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History Will Not Judge Social Media.

Started by Nick O'Neill · 10 months ago

Like many of you I have been amazed by the news I read today of historians being able to reproduce a sound captured on paper from 1860. The play back was digitally made from sound waves that were etched onto paper reals using an analog recorder.
I downloaded the MP3 and listened to the grainy soun ... Continue reading »

3 comments

  • Interesting post. I've been reading The Black Swan and it has readjusted my whole idea of history. In it Taleb dwells on something he refers to as "the cemetery of silent evidence" - all the stuff that history has forgotten either because of the destruction or obscurity of the original artifact.

    Essentially, what you are worried about has always been... we always have lost and always will lose bits of "us" as time progresses. The funny thing is that the future won't care... it will route around the loss and construct it's history based on what has survived. History doesn't represent truth or accuracy as much as represents our current perspective.

    I think at some basic level we all understand this and that is what drives the angst you're feeling. We all want to remembered as we are... we all want the truth of this whole thing to sustain. We all want future history to be as accurate as possible. Yet we know instinctively it's just not possible.
  • If no one else does, Google will archive al of this stuff and with storage getting cheaper and cheaper, most websites will be stored in multiple places, accessed years later and stored even more times. Whether they can link the stuff back to you personally is iffy, but the sentiments will be there.
  • Good post. I work with some digital preservation issues and I am always amazed at how little people discuss these topics. It seems that everyone is in this whirlwind of content creation and no one is think about content preservation. Even in the case of the files on our computers - we have no way of guaranteeing that they will be available to read (as in open) in 20 years. And you're right - what do we do about the stuff we don't even technically possess...?

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