IT’S a digital world these days, in case you haven’t noticed. Perhaps you have been living in a comfortable cave somewhere. But the rest of us are up to our flesh-and-blood ears in digital this and that.

There’s no escaping the digital, however much you might yearn for a time when books were books, newspapers were newspapers, and music came on big black discs – or even on small shiny ones, rather than as a list on your computer.

This digitised world moves so quickly there is never time to stop and wonder where we are headed. Stand still for a moment and you’re a fossil. Keep moving and you’re probably a fossil too.

Everything happens at such a pace. We used to develop our family pictures from film, wait for the prints and then stick them in an album. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, slides were the thing. This was cumbersome, as you needed a projector to view the images properly.

Most of ours have been lost, but I still have a few old Kodachrome slides. Hold one of them up to the light and you will see the ghost of a boy with Jimi Hendrix hair and a guitar in his hand. Next to this fuzzy mirage is the brother ghost, with long blond locks and a mandolin in his hand. The first ghost is me, now sitting here and writing this, while the second is my brother the professor, off living in France.

Somewhere on a bookshelf in our study you will find albums bulging with pictures of the children when young. These photographs gather dust, but at least they are there should we feel a bout of nostalgia coming on (such an outbreak is usually best avoided: watch it coming and duck, that’s my advice).

What will happen in the future to such photographs? Already ours sit on the computer, unnoticed and waiting for some future glitch that wipes them away with a flick of a computer bug’s long tail.

Or on a wider scale, what will happen to all the important documents future historians wish to pore over in to make sense of our period? We are all history in the end, but isn’t there a danger that our history will disappear into the digital ether, falling victim to what is known as bit rot – a sort of digital decay.

That is the view of a man who should know. Vint Cert sounds like a name made up by a novelist on an day of too much imagination. But the name is real enough and it belongs to an internet pioneer who is now vice-president of Google. As it happens, Google is one of the digital cornerstones of this modern life we now lead.

Can you recall a time when Google wasn’t there to answer every question? Life without Google would seem primitive, even if all that Google really does is send you down an endless corridor filled with doors that open and shut in a random ballet of half-grasped bits of knowledge.

In this digital world, nothing is guaranteed to last forever. That is what Vint Cert warned last week, when he said that digitised material from blogs, tweets, videos and pictures to emails and court rulings could all be lost. The danger lies in the programs needed to read them becoming defunct. The information would exist but we would have no way of “reading” it, eyes no longer being enough on their own.

The usual advice with digital info is to remember that nothing is safe. Back everything up twice, they say, in different physical spaces. I use a memory stick and an internet email server. Everything goes on to the stick and is then emailed somewhere, so that a copy exists on the email.

This is all very well, but memory sticks are old technology already. Someone in the know is probably laughing their digital socks off at my chosen method of preservation.

Surely we need to heed Mr Cert and ensure that the hardware and software remain to look through the digitised information building up in unseen mountains of knowledge.

Although will future historians really be as excited by finding a scrap of digital text as laying their hands on a musty bit of paper first handled decades or even centuries ago? It seems unlikely.