We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories 398
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.
Re:News? (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 the Italian Commedia dell'Arte hinges on letters getting mis-delivered.
In short: Yes, we are defined by our communications capacity, and that's been a subject of commentary for as long as we've been keeping records.
That more or less makes your point - but to conclude that it's no longer topical because we've been talking about it for a while... I can't agree with you there.
Re:It's been on my mind (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Porn sites? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"All traces of George W. Bush disappeared" (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:Like the Copyright Black Hole? (Score:3, Interesting)
Like what?
If you want a tricky example: Try to find a full day of what was shown on TV 20 years ago. You might be able to find a few of the popular shows from back then on DVD, a few of the commercials on Youtube and a few other bits and pieces, but finding the raw footage of everything connected is quite tricky. Such footage does exist, both on private VHS tapes and in archives, but the whole copyright situation on them should get very tricky, so you likely won't find such stuff publically available any time soon and I wouldn't trust a VHS tape to survive till its content enters public domain.
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.
Re:tv, radio, newspaper, official documents, memoi (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too much memory == no memory (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Isaac Asimov, in the Foundation trilogy which takes places thousands of years in the future, talked about the natural entropy of the physical media on which digital records are kept.
Hard drives fail, magnetic tape decays, south american fungi eat the insides of CDs... you don't need a catastrophic event, the second law of thermodynamics will do just fine.