Will history survive the computer age? As we know, our advancements in technology over the last 50 years has been extremely fast paced. More and more of what we say, author, feel, express, etc. lives solely on the computer hardware we own and the internet. Will this collection of data remain alive 500 years from now? Will physical history outlast "virtual" history? Would we know now as much as we do today about Jefferson and Adams if they had shared there thoughts on message boards (virtual) instead of writing letters (physical)? How many times have your thrown away, or reformatted your hard drive? It may seem like useless information that was tossed, but I'm sure historians in the future would beg to differ. Interested to hear your thoughts.
We would probably know more. Just about everything we type on the internet is archived somewhere. Important things are usually archived many places.
I would hope so. Yes, but what about that "trivial" data you lose when reformatting your hard drive? The little things that can tell a lot about how a person lived and thought. (I edited the original question to include this after your reply)
The most serious problem as I see it is that archived material may need obsolete equipment to retrieve. Examples: mag. tapes for computers of 1950 - 1990 era; 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33 rpm records; 8 track tapes; video tapes.
All of those important things that are located on those other sources you mentioned have already been rerecorded onto computers. So if any of them are lost , there's now a back up for everything ever recorded in the past, well most averting important that is. Ever been to the Library Of Congress? They have digitized everything that they have there. http://www.google.com/url?url=http:...ngress&usg=AFQjCNF6TBf5b5ZrQbeCr8YQdMSrPqnW3A
A very good question. Particularly with the publishing world on the verge of going digital, even more pertinent. I have doubts personally. I think much will be lost altogether or lost in the noise. Even if the retrieval equipment exists or can be recreated.
I don't agree. Much of what we know about people in history are personal notes and insignificant writings. Another example is modern photography. How many different file formats are we at now? Each manufacturer has their own RAW implementation. I have not been able to go to the Library of Congress. It is definitely a place I would like to visit. Thanks for the link. Agree.
Last September, I saw King Tutankhamen's artifacts in San Francisco. Looking at these three thousand year old bits of furniture and jewelery, I found myself wondering how much longer they would survive. Museums burn down, religious fanatics destroy things out of misguided dogma, ships sink, airplanes crash. Look at what happened to Iraq's museums. Who knows how many artifacts from the dawn of civilization were destroyed, or lost to looters (which is nearly the same as destroyed). These items survived for so long because they were buried in a sealed tomb in the desert, and forgotten. Though great care is being taken, I wonder how much they have already deteriorated in the relatively short time since they have been discovered. I suppose that ultimately, humans are transient, and so is our history and artifacts. Our deep space probes are almost certainly our longest lasting legacy, but are also likely unrecoverable to us, or anyone else who might be interested.
When I had youngins back in the early 2000's, I bought a state of the art digital camera. Why? To archive the photos of the children as they grow up- because digitally preserving photos (instead of negatives) was the way of the future. To that end, I have a drawer full of CDRs full of photos of the kids when they were young- for the kids to disseminate when they're adults. The CDrs themselves will degrade in 20-50 years' time, hopefully they'll be upgraded to another format before then. Apart from that, the wave of the Internet has brought very VERY little in the way of permanence. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it is not like an encyclopedia that takes a snapshot of time and preserves it. How much original content from a decade ago is still online? 99% of it is GONE. I have been ftp'ing since ftp was invented and all of it is GONE. Erased. Cleared. Defragmented to make new room for new servers. Saved on hard drives that have long since been shitcanned when they crashed. But I still got my drawer full of CDRs.
An even better link to over 2,000,000 free downloadable books is here : http://www.archive.org/details/texts They're almost all in searchable format after OCR was done.
It depends weather or not we get leaders some day who are anti-history, and anti technology, so in other words, we don't know if it will be around, only time will tell.:shrug:
That's what I worry about. Web sites that have thousands and millions of freely downloadably books being shut down because a radical government comes to power. Just look at places like Communist China with it's "Great Firewall of China", they do everything they can to keep ideas like pro-democracy and voting out of their country. In the U.S. almost all websites are accessible now, but it wouldn't surprise me if websites and books on websites start "disappearing", if not already, that are not PC (politically correct).
there is lots of renewable energy, research vanishing from the web..thanx to big corperations... so yeah i hear you, and big business will surely stand in the way of knowledge, and history as well. to bad really but what are we to do.
Huh ? :shrug: Can you give a clear example with links ? I've never heard of this. Communist China's "Great Firewall" is well known and documented : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China I've never heard of any corporations trying to block dissemination of books; INFACT, hundreds of thousands of books have been scanned by the corporations Microsoft and Google and are freely available on the web : http://books.google.com/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110401904.html
it's hard for me to find discriminative evidence, what i am referring this from is the shear fact that i researched this information for years, and allot of films, and sites that had detailed info in regards to this have vanished, it is getting allot harder to find raw information about the topic, and it is getting worse as every year passes. and the only people i could see removing this info are big businesses, fearing how simple and how cheap it really is to make these products, god forbid some one might make a cheap working solar panel at home for less then 1000 times what they will sell it for. taking there profits, it only makes sense to me because they would be the only people who would have anything to gain by keeping this info from us. but i do remember reading an articall on this a while back, i will try to dig it out just for you Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
What happened with that Microsoft thing? I've never heard of it and I'm reasonably active in the ebook arena.
I don't know of their current status on scanning books, but I've seen a lot at http://www.archive.org/details/texts, mainly about a year ago. Lately google's been uploading tons of books to this site.
