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?"
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...
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
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.
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
The Internet is not a Sentient Being. It doesn't live nor breathe, nor is it a set of tubes.
Well the wires are not sentient yet, but the Internet is cybernetic entity. The Internet has servers that connect to other servers autonomously. Data flows through the web's organic structure via web crawlers, email servers, and other web services. Compromised systems still spew packets of past exploits across the web. I can tell what time of day it is by looking at the traffic graphs alone. As the sun spins around the digital world and wakes the entities living thereupon, a brain wave of stimulus pulses across the web while others exhaust their activity and drop into a more dormant state. Much the way porpoises and other animals rest one half a mind at a time.
You have amoebas in your blood that can be removed and placed in a Petri dish, and these individual immune system cells will carry out their behaviours outside of you. You have a colony of bacteria that lives on your skin and gives you your identifying odor, killing some other harmful bacteria. In your guts thrives an essential colony of microbes. You are a cybernetic being formed from many smaller individual living cells... Much like the Internet is a single cybernetic being formed of all the clients and servers in the world -- and its users. You are one of billions of organic input aggregation, stimulation, and accumulator cells; Just like the blood cells you depend on for survival, the Internet survives on you.
In aggregate we are the Internet -- A cultural mind formed of self aware beings, far greater than the whole. This cybernetic symbiotic system is billions of times more aware of all its many selves than you. We do breathe information, we live online, we can be injured and even die. Is it not a set of tubes, it is a world wide neural network. The internet does remember. The more sensational, interesting, or entertaining the more impact the memory has and the stronger and longer the information is remembered; Just like in humans or other cybernetic creatures with memories.