<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/19/1096284/data-archives-archeologists-tiktok-future-wayback-machine/>
"There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our
old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken in 2013,
when she was almost one, on an aging Samsung digital camera. I originally
stored it on a laptop before transferring it to a chunky external hard drive.
A few years later, I uploaded it to Google Photos. When I search for the word
”grass,” Google’s algorithm pulls it up. It always makes me smile.
I pay Google £1.79 a month to keep my memories safe. That’s a lot of trust I’m
putting in a company that’s existed for only 26 years. But the hassle it
removes seems worth it. There’s just so much stuff nowadays. The admin required
to keep it updated and stored safely is just too onerous.
My parents didn’t have this problem. They took occasional photos of me on a
film camera and periodically printed them out on paper and put them in a photo
album. These pictures are still viewable now, 40-odd years later, on faded
yellowing photo paper—a few frames per year.
Many of my memories from the following decades are also fixed on paper. The
letters I received from my friends when traveling abroad in my 20s were
handwritten on lined paper. I still have them crammed in a shoebox, an amusing
but relatively small archive of an offline time.
We no longer have such space limitations. My iPhone takes thousands of photos a
year. Our Instagram and TikTok feeds are constantly updated. We collectively
send billions of WhatsApp messages and texts and emails and tweets.
But while all this data is plentiful, it’s also more ephemeral. One day in the
maybe-not-so-distant future, YouTube won’t exist and its videos may be lost
forever. Facebook—and your uncle’s holiday posts—will vanish. There is
precedent for this. MySpace, the first largish-scale social network, deleted
every photo, video, and audio file uploaded to it before 2016, seemingly
inadvertently. Entire tranches of Usenet newsgroups, home to some of the
internet’s earliest conversations, have gone offline forever and vanished from
history. And in June this year, more than 20 years of music journalism
disappeared when the
MTV News archives were taken offline.
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are
scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our
digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in
formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
The endeavor raises complex questions. What is important to us? How and why do
we decide what to keep—and what do we let go?
And how will future generations make sense of what we’re able to save?"
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
