This post was published to four sentences1 at 10:40:07 PM 7/1/2016

The Fragility of Electronic Communication

Account four sentences1

At work, I perform some IT administrator duties alongside my regular consulting responsibilities. One of
the cloud services we consume, and therefore need to administer, is Yammer, the enterprise social
network service. A couple days ago, I was reviewing the list of Yammer “external networks” that our
company is responsible for, and noticed one that, though it had more than 90 members, had not seen
any updates for two years. Suspecting that the network had run its course, I took a look through the
topics and posts and found that the network had been set up to serve a long-past event and did not hold
any data or communications of value. Judging the network to be of little value and no longer used, I
exported its data, uploaded the data to our network administrator to be archived, and, yesterday,
deleted the network.

As a consultant, I used to regularly advise and assist my clients with digitizing their paper processes.
Nowadays, most of those paper forms and “sneakernet” processes have been digitized to some degree
or another through email, so when I’m called in to assist these days, it’s usually to help take an email-
driven process and re-architect it with digital forms and automated processes and workflows. There is
no doubt that efficiency gains from digitizing and automating these formerly paper processes can be
huge.

But every once in a while, doing something like deleting a Yammer external network gives me pause and
inspires doubt. We technologists like to claim that digital records are far safer and more secure than
paper records, when the proper backup, cold storage,
and retrieval processes are put in place. Theoretically.

Probably my favorite New Yorker cover of all time is

one by Daniel Clowes, from June 2009. It depicts an
alien in the far future sitting amidst a rubble of
discarded and broken electronic devices, reading a
book. In a world deprived of electricity and working
components, Earth’s future denizen falls back on a
medium with no such dependencies.

The Yammer external network was deleted by a single

person—myself—because I decided it was old and
useless. Now, I’m pretty confident that I was right,
but think how the decision was made. One person
analyzed, one person made the decision, one person
deleted the data in a network of 90 members. Most of
our important IT systems are governed by more
robust governance, true, but many aren’t. And we are
utterly at the mercy of the judgment, competence,
and consistency of the world’s IT departments, which,
if being a consultant has taught me one thing, vary
pretty widely in these qualities.
I greatly fear what the result of our digital practices today will be in the future in the realms of history
and archival. We can read the correspondence of most of history’s most notable figures, but today we
create our correspondence in a medium that is at the mercy of anonymous IT administrators who rarely
have the needs of history in mind. I fear that future historians will encounter a digital cliff, somewhere in
the mid-2000s, when correspondence becomes inaccessible for all but the most important of figures.