massive amounts of digital pornography and pictures of cats, the landfills have millions of Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons, and someone will have to pick through that mess and decide what mattered and what didn’t.
I have bad news for you…
Comment on We're losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?
AbbieAbbie@beehaw.org 2 months ago
The key is going to be how it’s curated.
I remember reading a while back that some moron dropped his shoe down a well in the 1400s, and when they found it 600 years later they put it in a museum because so few things from that time have survived.
Historians of the future are going to have the opposite problem. We have massive amounts of digital pornography and pictures of cats, the landfills have millions of Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons, and someone will have to pick through that mess and decide what mattered and what didn’t.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 2 months ago
DdCno1@beehaw.org 2 months ago
The thing is, this pornography and cats will tell future historians a ton about what people were like in our times. Not all of it will be accurate, but that’s an issue with any primary source. Hell, watch some grainy smut from the '70s or ‘80s and pay attention to things other than the “action”, like the choice of music, the way the actors are talking, how they are dressed, what the sets look like, what kind of excuses for plots are being used, all of which are clearly products of their time. Amateur stuff is even more illuminating. Before anyone thinks I’m overthinking this: We learned a lot about Rome from the smut Romans carved into buildings in Pompey.
It’s the same with old cat pictures. You can reasonably date many of them by what the background looks like, e.g. what kind of electronics and furniture are present, how people who are also in the photos are dressed, image quality (provided it hasn’t been compressed to hell and back since), etc. These kinds of seemingly inconsequential artifacts of our time will be highly illuminating to future historians (provided they are being preserved), just like the complaint letters ol’ Ea Nasir received thousands of years ago.