3 ms·

While talking with my parents I realized how little of their generation is available to us. What did they eat in there travels? Where? What music did they liste

While talking with my parents I realized how little of their generation is available to us. What did they eat in there travels? Where? What music did they listen to? What kind of cloths did they wear? I have a few fragments of photos, anecdots and not much more. I was thinking about how highly detailed memories of our generation would be available to future generations. Facebook, Twitter etc are in a way digital monuments of our entire generation. Looking at these misguided arbitrary corporate decisions of culling data isn't comforting. Archive.org is trying to do its best but there needs be better efforts in preserving memories of who passed away and we need to be more sensitive about that even though they are going to produce ad click revenues.

shard972 7y ago
Have you tried reading a book? I don't see how an old facebook timeline is going to provide a lot of insight about a culture in the past compared to what we already do with books and to some extent movies.
mikorym 7y ago
> arbitrary corporate decisions There was a HN thread about an open source Twitter implemented in Haskell with the full stack in one page (it's called something specific) and that made me think that maybe decentrialisation is really just having decentrialised habits. If you can figure out storage, the rest is all just done on the client side. It would kind of be like a exodus back to 1997, when everyone just slapped together some HTML and had a web page (I think; back then I was playing SC2 and didn't know what HTML was). I thought of this example yesterday: Often people lament something like "the master craftsmen are all old, what would happen in the next generation". But I think the next generation is busy inventing the craft independently. Much like leathercraft or book binding on Reddit. I do think people can get lazy because of YouTwitFace. But I do think that a lazy person can become very efficient and prolific precisely because of revolt against their self-imposed boredom. It does not require a lot of people (e.g.: archive.org) to make a rather large difference. GNU/Linux and the rest are examples of that 90% viewers/lurkers, 9% interaction, 1% creators. I don't know if I am misquoting that, but maybe people should be active in choosing what they preserve. That is, you are your own 100%; there is no 90-9-1 with regards to your legacy. You have to store it yourself.
- mikorym 7y ago
  Edit: SC1, obviously. I am sorry to concede that I didn't have a future copy of SC2 back in 1997.
mholt 7y ago
For preserving at least your own data, check out one of my projects, Timeliner: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner It downloads your digital life and stores it locally on a single, unified timeline, for archival and family history purposes.
wastedhours 7y ago
That hit me recently - was sat in an airport the other side of the world having just sent my mum a WhatsApp saying we were through security and sharing some snaps from that leg of the journey. Even within my lifetime, that'd have been a £10 phonecall and a postcard that might or might not arrive in a week or so. It took 20 seconds to have an immediate, searchable, chronological update on what we'd done and where we were. Incredible. That being said, if Google Photos and WhatsApp go the way of the dodo, we're a bit screwed.
rimliu 7y ago
I have the opposite opinion on culling the data. This "preserve everything" attitude just smells like digital hoarding to me. Especially in the context of Twitter, which is mostly the noise with rare blips of the signal. And even in those cases the signal often is very specific to that moment in time and not that important later. The vision of a huge pile of digital trash with a few gold nuggets inside has zero appeal to me.
- thombat 7y ago
  My wife has started making photobooks of significant family events, having observed that having an arbitrarily large pile of digital photos that never get curated or culled actually means we're less likely to revisit our past.

shard972 7y ago

Have you tried reading a book? I don't see how an old facebook timeline is going to provide a lot of insight about a culture in the past compared to what we already do with books and to some extent movies.

mikorym 7y ago

> arbitrary corporate decisions There was a HN thread about an open source Twitter implemented in Haskell with the full stack in one page (it's called something specific) and that made me think that maybe decentrialisation is really just having decentrialised habits. If you can figure out storage, the rest is all just done on the client side. It would kind of be like a exodus back to 1997, when everyone just slapped together some HTML and had a web page (I think; back then I was playing SC2 and didn't know what HTML was). I thought of this example yesterday: Often people lament something like "the master craftsmen are all old, what would happen in the next generation". But I think the next generation is busy inventing the craft independently. Much like leathercraft or book binding on Reddit. I do think people can get lazy because of YouTwitFace. But I do think that a lazy person can become very efficient and prolific precisely because of revolt against their self-imposed boredom. It does not require a lot of people (e.g.: archive.org) to make a rather large difference. GNU/Linux and the rest are examples of that 90% viewers/lurkers, 9% interaction, 1% creators. I don't know if I am misquoting that, but maybe people should be active in choosing what they preserve. That is, you are your own 100%; there is no 90-9-1 with regards to your legacy. You have to store it yourself.

mikorym 7y ago
Edit: SC1, obviously. I am sorry to concede that I didn't have a future copy of SC2 back in 1997.

mholt 7y ago

For preserving at least your own data, check out one of my projects, Timeliner: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner It downloads your digital life and stores it locally on a single, unified timeline, for archival and family history purposes.

wastedhours 7y ago

That hit me recently - was sat in an airport the other side of the world having just sent my mum a WhatsApp saying we were through security and sharing some snaps from that leg of the journey. Even within my lifetime, that'd have been a £10 phonecall and a postcard that might or might not arrive in a week or so. It took 20 seconds to have an immediate, searchable, chronological update on what we'd done and where we were. Incredible. That being said, if Google Photos and WhatsApp go the way of the dodo, we're a bit screwed.

rimliu 7y ago

I have the opposite opinion on culling the data. This "preserve everything" attitude just smells like digital hoarding to me. Especially in the context of Twitter, which is mostly the noise with rare blips of the signal. And even in those cases the signal often is very specific to that moment in time and not that important later. The vision of a huge pile of digital trash with a few gold nuggets inside has zero appeal to me.

thombat 7y ago
My wife has started making photobooks of significant family events, having observed that having an arbitrarily large pile of digital photos that never get curated or culled actually means we're less likely to revisit our past.