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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 sh
by 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 agoSome 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 agoWell, 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 agoDon'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 agoAnother 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.
- empath75 7y agoYep. I’ve got a bunch of mix cds that are just gone and a lot of pictures that were hosted on personal websites that never got captured by internet archive.
- comboy 7y agoNow I want to listen to it. Why not put it somewhere on the Internet? Maybe it will bring some joy to a few more people. Worst case scenario it will get ignored (it will get one listen from me though).
- munificent 7y ago> Why not put it somewhere on the Internet? I don't think I have a copy any more. If I do, it's likely in a format for an old MOD tracker that I may not be able to open any more.
- agumonkey 7y agoProbably on some cdrw. A tape even.
- quotemstr 7y agoSure. I expect we'll lose things here and there, as we have already. But major works are safe, and there's more than enough for any future civilization to establish definitively how we lived.
- DougN7 7y agoThe quantity doesn’t matter as much as the medium. I suspect digital mediums are one of the most fragile and least likely to survive.
- mtgx 7y agoWe have to go through major hoops now to play old DRMed games that may not even play on an upgrade to the same operating system anymore. Will companies DCMA all versions of a "pirated" game in the future? Will there still be windows to play on it? Etc