thankfully we do have people trying to archive things. sadly not everything will make it into that. just to much new stuff all the time to keep up with. but if we can keep the important and mostly important stuff
Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
It sucks that we already have internet lost media
One of the most interesting aspects of historic preservation of anything is that it's an extremely new concept. The modern view of it is about a single lifetime old, dating back to the early 20th century. Historic structures were nothing but old buildings and would be torn down with the materials repurposed as soon as there was a better use for the land or materials. Most historic buildings that date to the 19th century and earlier are standing not because people invested significant time and money into maintaining a historic structure as it originally was but because people were continuing to live, work, socialize or worship in the structure.
Preservation is entering a very interesting new phase right now particularly in transportation preservation as many of the vehicles in preservation have now spent significantly longer in preservation than they did in active service. There are locomotives that were preserved in the 50s and 60s who's early days of preservation are themselves a matter of their history. There are new-built replicas of locomotives from a hundred years earlier that are now a hundred years old. In railroad preservation there's also now the challenge of steam locomotives being so old and so costly to maintain that some museums are turning to building brand new locomotives based on original blueprints
Other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets
I mean I could just smash or burn those things, and lots of important physical artifacts were smashed and burned over the years. I don't think that easy destructability is unique to data. As far as archaeology is concerned (and I'm no expert on the matter!), the fact that the artefacts are fragile is not an unprecedented challenge. What's scary IMO is the public perception that data, especially data on the cloud, is somehow immune from eventual destruction. This is the impulse that guides people (myself included) to be sloppy with archiving our data, specifically by placing trust in the corporations that administer cloud services to keep our data as if our of the kindness of their hearts.
Yeah, it's somewhat ironic that in the "information age" information is never been so volatile