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We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jan 26, 2009 10:11 PM
from the black-hole-of-history dept.
from the black-hole-of-history dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.
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Ask Slashdot: Will There Be Historical Records from the Digital Age? 251 comments
magarity asks: "NPR's Morning Edition today aired a segment on the Medici Archive Project where every letter sent and received by the ruling Medici family of renaissance-era Italy is being stored. The interviewer, Bob Edwards, casually joked that it was a good thing the Medicis didn't use email or else all this history would have been lost. It is easy to predict that at a similar distance in the future little will be known about our time period. After all, it is already problematic retrieve 25 year old data from 8 inch floppies, simply because the reading mechanisms are hard to find even if the media has retained the data. The same thing will happen to CDs in 50 years. How should the dawn of the digital age be recording itself for history, especially casual correspondence that gives insight into day to day life?"
[+]
Science: Web Pages Are Weak Links in the Chain of Knowledge 361 comments
PizzaFace writes "Contributions to science, law, and other scholarly fields rely for their authority on citations to earlier publications. The ease of publishing on the web has made it an explosively popular medium, and web pages are increasingly cited as authorities in other publications. But easy come, easy go: web pages often get moved or removed, and publications that cite them lose their authorities. The Washington Post reports on the loss of knowledge in ephemeral web pages, which a medical researcher compares to the burning of ancient Alexandria's library. As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture.""
[+]
Science: Rosetta Disk Designed For 2,000 Years Archive 659 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog 'human-readable' scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. 'This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth,' says Oliver Wilke. 'If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations.'"
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"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How much you wanna bet the above post gets a +5 insightful whereas a similar post about Clinton (or god help us, Obama) would get -1 troll?
And yeah, I'll get modded down for pointing this out, but what do I care? Karma: Excellent. I just hope whoever opts to throw a -1 offtopic my way also takes a serious look at the parent. And no, I'm not posting this as AC either.
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
People who don't like Bush -- ESPECIALLY people who don't like Bush -- should want all record of him preserved.
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry; his record isn't disappearing anytime soon. There are no media compatibility issues with gravestones and they offer excellent document retention.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because George Bush managed to fuck up the great economy Clinton left him with
You do recall the dot-com crash in 2000, right? Bush wasn't in office until 2001.
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Funny)
It's still his fault. We KNEW he would be elected. That alone crashed the dot-com bubble.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's still his fault. We KNEW he would be elected. That alone crashed the dot-com bubble.
Why is this being modded as funny? Markets, if at all rational (which is debatable), are based on predictions of changing economic conditions in the future. The fact that an idiot like Bush was even a leading candidate at the time should have served as a harsh warning to smart investors, that things in the U.S. economy might head south real quick. They were right. And just look at all the bumps up the stock market took whenever Obama announced a new appointee anywhere in government finance. The markets obvi
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Funny)
Gore and Kerry's campaigns were "mumble mumble this, mumble mumble that." Americans who want change didn't have a real voice or character(since Howard Dean, anyway) until Obama. Hillary would've also won, but she's too cool with her New York Jew constituency and we have to have a prez who's more low-key about that kinda shit.
People who mod me down: suck my dick.
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
but it's not suffering PTSD after being violently beaten up by greedy assholes.
So in which administration do you think passed a lot of the deregulation that enabled those 'greedy assholes'? Which administration passed the Telecommunications Act, the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Eventually the wet for Obama crowd is going to wake up and realize that the Democrats are just as big of a threat to our way of life as the Republicans are. Of course by the time that happens everybody will have forgotten about how badly the GOP fucked up and we'll start the whole cycle over again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War, badly handling Katrina, and staffing every position with hacks and cronies? Repubs are demonstrably worse for our country.
I don't buy this "Oh, they're all bad, Dems are just as bad" meme. It's just not factually true.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War,
The CDA was attached to the Telecom Bill that directly led to the Telecom crash. There's certainly bipartisan blame for that one, Republicans may have pushed it through the House and Senate, but impeached ex-President Clinton signed it.
Both groups that the US ended up going to war with in Afghanistan and Iraq had been originally funded by previous administrations (to bipartisan support as the Republicans did not have enough votes to get any bills through congress at the time).
The war in Iraq I agree was pe
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Informative)
World War II: Rosevelt (D). (more dead americans than any war in history)
Actually, more Americans died in the Civil War.
In World War 2, about 418,500 Americans died. That's a lot, but we got off light compared to the other combatants, whose casualties numbered in the millions.
Meanwhile, about 620,000 Americans died in the U.S. Civil War -- 360,000 Union soldiers, 260,000 Confederates. The Confederates were Americans too, ya know, despite their best efforts to split off.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
By demographics, yes, Lincoln probably would have been a Democrat. That said, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ would likely have been Republicans. (Truman and LBJ almost certainly, Kennedy maybe.) The goalposts have shifted considerably over the last 150 years...
