Roy Rosenzweig’s article Scarcity of Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era brings up some really interesting points about the shelf life of websites and other digital media. Websites are quick, and images can get anywhere on the internet faster than you can blink, but they can also be deleted from existence with the push of a button. Books, magazines and other hard copies take longer to publish and get out to the consumer, but they also stick around longer. This just goes to show that we need to be very careful about preserving our digitized things; anything can happen and a backup is always a good idea.
Articles like these make me think about how future generations will see us. If we manage to preserve all of our online data- everything- what conclusions would they come to about us? Everyone always jokes about the latest pop culture fads and how people 1,000 years from now will view them, but I seriously wonder what part of our history will be left. Will we find a way to preserve this information, creating a fluid way for it to move from one advanced technology to the next? (i.e. CDs to DVDs to… whatever we use now. Thumb drives?) Or will our history become static? Will future generations be unable to access anything of ours because they simply don’t have things like disk drives or USB ports anymore?
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