6 ms·

It's funny that nowadays we look at images in churches, old books, and other old buildings to deduce what medieval people did. What will people use in 200 years

by est31 7y ago

It's funny that nowadays we look at images in churches, old books, and other old buildings to deduce what medieval people did. What will people use in 200 years to deduce what we did? Will they use social media selfies? Or will those have disappeared?

mruts 7y ago
This seriously worries me. Every generation thinks that what they do is disposable and not worth preserving. Source code from even just 20 years ago discarded and lost, priceless and one of a kind computer systems thrown into the sea, old movies and books completely lost. While nothing has really changed in regards to the value current generations place on current production, what has changed it seems is our ability to rediscover these lost artifacts. Newly printed books will rot away in a century or two, the memories and data we keep on company servers will be thrown away either on purpose or by accident (just look at myspace) or be otherwise inaccessible. No longer will our kids be able to find old pictures of their dad or an old diary from when we were young. Hell, I don’t even have anymore all the code or essays I wrote in college, and I would give a lot to get those things back (not even including the 25btc I carelessly let get destroyed). Archive is doing a great job, but as more and more content moves behind unfindable and unindexable corporate pages, it’s nowhere near good enough. It would be really cool if such a technology exist that you could write data once on to some chip or piece of glass or whatever that you could read again and again forever. It’s really important that we try and solve these problems, if not for us, but the people that come after.
- jp555 7y ago
  This assumes there’s no value in forgetting, but what if that’s wrong? What if forgetting is really really important for reasons we don’t know? I mean almost everything that happened in history wasn’t recorded, and yet we’re here.
azernik 7y ago
We've got a lot more than that for medieval Europe - archaeological remains of more commonplace objects, business and administrative records (oh lord the things you can learn from an inventory sheet or an invoice), etc.
- cultus 7y ago
  Not necessarily. The vast majority of recording media we have are not nearly as robust as stone or vellum. Not much outside of archival paper will survive.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    While that's true, the vast majority of things we record are not worth keeping for long time frames. There's still a lot of stuff that gets printed on metals, stones, archival media, etc. Not to mention we have modern archival methods that didn't exist back then. Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth, we'll still be passing vastly more information on to future generations than previous generations ever did.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      I assume there are other archives like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc... Designed to withstand 70s nuclear war scenarios, among other things. Stores about 1 billion 35 mm images at the moment.
    - est31 7y ago
      > Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth Many archives are not replicated, at least not including all important pieces. Also note that what's worth keeping vs what's unimportant might change over time. Bach and Vivaldi only became famous after their death. I don't say that everything should be preserved forever, just that it's kept in mind.
      - azernik 7y ago
        Right now, Spotify and Apple Music and Google Play are holding on to recordings, in hundreds of replicas, of garage bands who've only been heard by 1000 people in their whole history. If one of those services goes out of businesses, there are others. Archivists like the Library of Congress use in-house solutions comparable to S3 Glacier or Google Archival Storage, where use of longer-lived media and copying to new media is cheap enough to preserve fantastic amounts of information. A caveat - though the risk of losing art due to loss or destruction of physical media is lower than ever, we still have to contend with intentional destruction of copies by the creator, for business or security reasons.
quotemstr 7y ago
I suspect that our inventory of digital media will survive as long as people do. It would take a complete technological collapse to expunge all the random TV shows and internal discussions floating around the infospher, and even under the worst ecological scenarios, technological collapse everywhere is unlikely. Future scholars will be able to just spool up our mass entertainment as we do. They might even read this comment.
- bluquark 7y ago
  Some kind of computerized historical analysis might read your comment, but it's hard to imagine how it would be practical for future historians to read more than a tiny sample of the enormous flood of ephemeral writing we're producing today, such as message board comments. They'll have both the challenge and the advantage of being able to see into many types of conversations that were once unrecorded.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    Well, sure. I'm not saying that anyone will read this thread. That's unlikely. But I believe that this thread will at least be available somewhere in some archive pretty much for the remainder of human history.
- ancientworldnow 7y ago
  Don't be so confident. MySpace lost basically all the original music uploaded to that site, much of which only existed there. I've personally seen one off masters of tons of video and audio content destroyed to make room for new stuff or because the media can't easily be played anymore. Much of our digital archives are only maintained with constant and fragile upkeep.
  - munificent 7y ago
    Another case in point: I used to make electronic music. Back in the 90s, I made a track and uploaded it to mp3.com, back when that was a place for people to share music. It got relatively popular, for what "popular" meant at that. I got messages from people saying they liked it, there were lots of downloads. As far as I can tell, that song no longer exists anywhere on the Internet.
gedy 7y ago
Freeway overpasses?
- oftenwrong 7y ago
  "The Mayans and Egyptians built pyramids. The Chinese built the Great Wall and armies of clay soldiers. The Khmer built temples in the jungle. Americans build highways. It’s our state religion." https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/
pvorb 7y ago
I often think that maybe in a 1000 years or so, archeologists will find evidence that almost every household had a copy of Harry Potter or something similar and will conclude that this was a widespread religion at the time.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  Modern books like Harry Potter come with front or back matter that makes it clear that they are works of fiction, not a religious text.
- goto11 7y ago
  Current historians distinguish between religious texts and fiction for entertainment. Why should this distinction be lost in the future?
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    I understand that in the archaeological community, they have a tendency to label things they can't figure out as being of religious significance. An example I recall is some kind of olive press, I think; it was labelled a religious tool until someone familiar with old-school manual olive presses commented how much it looked like an olive press. Where this is going is that current archaeologists mistake household items for religious tools, so perhaps future archaeologists will as well. As an aside, how do we know that current historians are not already doing the same? That they're not already labeling ancient fairy tales, told as amusing stories by people who knew they were just stories, as religious texts?
    - pvorb 7y ago
      That last paragraph is exactly what I was thinking. Did people in ancient Greece actually believe the stories from the Odyssey or Iliad? Or was it meant to entertain? Or have a look at Genesis. Is this something that the original sources believed to happen or was it an entertaining story in the beginning and retold until people started to believe in it? I'm not sure there always is a clear distinction between fiction and religion.
lallysingh 7y ago
Amazon order history. Per person.

