Digital wear - an old phenomenon in a new way

A quarter of a century ago, digital technologies came to ordinary consumers. Until that moment, we, ordinary consumers, had paper books, vinyl records, tape recordings and film film. All this wealth was worn out during use, distorted when copied, and simply deteriorated over time during storage. Of course, for good, it was necessary to have negatives and master tapes for storage and the first copies to use, but the end users did not follow these rules a little.

And when personal computers with digital technologies came to us, it was a miracle - books, photos, songs and movies, all this did not deteriorate either during storage, or during playback, or during copying. Digital eternity has appeared on the horizon. Appeared, waved a pen and disappeared.

The fact that digital technologies have won, but the victory turned out to be a strange taste, we can talk for a long time. Now I will only touch on the issue of photos.
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Why is it all

For the past 14 years I have been studying the history of technology. In this lesson I use not only archival documents and paper books, but also digital documents. These are scans and photos from personal pages, local Internet forums, websites of libraries and newspapers, and even from dump sites with “funny pictures” (where everything is loaded without getting into).

To work with this content hell, I had to work out reflexes, develop techniques, and also formalize and describe the problems that arise in my way.

Because if the problem is described and well documented, then this is no longer a problem, but simply a feature of the work.

The appearance of the hero

The phenomenon I want to talk about is widely known and much discussed, but, oddly enough, it does not have a well-established name and well-defined boundaries.

This is definitely not “data degradation” - it is a consequence of random technical failures during storage. And this phenomenon is not identical to the “generation loss” - it illustrates some technical aspects of the process, but does not describe and does not explain the organizational side of the problem.

Therefore, I came up with the term “digital depreciation” (I checked it again, right before publication - neither Google nor Yandex find this phrase). In this case, by “wear and tear” I mean the same thing as in the case of wear in the physical world - the loss of consumer properties during operation. And, as in the case of technology, digital wear depends on the conditions and modes of operation. Quiet driving a car on a flat road leads to one level of wear, chasing through potholes, and even with overloading - to another.

Digital wear at the beginning of the digital revolution

As I said before, at the beginning of the digital revolution, digital photographs were more promising than analog ones - they did not fade or distort when copying. However, it very quickly turned out that digital photos could only be stored in theory forever and copied without sacrificing quality. And all because of them - the operating conditions.

And then the conditions were very harsh.

The disks had a small volume, and Internet access - a small speed. In addition, both were worth it. It was a tough time. We survived as best we could.

We reduced the pictures in size



We experimented with formats.



Still, it did not help. Because our mailboxes were scanty, and our sites had less space than required to store one raw file of a modern digital camera.

- 10 MB of disk space (excluding log files),
- use of any domain,
- pre-installed CGI scripts,
- 1 real mailbox,
- virtual mail server on your domain with unlimited number of EMail
addresses,
- access and update via FTP,
- server access statistics.

1.3.1 Installing a virtual server ... for free
1.3.2 Monthly fee ........................... 7 USD / month
with a one-time payment of 6 months ............... 40 cu
with a one-time payment of 1 year ................... 70 USD
1.3.3 Additional disk space ........ 1 USD / month for every 10 MB

(the real tariff plan for hosting is from 2002, and cu and salaries were not like that now)

The economic and organizational reality of the Internet was so tough that theoretically undamaged when copying pictures, in reality, they were killed in the trash during their operation.

World after digital victory

And now, decades have passed, the Internet has become wide, the disks are huge, and all this is worth a dime. Now there is no need to save bytes, and most people do not even think about such issues. People just take pictures and immediately upload a photo to the Internet, without any editing.

It would seem that the very digital future has come, in which the pictures live forever and are not distorted in the process of copying them.

Alas, but no.

The most common options for using images on the Internet are currently:

• social network upload
• photo hosting upload
• upload to online forum
• messenger forwarding
• upload to your own site

(options are listed in no particular order)

And none of these options, including uploading to your own website, is guaranteed to be non-distorting.

