1 post tagged “archiving”
In one thousand years, how will we be studied? How will the future even know we were here when our cheaply-constructed buildings will long be dust and our intellectual property scattered ones and zeroes in the wind?
A bit dramatic, yes, but it's not the first time the thought's been made. I've printed only a handful of the thousands of pictures I've taken over the years, most of them going onto my hard drive, to be looked at on cold, rainy days like this one. The box of prints I have in my closet is from college, when developing and printing them was the only way to admire them. Now, my idea of permanence is uploading them to flickr. Even if my computers crash and my back-ups fail, they'll be there. Right?
Then I read this:
We regret to inform you that we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended. [src]
FileFront, a popular site specializing in gaming videos, is going the way of the dodo. This epitomizes the contradiction that is internet permanence: the data is always there, ready for Google to index it and people to search for it. Only in the end, it's just data.
FileFront is a casualty that will be felt by some but not by most. But imagine a site like flickr disappearing from the interwaves. So much archived and shared creativity gone. Even bigger, what about YouTube? Even the mighty Google will one day be spoken of in the past tense. It's the whole, "On a long enough timeline..." thing.
Time to start printing my photos and burning DVDs of my movies? Maybe. Who knows?