by est31 7y ago

mruts 7y ago

This seriously worries me. Every generation thinks that what they do is disposable and not worth preserving. Source code from even just 20 years ago discarded and lost, priceless and one of a kind computer systems thrown into the sea, old movies and books completely lost. While nothing has really changed in regards to the value current generations place on current production, what has changed it seems is our ability to rediscover these lost artifacts. Newly printed books will rot away in a century or two, the memories and data we keep on company servers will be thrown away either on purpose or by accident (just look at myspace) or be otherwise inaccessible. No longer will our kids be able to find old pictures of their dad or an old diary from when we were young. Hell, I don’t even have anymore all the code or essays I wrote in college, and I would give a lot to get those things back (not even including the 25btc I carelessly let get destroyed). Archive is doing a great job, but as more and more content moves behind unfindable and unindexable corporate pages, it’s nowhere near good enough. It would be really cool if such a technology exist that you could write data once on to some chip or piece of glass or whatever that you could read again and again forever. It’s really important that we try and solve these problems, if not for us, but the people that come after.

jp555 7y ago
This assumes there’s no value in forgetting, but what if that’s wrong? What if forgetting is really really important for reasons we don’t know? I mean almost everything that happened in history wasn’t recorded, and yet we’re here.

azernik 7y ago

We've got a lot more than that for medieval Europe - archaeological remains of more commonplace objects, business and administrative records (oh lord the things you can learn from an inventory sheet or an invoice), etc.