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
Gr... Now I must undo mods...
World War II: Rosevelt (D). (more dead americans than any war in history)
Your comparing our two modern wars to WWII? Please tell me your doing this for mere partisanship, as there is absolutely nothing in common with our current political wars and WWII.
WWII was a war fought over genuine despots, and not just tinpot dictators raised to that level for the sake of political ends. In the case of WWII there was a genuine act of war, a threat to our allies, general geopolitcal stability, and a real genocidal bona fide bad guy. Our current crop of wars lack ALL of these. In WWII there was an ACTUAL threat to the US, a threat that is completely lacking in our current wars.
These wars are poltical only.
I can agree with your complaints against Korea and Vietnam, but comparing WWII to the neocon "Bush doctrine" wars we're in currently is just dumb and fallacious.
Arguably Afghanistan might be just, since the Taliban did INDIRECTLY cause a direct threat, unlike Pearl Harbor and the Japanese incidentally which was a DIRECT threat. I personally think Afghanistan is a good war, as do most nonpartisan analysts, but oddly this is the war we ignore, and proved to be the least of Bush's military priorities.
Iraq is, and was, just dumb, and only motivated by petty political reasons. We had no real reason for being there, outside of purely ideological (and partisan) political reasons. Even Iraq is a bit dumber than our involvement in Vietnam and Korea, since that was at least for BIPARTISAN political idiocy based purely on temporal and fallacious political grounds.
Ignoring war, though GWB was the worst president we have ever had. He did more to dissolve our rights than any president before him (except perhaps Adams). He didn't even have the illusion of ethics, he endorsed torture, exceptionalism (rebranded nationalism), he looked out for his rich cronies in a way that Reagan could only dream of, he killed ALL safety regulation, and generally fought against the majority of Americans as much as possible. I don't understand how ANYONE can like him, he didn't even support his religiously fundamentalist base, much less true fiscal conservatives. Hell even hopeless pure war-for-wars-sake hawks can't like him since he f*'ed up both the wars he decided to start.
Economically, I suppose, he did start a trend some might like, decreasing income and dramatically increasing spending. Perhaps some might even like the idea of a "war against x" where "x" is an unassigned variable. He also popularized the wonderous anti-intellectualism that uneducated idiots love (we can call it populism), where ruling a country by your "gut" is preferable to ruling it by experts, information, and science.
I'm not going to hop on the partisan band wagon here, either. Clinton was a BAD president, as was every modern president we've had since FDR. It isn't a question of "us versus them". that mentality is the problem. We CAN have political differences, we SHOULD have them. You are about as right as I am. Politics are necessarily subjective. When you act as if they are objective, you always act towards tyranny.
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Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:4, Informative)
World War II: Rosevelt (D). (more dead americans than any war in history)
Only if you discount the bit of unpleasantness from 1861 - 1865.
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
Because George Bush managed to fuck up the great economy Clinton left him with
And even if people accept that premise that relates to biased moderations in what way exactly?
because Obama is a visionary and has a fantastic platform
Get back to me in four years before you start spouting about fantastic his platform is. I'm rooting for his success (because we can't afford for him to fail) but I'm not going to call it a "fantastic platform" six days into his administration and I'm growing weary of the worship that surrounds him. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for him.
If you disagree that Bush is a worse president than Clinton was or Obama will be, then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut and let the world think you are intelligent rather than removing all doubt.
Translation: If you disagree with me then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut, lest I be exposed to competing points of view that might tax my brain and force me to actually think.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Informative)
Also NBER President Martin Feldstein said in 2004:
"It is clear that the revised data have made our original March [2001] date for the start of the recession much too late. We are still waiting for additional monthly data before making a final judgment. Until we have the additional data, we cannot make a decision."
Interesting way of saying "we are clearly wrong, but we aren't going to commit to it".
And Finally, how could someone who hadn't by March even passed his economic policy until June of that year.
Interesting further quote from the article on his economic policy [wikipedia.org] Bush inherited a faltering economy from Clinton, the economy having grown only at a 1.1% annualized rate over the previous three quarters from March 31 of the first year of Bush presidency [15](see Early 2000s recession). Bush had his tax cut plan approved by Congress in June, proposed early as a response to the economic decline and, despite the aftermath of the 2001 9/11 attacks, managed to keep the country out of recession[neutrality disputed] (defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in the size of the economy) during the time he and his economic policies were assuming more control over the economy.
I may not like the man as president, but I refuse to make him the magic bullet for all the problems with this country.
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
Regan and HW spent like drunken sailors, leaving a mess for the next President to pay off. Clinton cut spending, payed off debts, and set things up for tax cuts. Bush spent like a drunken sailor, and gave tax cuts, leaving a mess for the next guy. Damn those nasty big-government tax-and-spend Democrats.
