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We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories
Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.
and nothing of value was lost.
Archive.org has been doing this forever. Why is it taking other folks so long to do the same?
I wholeheartedly agree that there should be some mechanism for archiving millions, if not billions, of web pages. Someone should get right on that.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Well, for starters, I keep my memories in my head.. but if you're talking about records and history then I think copyright is a bigger culprit than digitization any day. Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually. I seriously doubt the Obama team came in and pulled an 'rm -rf' on the old webpage.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The National Archives has preserved the whole final state of the Bush White House site here: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
> Yeah, but who's archiving archive.org???
The turtles, of course. It's turtles all the way down.
I bet you also forgot that Smithers was black.
So was Michael Jackson at some point, no one cares.
Don't be so sure. One of an archaeologist's favourite places to dig is in the village rubbish tip. It's important because it tells us more about day-to-day life in a society than what people wrote down on papyrus, carved into stone, or otherwise saved for posterity.
In virtually every case, the stuff that rulers deem important doesn't bear much relation to the way everyday people live. Often enough, it's an outright lie. So if we want to understand a society with any depth of detail, we need to know the trivial and mundane as well as the monumental.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Exactly, the idea that there will be LESS information surviving from our current torrent (hehe) of data is simply stupid. The fact is we have a limited view of history in the form of first person accounts because it was so expensive (both in terms of time and resources) to create a personal account of an event. Today we have say 10M blog entries about Obama's inauguration. Even if 1/10th of 1% of those are preserved that means we still have 10K accounts, how many surviving accounts of say FDR's inauguration do we have? My father has a handful of 8mm films from his childhood, my wife has boxes of VHS tapes and my kids will have hundreds of gigs of photos and movies of their childhood, each generation has more chances to save significant amounts of data because storing it is ever cheaper.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ahh but that is dealing with societies that are very different. The ones that you are talking about for that sort of thing are long gone and left little in the way of data. Thus it does become important to try and piece together things from trash and such.
However society (in the first world at least) is very, very different now. There is a tremendous amount of data kept. There has been a lot kept since the printing press started really taking off, but even that is nothing compared to the data that is kept in the digital age.
So barring some amazingly catastrophic event (in which case there might not be future historians) it won't be a problem. There's plenty of data preserved on all aspects of life. Be it scholarly research, news, whatever, there's lots out there that isn't subject to the approval of the government. Also governments are keeping data on a much larger scale than before. You have stuff like the Library of Congress, which is more or less just a big collection of shit published in the US.
Thus I really doubt there'll be much uncertainty about how people from our time lived. There are too many records of too many types. In particular, video is a powerful one. A written piece is always influenced by the author. It is subject to how they remembered the event and how they choose to retell it. An unaltered video simply captures what happened. It tells whatever story falls in its lens and microphone.
You cannot compare how research on a culture from 3000 years ago is done to how research on the current culture will be done.
The grandparent is also right that there is a real problem with signal to noise. There is so much data, and so much of it really random crap, that one of the major challenges future historians are likely to face is to sort through it to find the useful shit.