Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Long Will the Internet Remember Us?
An anonymous reader writes "The common trope these days is that the internet never forgets. We tech-inclined folk warn our friends and relatives that anything embarrassing they put on the internet will stay there whether they want it to or not. But at the same time, we're told about massive amounts of data being lost as storage services go out of business or as the media it's stored on degrades and fails. There are organizations like the Internet Archive putting a huge amount of effort into saving everything that can be saved, and they're not getting all of it. My question is this: how long can we reasonably expect the internet to remember us? Assume, of course, that we're not doing anything particularly famous or notable — just normal people leading normal lives. Will our great-grandkids be able to trace our online presence? Will all your publicly-posted photos be viewable in 50 years, or just the one of you tripping over a sheep and falling into the mud?"
Jon Postel. His name doesn't come up all that frequently but I still remember. Martin Manley. You remember that guy? I do, even if Yahoo pulled his website down.
Come on, the internet remembers forever. You die twice, once when you stop breathing, and once when the last person mentions your name.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
The Internet will remember you as long as the services that have information about you exist. The services... they'll remember you as long as their owners can make money off them one way or another. As soon as they can't make money (even if it's just milking venture capitalists for another round of financing), they'll shut the servers down and wipe the databases. A couple months after that, the search engine caches will have lost track of the pages and that'll be that. All that'll be left is what individuals have saved somewhere else, and that's disorganized enough that it probably won't turn up anywhere.
The issue for most people isn't whether the Internet remembers you, or for how long. It's that how long it remembers you is completely and utterly out of your control.
We're all dead anyway. None of my old files are particularly accessible, from code written as a teenager and saved to worn-out floppy disks to CDs formatted for dead operating systems. Most of my photos are rotting on hard drives and I never really bother to look at them.
I don't want to be remembered by "the Internet". I want to be remembered by my kids and grandkids, and maybe some future programmer who might run across some old code I wrote and go "whoa, nice."
The internet can suck a bag of dicks and charge 5.99 a month to watch.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Web Rings on the shoulders of AngelFire. I watched animated GIFs glitter in the dark profiles on MySpace. All those... upvotes... will be lost in time, like memes... on... 4chan. Time... to die...
Nothing lasts forever. Move on.
The internet has selective retention, and things do disappear. It is still possible, last time I checked, to pull up some usenet posts that I made in the mid 90s. At one time Google was able to pull up certain information about me, but that disappeared 10 years ago. On the other hand, lots of things people posted online in information services like GEnie, CompuServe, The Source, etc., never made it onto the internet. Also, many of the old internet archives, ftp sites, gopher sites, archie sites, etc., are rapidly disappearing. I used to spend a certain amount of time spelunking, looking for various types of old information, and a lot of it has disappeared. Some professor leaves and his site and papers eventually tend to go away either by plan, accident, or negligence. A university reorganizes its web site, and old files and personal information goes away. Even on Slashdot it can be hard to find posts I made years ago. For years prior to getting an account I used to post from time to time, and I can find a couple of the posts I remember, but there is one I'd really like to find, and just can't. It seems to have faded into the ether.
You see the same thing happen with blogs and personal web sites. They tends to hand around for a time, sometimes a very long time. But if you change to another service, or lose interest, your stuff eventually tends to disappear for all sorts of reasons. In some cases that can mean a real loss of useful information given the growing important of blogs.
I think the fading memory of the internet is actually a problem. It often seems that for every bit of information that makes it onto the internet there is some fraction of other information that fades away. That would be great if the only problems we faced were new ones, but we keep having to fight the same old battles again and again. Sometimes the old documentation that had faded into irrelevance becomes very timely again, and the old techniques beat the new ones under the changed conditions. That is assuming you can find the documentation to make them work.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Put something funny/quirky/stupid on your IRL headstone, the internet will then rediscover you over and over until the words can't be read.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
It'll be the first data jubilee.
When my university's library expanded in the late 1980s, I wondered about two things: in another two or three decades, will they need to expand again? Of course. And also: Who is going to read or look up info in all those books? Of course, there will always be specialists and indexes and catalogs, but if the trend continues for all the 21st Century, and all of the 22nd Century, ..., at some point there will be far too much "literature" even in a very narrow academic specialty for any human to make use of. Then what about all the non-academic stuff, cheap romance novels and mysteries and memoirs of flash-in-the-pan pseudo-celebrities?
It's not that we need a good ol' roaring book-burning now and then like at Alexandria long ago, but somehow the best needs to be brought to the top, and the most of the mediocre disposed of. And maybe keep mediocre writers from ever starting. (Stuff that's actually *bad* not merely mediocre - keep some as examples and for the entertainment value!)
So now we have disks and all manner of extremely dense storage materials. This changes nothing, aside from the physical space requirements are reduced to near nothing. Even with intelligent indexes and indexes of indexes, or miraculously good search engines such as Google, or whatever we'll have in fifty years - it's mind-boggling to wonder how such a huge growing pile of information will be utilized.
