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Sex-advertising graffiti in Pompeii are still valuable cultural artifacts that let us know what life in Pompeii was like. There are two orthogonal reasons for
by romwell 5y ago
Sex-advertising graffiti in Pompeii are still valuable cultural artifacts that let us know what life in Pompeii was like.
There are two orthogonal reasons for culture to be preserved:
* there are things that will be valuable to future generations to build upon and enrich them
* someone in the future would ask, what was life like in 2020, and without the "trash" culture, the answer will be very much off the mark
Trash or not trash, this is what we have.
This is why archive.org is important, this is why preserving Usenet archives is important, and why I'm happy that many geocities websites were archived before Yahoo axed them.
- eecc 5y agoIndeed, but there’s this concept called “forgetfulness”. We can’t afford to hoard everything, eventually things get lost in time and it’s ok. We will die and so will our own footprints disappear. Something - perhaps the most relevant and actively preserved, or frequent and therefore merely because of statistics - will survive. But we need to entertain the option of letting go
- romwell 5y agoSure, we don't need to preserve every single piece of scrap in our collective memory. But archiving doesn't do that either. There are many more silent films archived than either of us have watched, for example. Then sure, not everything needs to be archived. I believe there's a reasonable, subjective threshold of what you'd need to keep to get an idea of a person living in the time period. Letting go and keeping are not incompatible ideas.