[Web4lib] Next new thing?

[Mark Bardsley]

Lars,

>From time to time, I hear the argument I think you are trying to make: most
of the digital communication is ephemeral and in the future we will not be
able to access it. However, I think that argument is flawed for a few
reasons:

(based on hunches, sorry I am too preoccupied to look up sources but can and
will, should I be prodded to - and yes, I know there is contrary literature)

1) The digital age has increased communication and personal artifacts.
Therefore, if 10% of our communications and artifacts still exist in 100
years that will probably be more than in previous decades.
2) Contrary to the predictions, the digital age has been accompanied by an
increase instead of a decrease in paper production.
3) There is an acronym but I can't remember it (then what is it good for?)
that implies that many copies keep things safe. The digital age is allowing
us to keep many copies of things. These copies are going to move from
storage media to storage media. In other words, things that are now on hard
drives, DVDs, etc, will move to holographic or DNA based systems (or
nanotech) -for example.

I think a good example of how to save the world from another dark age is the
effort taking place at the Internet Archive.

As for finding all our stuff - well that is a problem Google is trying to
solve and doing an admirable job...

- Mark 


On 7/16/05 3:44 PM, "Lars Aronsson" <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> Sloan, Bernie wrote:
>> First we had blogging, and then podcasting.
>> What's the next new up-and-coming thing along these lines?
> 
> Many people are now in their first decade of e-mail, digital
> (still and video) photography, blogging, digital music collection
> building, etc.  In the coming decade many will learn about
> archiving, backup, loss and aging of personal digital materials.
> Some will fade like color photos from the 1950s.  But there are
> also big hopes of being able to search decades past.
> 
> We will need better ways to organize (and add metadata to) our
> personal collections for the purpose of future recall.  Where was
> this photo taken?  And who are the people?  Do I have any photos
> of aunt Mary?  How can I find them?
> 
> If we can manage our digital collections over time, the 2nd
> millennium AD will seem like the dark ages, just like we are now
> used to view the time before the printing press.
>