4 ms·
I wonder whether a YouTube video, a post on Instagram, or similar artifact of our modern world would ever be able to survive 350 years. This …longevity(?) seems
by whyenot 2y ago
I wonder whether a YouTube video, a post on Instagram, or similar artifact of our modern world would ever be able to survive 350 years. This …longevity(?) seems to be something that is unique to physical objects like books, printed photographs, or paper cuttings. In 350 years, will we look back at this time and considering it another dark age because so little of the content we are producing will still exist in an accessible form?
- mystified5016 2y agoBooks are not at all special. Only a very small fraction of writings from antiquity are still available to us. Some exist only as lumps of carbon in the Herculaneum papyri and haven't been seen by humans in a thousand years. Overall, most books ever printed have been destroyed. It's just that we've printed a lot of them. It's mostly a survivorship and recency bias. We're barely into our first century of producing digital artifacts. Some things have been lost, of course, but we do still have a lot of information about the very earliest machines. We still have some of the first programs, some of the first machines are still running today. We might be able to preserve things in the very long term if we can convince ourselves it's worth the effort, but more than likely the far future will have lost as much from our time as we have from antiquity.