Parent
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand the Reagan nostalgia one bit. He introduced idiotic SDI program (Starwars), he renewed the cold war (though was fortunate enough to last until its inevitable decline, and thus take credit), he introduced the terrible "trickle down" motivation to focus everything on the rich and deprive the other 70% of the population of any benefits, he decided running government based on religion was a good idea (while his wife gave him astrological advice), and he started the modern idea of "make less spend more" rebranded as "conservationism" (viz "quit your decent job, get one at Taco Bell, and by a Mercedes Benz"). He continued to destabilize most of the world via the CIA, especially Latin America because he personally didn't agree with their popular democratic governments (for the sake of democracy mind, i.e. American interests). He funded most of the people who are now our "greatest enemies", in his wars against Russia.
What the hell was so great about him, except charisma?
This isn't a partisan attack, I also dislike Clinton, both Bushes, Nixon, and most of Carter. Hell, I even preferred the first Bush over Clinton, even if I lean somewhat left. Hell, I even think Kennedy would have been a terrible president. But after Nixon, Reagan was really the guy who led to the presidency being imperial, and the great destroyer of rights. He held lead into the era where we exist for the government, and not the other way around.
Reagan was one of our worst presidents... Besides GWB, of course, who did the most to destroy America, and all that we are founded on.
Parent
The worst abuses remain unaddressed (Score:3, Informative)
"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Like those of us who voted for President Bush the first time to reverse the previous administration's policies (but really didn't), when will the Obama guys get frustrated when he fails to end the so-called "Patriot" Act and warrantless wiretapping which he supposedly opposed?
He will not, because the "Patriot" Act was composed in pieces by the Bush I/Clinton administrations. He already caved on the warrantless wiretapping so that's already a done deal.
Just do it. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just do it. (Score:5, Funny)
Archive.org may not be willing to archive important sites (such as pr0n), and it only has a single mirror.
Don't worry I'm working on archiving all that porn locally. Eventually I'll combine every single file into one giant torrent and upload at least 99.9% of it before dropping offline ;)
Parent
Re:Just do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Archive.org may not be willing to archive important sites (such as pr0n), and it only has a single mirror.
Don't worry I'm working on archiving all that porn locally. Eventually I'll combine every single file into one giant torrent and upload at least 99.9% of it before dropping offline ;)
You sir are a great humanitarian.
Parent
interesting idea (Score:5, Funny)
I wholeheartedly agree that there should be some mechanism for archiving millions, if not billions, of web pages. Someone should get right on that. [archive.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but who's archiving archive.org???
They say they never forget, but... (Score:5, Funny)
> Yeah, but who's archiving archive.org???
The turtles, of course. It's turtles all the way down.
Parent
Like the Copyright Black Hole? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, for starters, I keep my memories in my head.. but if you're talking about records and history then I think copyright is a bigger culprit than digitization any day. Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
Re:Like the Copyright Black Hole? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod this up to +11. It's insane how much material has to be archived illegally to keep it intact. Case in point: When Legacy Engineering developed the Atari Flashback 2 for the modern Atari, they had to pull all the ROMs, documents, schematics, and everything else from their own archives. Atari had absolutely none of it.
Similarly, all kinds of software is being lost due to the draconian copyright laws. In fact, two of the titles I remember from my childhood (a Q-Bert ripoff with ice cubes and a lunar lander clone that gained you fuel from answering math problems) are, as far as I can tell, simply lost to history. No one has even documented their existence, much less made a backup for posterity!
Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse. Movies, television, software, digital texts, and other forms of useful information and cultural entertainment are being lost to time permanently. All because these items fall out of circulation and copyright law prevents enough copies from being kept around to prevent their untimely demise.
That being said, I do realize that not everything can be kept. Hell, I know more than enough historians wish we had even simple documents like tax assessments and census results from the ancient world. Even seemingly stupid stuff like that can be incredibly useful. Never the less, some of this information is simply going to be lost in time. But let's at least make an effort to preserve the works that define our history and culture. You never know. 2000 years from now our descendants may want to piece together what happened to us. ;-)
Parent
Re:Like the Copyright Black Hole? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse. Movies, television, software, digital texts, and other forms of useful information and cultural entertainment are being lost to time permanently. All because these items fall out of circulation and copyright law prevents enough copies from being kept around to prevent their untimely demise.
I've often thought that'd be a good extension to copyright law. As soon as something stops being available for sale (or maybe after some reasonable time, like a couple months), then it should enter the public domain.
If companies want to keep owning the rights to something, they should have to demonstrate they're prepared to make it available commercially so people can actually buy it. Otherwise people that want it will be forced to become criminals to get their hands on it (or, obviously, do without).