cultus 7y ago
Not necessarily. The vast majority of recording media we have are not nearly as robust as stone or vellum. Not much outside of archival paper will survive.
- freehunter 7y ago
  While that's true, the vast majority of things we record are not worth keeping for long time frames. There's still a lot of stuff that gets printed on metals, stones, archival media, etc. Not to mention we have modern archival methods that didn't exist back then. Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth, we'll still be passing vastly more information on to future generations than previous generations ever did.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    I assume there are other archives like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc... Designed to withstand 70s nuclear war scenarios, among other things. Stores about 1 billion 35 mm images at the moment.
  - est31 7y ago
    > Barring a simultaneous complete and total collapse of all civilizations on Earth Many archives are not replicated, at least not including all important pieces. Also note that what's worth keeping vs what's unimportant might change over time. Bach and Vivaldi only became famous after their death. I don't say that everything should be preserved forever, just that it's kept in mind.
    - azernik 7y ago
      Right now, Spotify and Apple Music and Google Play are holding on to recordings, in hundreds of replicas, of garage bands who've only been heard by 1000 people in their whole history. If one of those services goes out of businesses, there are others. Archivists like the Library of Congress use in-house solutions comparable to S3 Glacier or Google Archival Storage, where use of longer-lived media and copying to new media is cheap enough to preserve fantastic amounts of information. A caveat - though the risk of losing art due to loss or destruction of physical media is lower than ever, we still have to contend with intentional destruction of copies by the creator, for business or security reasons.

quotemstr 7y ago

I suspect that our inventory of digital media will survive as long as people do. It would take a complete technological collapse to expunge all the random TV shows and internal discussions floating around the infospher, and even under the worst ecological scenarios, technological collapse everywhere is unlikely. Future scholars will be able to just spool up our mass entertainment as we do. They might even read this comment.

bluquark 7y ago
Some kind of computerized historical analysis might read your comment, but it's hard to imagine how it would be practical for future historians to read more than a tiny sample of the enormous flood of ephemeral writing we're producing today, such as message board comments. They'll have both the challenge and the advantage of being able to see into many types of conversations that were once unrecorded.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Well, sure. I'm not saying that anyone will read this thread. That's unlikely. But I believe that this thread will at least be available somewhere in some archive pretty much for the remainder of human history.
ancientworldnow 7y ago
Don't be so confident. MySpace lost basically all the original music uploaded to that site, much of which only existed there. I've personally seen one off masters of tons of video and audio content destroyed to make room for new stuff or because the media can't easily be played anymore. Much of our digital archives are only maintained with constant and fragile upkeep.
- munificent 7y ago
  Another case in point: I used to make electronic music. Back in the 90s, I made a track and uploaded it to mp3.com, back when that was a place for people to share music. It got relatively popular, for what "popular" meant at that. I got messages from people saying they liked it, there were lots of downloads. As far as I can tell, that song no longer exists anywhere on the Internet.

gedy 7y ago

Freeway overpasses?

oftenwrong 7y ago
"The Mayans and Egyptians built pyramids. The Chinese built the Great Wall and armies of clay soldiers. The Khmer built temples in the jungle. Americans build highways. It’s our state religion." https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/

pvorb 7y ago

I often think that maybe in a 1000 years or so, archeologists will find evidence that almost every household had a copy of Harry Potter or something similar and will conclude that this was a widespread religion at the time.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
Modern books like Harry Potter come with front or back matter that makes it clear that they are works of fiction, not a religious text.
goto11 7y ago
Current historians distinguish between religious texts and fiction for entertainment. Why should this distinction be lost in the future?
- EliRivers 7y ago
  I understand that in the archaeological community, they have a tendency to label things they can't figure out as being of religious significance. An example I recall is some kind of olive press, I think; it was labelled a religious tool until someone familiar with old-school manual olive presses commented how much it looked like an olive press. Where this is going is that current archaeologists mistake household items for religious tools, so perhaps future archaeologists will as well. As an aside, how do we know that current historians are not already doing the same? That they're not already labeling ancient fairy tales, told as amusing stories by people who knew they were just stories, as religious texts?
  - pvorb 7y ago
    That last paragraph is exactly what I was thinking. Did people in ancient Greece actually believe the stories from the Odyssey or Iliad? Or was it meant to entertain? Or have a look at Genesis. Is this something that the original sources believed to happen or was it an entertaining story in the beginning and retold until people started to believe in it? I'm not sure there always is a clear distinction between fiction and religion.

lallysingh 7y ago

Amazon order history. Per person.