2 ms·
I don't know. In the past a lot of material culture survived for thousands of years by total accident. A lot of objects survived just because nobody ever bother
by minimuffins 6y ago
I don't know. In the past a lot of material culture survived for thousands of years by total accident. A lot of objects survived just because nobody ever bothered to destroy them, and could be found later.
It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
- ghaff 6y agoCertainly digital information has to be deliberately preserved and doing so has challenges relative to anything physical. That said, with a few exceptions (e.g. papyrus in very dry conditions), pretty much anything on paper/parchment needs to be deliberately preserved as well. And, as you get to wetter climates e.g. Britain, there is very little preserved from post-Roman Medieval times. But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?