It might be a very optimistic view though, I think the current world can preserve tremendous amount of information more than ever before. Not only documents and images but also audio and video clips… and what enable this is the vast extent of storage on the virtual space, so-called ‘the cloud’ like drop box and Amazon Glacier (thank Laura and Richard, because of you, I could at last understand what ‘the cloud’ is!!). The benefit of the system is, I guess, to obtain the ‘secure’ place for our precious data to some extent, because our HDD in the computer had been always threatened whether or not the data would be suddenly disappeared by breakdowns or natural disasters.
However, there is the reason which we cannot be optimistic. Because, the prospect that 70% of entire digital data might be lost by 2023. At the same time, the problems which are caused by the ‘secure place’ also exist. The safekeeping might be determined by the servers, and it largely depends on the definition of what the service is, as the ‘Grey Wizard’, Richard Wright talked to us today. One of the great ideas which was innovated in Middle-Earth could be the PrestoPRIME, the virtual repository space which keeps 2 copies for one data, regularly examines the error of these data, and when errors are detected, then seeks the solution and repairs the copy, in order to preserve data intact. But who knows it keeps them in secure forever (what the people in Middle-Earth taught me is that digital technology is not almighty so the most important thing is to always doubt the ability!).
If I think Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook are kinds of repository space for various audiovisual media, the new problems which are caused by them might be ‘uncertainty’. Viewers cannot know how much these data have trustworthiness, because authenticity of creator is uncertain, integrity is vulnerable and it in turn leads to unreliability. Only the creator knows the truth of the data. What we shall now get on better is that we can just store the huge amount of data. But better is better.
Thank for preserving much more data, in 100 years later, Facebook is said that it will become the place for 5% living people, and the other 95% would be for dead. But if I consider the entire Facebook as one big archives for billions people’s memory, I don’t find any problems in ‘Facebook cemetery’. See our current archival institution. How much original users/creators still survive? Perhaps, 95% of entire records have already lost their original creators. Archives are such. And then, Facebook will be able to become genuine archives for people.
by EtsUruk-hai