Parent
Re:Like the Copyright Black Hole? (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of it is *not* available. Most books do not see a second print run. There's literally millions of films that never made it to VCR and millions more that never made it to DVD. This is not because people are uninterested in buying them. It's because the copyright holder has the exclusive right to make new copies and they choose not to. It's more profitable for them to print copies of new works for which they can ask a higher price.
Parent
Re:Like the Copyright Black Hole? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's great. Thing about the library of congress, it's in Washington DC. Most people, are not. Compare this to the collected works of Shakespeare or the Bible.. copyright reduces availability.. that's the purpose of copyright, to make something scarce that would otherwise be plentiful, so people can profit off it. Oh, and the promotion of progress or something.. yeah.
Parent
Bush White House Site Preserved in Full (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bush White House Site Preserved in Full (Score:4, Funny)
Good! Between this and the Monty Python archives now on YouTube, we should have our fill of free comedy for years to come.
Parent
Too much memory == no memory (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to cut down the noise somehow.
We don't need to save every teenager's text message.
I'm not willing to spend a lot of money to preserve my *own* memories. If they think it is so important, then they can kick in some money and free time to do it.
Re:Too much memory == no memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be so sure. One of an archaeologist's favourite places to dig is in the village rubbish tip. It's important because it tells us more about day-to-day life in a society than what people wrote down on papyrus, carved into stone, or otherwise saved for posterity.
In virtually every case, the stuff that rulers deem important doesn't bear much relation to the way everyday people live. Often enough, it's an outright lie. So if we want to understand a society with any depth of detail, we need to know the trivial and mundane as well as the monumental.
Parent
Re:Too much memory == no memory (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh but that is dealing with societies that are very different. The ones that you are talking about for that sort of thing are long gone and left little in the way of data. Thus it does become important to try and piece together things from trash and such.
However society (in the first world at least) is very, very different now. There is a tremendous amount of data kept. There has been a lot kept since the printing press started really taking off, but even that is nothing compared to the data that is kept in the digital age.
So barring some amazingly catastrophic event (in which case there might not be future historians) it won't be a problem. There's plenty of data preserved on all aspects of life. Be it scholarly research, news, whatever, there's lots out there that isn't subject to the approval of the government. Also governments are keeping data on a much larger scale than before. You have stuff like the Library of Congress, which is more or less just a big collection of shit published in the US.
Thus I really doubt there'll be much uncertainty about how people from our time lived. There are too many records of too many types. In particular, video is a powerful one. A written piece is always influenced by the author. It is subject to how they remembered the event and how they choose to retell it. An unaltered video simply captures what happened. It tells whatever story falls in its lens and microphone.
You cannot compare how research on a culture from 3000 years ago is done to how research on the current culture will be done.
The grandparent is also right that there is a real problem with signal to noise. There is so much data, and so much of it really random crap, that one of the major challenges future historians are likely to face is to sort through it to find the useful shit.
Parent
Archive.Org (Score:4, Informative)
It's not perfect by any means but the WayBack machine on Archive.Org can find some pretty old stuff. Scary stuff too. Like that time I was into...... er forget it...
Plus if the Whitehouse doesn't get your fancy... there is tons of Grateful Dead Music there as well.
Porn sites? (Score:4, Interesting)
who needs archive.org for the white house? (Score:5, Informative)
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one [nara.gov]. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually. I seriously doubt the Obama team came in and pulled an 'rm -rf' on the old webpage.....
Parent
Re:who needs archive.org for the white house? (Score:5, Insightful)
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one [nara.gov]. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually.
They're already ahead of you.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ [archives.gov]
Parent
Re:FP (Score:4, Insightful)
The niche folks must continue to ensure that minutiae are not forgotten, for those who control the past control the future. Attention span is directly proportional to richness of memory. For fuck's sake, everybody read 1984!
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Re:FP (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:FP (Score:5, Funny)
I bet you also forgot that Smithers was black. [23b.org]
So was Michael Jackson at some point, no one cares.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty much. A Novel in Nine Letters [wikipedia.org], one of Dostoyevski's famous shorter works, used the newly established postal service as a framing device.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that hinges on the lack of reliable postal services. A courier is late arriving with a note for Romeo, so he never finds out that Juliet has merely faked her own death.
Some of the stock humour in th
Re:It's been happening since tike in memorial... (Score:4, Informative)
You find one Smith from Australia with no relationship to the Smith in Wales, who in turn has no relationship to the Smith in Zimbabwe.
That's because one was a blacksmith, another a silversmith, the third a pewtersmith.
Parent
Re:tv, radio, newspaper, official documents, memoi (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a social benefit, stupid. You just demonstrated the behavior I described. The social benefit incurs an economic cost. There might be some very, very long-term economic benefit, but it's harder to prove. The social benefit is obvious, at least to some of us.