Subj : Preserving Digital History
To : Boraxman
From : Kaelon
Date : Tue Jul 19 2022 05:42 am
Re: "Highly profitable" Bay S
By: Boraxman to Kaelon on Tue Jul 19 2022 12:16 pm
> I do that with photos which we take which matter to us, we print them into a
> book, though that is only a fraction of what we've taken.
I think this comes down to content value. When it was challenging to affix content to a physical format, authors, artists, writers, musicians, and creators throughout history exercised some degree of prioritization and restraint. "Is this important to me? Would it be important to others?" This was a critical viewpoint.
In the Age of Digital, no such question necessarily needs to be asked. For those of us who grew up around personal computers (I'm looking at you, fellow Gen-X'ers), we still took some degree of care with how we spent our time. But true "digital natives," namely, Millennials and now Gen-Z'ers, are engaged in total digital broadcasting (sometimes derivisively dismissed as 'narcissism'). Every thought, perspective, whisper, scribble, etc., gets "affixed" to a digital format - website, blog, forum, social media stream, photo site, etc.
TL;DR - Not everything is actually important. So the fact that most of it is lost is not, necessarily, a catastrophic loss for civilization. But it is lost, and future generations will know next to nothing about Geocities, let alone the early days of the Internet.
> I consider myself quite computer literate, having worked as IT
> support/co-admin, and even I worry about losing data that *I* handle, let
> alone others. People store their digital photo's on a laptop, one theft
> away from total loss. Someone I knew had theirs on a harddrive which they
> spilled liquid or or dropped. My wife had the only copies of many photos on
> her hard drive, which one day, decided to just die in a puff of smoke
> (luckily it somehow just worked again months later). Burned DVD's last,
> usually, but I've been stung by manufacturing defects. How many people use
> M-DISK? No one really. How many people have their photos managed by iPhoto
> or something, and have no idea where the files actually are on their drive,
> or how to access this outside of iPhoto/whatever-cloud-service?
Great point.
> If it is hard for me, what hope do others have?
Totally.
> So even if the information is around and not lost, how to find it? This was
> an issue in Medieval Europe too, old scrolls and books just laying in a
> jumble which no one knew, or cared, to know what they were.
During the Renaissance, this problem was tackled programmatically through a variety of specialized roles:
* ARCHIVISTS were responsible for determining how content would be stored for the long-haul, and built upon the ancient library science and started creating standards for preservation, categorization, and reference.
* CHRONICLERS reviewed all of the news of the ages and built abridged histories, or Chronicles, of the time, including extentive reference to content that had been archived for future generations to conduct follow-up research.
* HISTORIANS became the scholars that reviewed the chronicles and cross-referenced with what archivists, and lesser librarians, had stored, in order to produce more 'modern' retrospectives and studies on what really happened and what the impact of what happened was.
We need similar roles for the new digital age. And I am not really convinced that the Internet Archive has a true archival, chronicling, and historiographic practice for their resspective domains.
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-=: Kaelon :=-
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