It turned out that simultaneously with the increase in the size of the disk and the quotas of hosting, the number of digital images also increased. And the process of fighting for each byte, in fact, did not disappear, but moved from your computer to the server of Internet services. And all the same two operations are going on - resizing the image and playing with its format.

And here you have a simple, but very clear illustration.

I took on Wikipedia a file with a picture of a famous painting cut out a piece of it under the “4 by 3” aspect ratio, changed the size to 2000 pixels wide, and saved it in a jpg file with a size of 804 kilobytes.



With this picture, I did what most Internet users do - I uploaded to the social network (in this case, Facebook).

And then I downloaded and got a jpg-file of 602 kilobytes in size, with the same 2000 pixels of width and 1500 pixels of height.



You, of course, say that you know about what happens when using the jpg format, that this is the “generation loss” and that it is impossible to notice the difference between the pictures with the naked eye.

Well, I armed myself and with the help of graphic editors I got a “difference” between the pictures ( PaintShop Pro in this case subtracts the colors for each color and takes the module). As a result, I received a picture that can not be distinguished from a solid black fill.

But only with not looking. Armed eyes said that there are more than 9 thousand colors in the picture. More than 9 thousand shades of gray, visually indistinguishable from black. Only 9 thousand, on a picture the size of 3 million pixels. It would seem that there is nothing to worry about - the distortions are minimal.

This is the moment I decided to find out how many pixels the color exactly matched, and for this I replaced pure black (# 000000) with pure white (#FFFFFF). You have already seen the result at the beginning of this article - there are very few white pixels. The script I wrote counted the number of pixels in the original image, the color of which exactly matches the corresponding pixels in the image of the past Facebook.

They turned out exactly 37385, that is - 1.2% of the total number of pixels.

98.8% of pixels turned out to be distorted as a result of one iteration of “upload to social network”.

New word on the letter "I"

Then you ask what the current term “generation loss” did not suit me.

But he did not suit me by describing only one technical aspect (relatively speaking, an analogue of “abrasion” in mechanics), but does not indicate the whole phenomenon.

And the phenomenon is that the default method of using images on the Internet, at present, is to send them to services that perform actions on them leading to distortion.

And this is not only re-compression, it is also a resizing (for example, like Facebook messenger), and even a logo overlay (like many online forums, blog platforms and websites).

At the same time, Internet users care little about finding the best possible option (ideally, the original), but simply re-use the first pictures they find on social networks and search engines. Images that repeatedly pass the procedure of clamping, reducing or increasing the pixel size, as well as the repeated imposition of logos.

For the mass consumer, the very fact of re-sending the picture and the speed with which it is carried out comes first, and the quality issue is simply ignored.

That is, there are changes that occur not because the user has such a desire, but simply as a result of the digital image life cycle. And, given the technological and social reality of the modern Internet, these changes are made inevitably and predictably.

That is why I call this phenomenon "digital wear" - it occurs as a result of operation.

* * *

Of course, there are professionals and technical solutions that allow you to store and transfer files without distortion. You just need to use specially configured computers and file transfer protocols.

And, on the other hand, if you have a properly equipped room and handle paper carriers carefully, they can be stored and used for a very long time and with almost no losses.

I do not want to say that nothing has changed at all. Of course, it has changed, and especially for professionals. With proper operation, digital objects can indeed be considered eternal, while analog ones are subject to destruction, even with the most perfect storage.

But the mode of operation of digital objects, which is used by the mass consumer in the conditions of modern Internet services, is similar to the mode of operation that the mass consumer applied to the same tape recordings and photographs.

And such a regime leads to the emergence of “digital wear”, which, although not fully analogous to mechanical wear, plays the same role in the life cycle of digital objects that mechanical wear plays in the life cycle of material objects.

And now what? (afterword)

The main purpose of creating the concept of “digital wear” is not to intimidate readers or “we all die”, but to develop reflexes and methods for life and activity in the conditions of the existence of this phenomenon.

And the understanding of how and by what laws digital objects live and spread on the Internet, more than once allowed me to find a less worn version of the picture that interested me.