The Internet is not a Sentient Being. It doesn't live nor breathe, nor is it a set of tubes. It doesn't "remember" anything. The systems that we associate with the Internet, like Search Engines or Storage Services all have Terms of Service (ToS) that have a wide range of rights and responsibilities that are legally binding. Since you had no dealings with the authoring of the ToS for any particular service you use, you're basically agreeing to allow them to do whatever they want with whatever you're willing to use of their services. Think Human Centi-I-Pad here folks.
If you don't want to be "remembered" by the Internet there's really not a way to eliminate your information. Sure there are companies out there who'll clean up your image or try to, for a fee but in the US at least these companies can be as predatory with what you allow them to have because you allow them to do it to you. It's in the ToS you agreed to and they'll sell the information to other companies who will then create new profiles about what kind of cereal you eat or what medications you take. The downstream market on data mining personal preferences and choices is huge and even your state and local governments sell your data to middle-men data brokers all the time. Buy a new car recently? Your information, what you bought, how much you payed is all out there. So now not only is that transaction disclosed to somebody else it's used outside of that transaction to determine your eligibility to buy or possibly buy other things. You bought a VW, that must mean you fit into this box and your address is here so your income level must be this... You're now filed and categorized and your junk mail will now reflect the new influx of great marketing material targeted to that box.
What's been lacking is a complete lack of legislation protecting your privacy and keeping your private information private. The problem with is legislators are constantly glad-handed by the same companies who mine your data constantly and they constantly lobby them prohibiting progress in protecting you. In the US the Supreme Court has even ruled that you have no expectation of privacy when you hand data over to a third party. Until this is rectified, you're screwed.
On the flip side should you choose to deal with a company who provides their service via the Internet, I wouldn't rely on a company that offers something for free because at the root of this is how sustainable is that model? If it's "free" there's usually a hook and whatever you entrust to them will usually be subject to some change in that ToS in the future. If you pay for a service, you should make sure that the business has a sustainable business model and will grow. I mean you wouldn't put your money in a bank that just popped up and is operating out of the trunk of a car would you? No you wouldn't, but there are people who constantly trust their photos, files and other personal data to droves of Internet "startups" who will be gone or have such rotten infrastructure that whatever you give them will either disapper or be stolen. Of course you can hope that they get acquired but usually in that case, it means that whatever you have will be discontinued or substantially changed by a new ToS that again, you have no input on. You either agree or disagree.
I tell my family and friends that it's not the Internet, it's the companies providing these services. If you trust these companies fine but then I say "Would you let them hold your wallet for a week?" "Would you let Larry Ellison watch your small child while you run and do an errand?" If not why would you then entrust your vacation photos or that huge collection of old Jazz MP3s you have to them? Sure, there are services that add value but again what's the business model and are you in control of what they do with the information you give them? In most cases, that's not true and those are the services you should avoid.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Theres http://www.archiveteam.org/ a collective effort to save web sites, i am downloading Geocities in a torrent http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Geocities just to recover two crap pages i did long time ago, its like watching photos 20 years old :)
When I am a multi-billionaire, I will build a giant monument, 100 miles wide, fifty tall, and engrave on it all over every tweet and facebook post ever written since the 1990s, through all of the 21st century, so our descendants one thousand years in the future will not lose all that precious wisdom and insight into our culture.
Since before Internet was Internet I have been online, but unlike many others, I rather have my real identity to remain inconspicuous.
Why should I let Internet to "remember" me ?
I mean, what for ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This internet thing is recent and the 'content lasts forever' is a problem of the present generation. Before the turn of the century the stupid shit we did in high school and college would go away unless it generated an official governement record, and someone was inclined to do a deep background check. Now many document every little thing that happens and posts it on services that depend on keeping those records for a long time. No forever, just long enough to be annoying when one is trying to make money or get married. Facebook, tumblr, whoever, will eventually begin to archive, or there will so much new content that old will be harder to find. Even the sex videos will become overwhelmed with the new content. Memory is not just existence, but
establishing a navigable path to the content. Such a path will still have costs, and if we are not famous that cost will less liley be borne by the random stanger
Let me give you a benign example. For years I had a press photon online as part of minor research project. It was posted in the mid 90's, at the beginning of this internet thing, and would be what would pop up if anyone was looking for me. After a time, 10-15 years, it simply disappeared. from a casual search. I am sure that if one dug it is somewhere online. I am sure if one dug it is a newspaper or a hard drive. But who is going to do so? Not me, not anyone I could imagine.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
More importantly: Do we want to?
Forgetting is a benefit. We all have things in our lives we do not want to remember, or want to remember differently than they truly were. That perfect holiday you had, the love of your life, how you met your wife, etc.
In many relationships and friendships, selective memory is what keeps them together. Remembering the good times and forgetting the troubles.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Nothing last forever. Absolutely nothing,
Protons might. Nobody has observed proton decay yet. They could well last forever.
I think it better to think about internet longevity in terms of 'half life': a certain amount of the information recorded will decay over a certain amount of time. Few people will ever completely disappear. But that doesn't mean that people beyond a certain point will be easy to find.
Roger Ebert wrote a poignant essay on this topic about a year before his own death. In the essay, he explores just what information about someone means, divorced from actually knowing that person. Check it out; it's a keeper. Merry Christmas.