Two weeks ago, Yahoo shut down GeoCities: a web hosting service that provided free or inexpensive hosting for over thirty-eight million user-built pages; one might consider this the first digital extinction event. An era ends with a whimper, and the show goes on.
Digital archaeology already exists in a rudimentary form: prior to the shutdown of GeoCities, the Archive Team took to preserving this digital history, retrieving the soon-to-be-lost data from the GeoCities servers; elsewhere, other groups are recovering and archiving graphic artifacts.
Consider the internet: it is a sum of the species; it is the human psyche, cataloged on billions of pages. If archaeology intends to understand humankind, the internet offers an unprecedented amount of information: for better or for worse, we are being digitally preserved for future generations.
And what will future generations think of us--of me? It's a strange [read as, comforting] thought: that this blog may someday be made available to some stranger's eyes. I hope my future archaeologist [hello, by the way] finds these musings interesting--lo! a story idea:
Digital archaeology already exists in a rudimentary form: prior to the shutdown of GeoCities, the Archive Team took to preserving this digital history, retrieving the soon-to-be-lost data from the GeoCities servers; elsewhere, other groups are recovering and archiving graphic artifacts.
Consider the internet: it is a sum of the species; it is the human psyche, cataloged on billions of pages. If archaeology intends to understand humankind, the internet offers an unprecedented amount of information: for better or for worse, we are being digitally preserved for future generations.
And what will future generations think of us--of me? It's a strange [read as, comforting] thought: that this blog may someday be made available to some stranger's eyes. I hope my future archaeologist [hello, by the way] finds these musings interesting--lo! a story idea:
A digital archaeologist stumbles across a decades-old blog, and falls in love with the now-elderly blogger; or rather, the younger writer chronicled in the blog's musings. Could be an interesting story, science fiction-cum-memoir, equal parts nostalgia and narcissism.Another story idea, another unwritten story; I suppose that's why I feel an affinity for the internet: I am constantly evolving, leaving behind a trail of stillborn ideas as my mind races forward towards... something; and similarly, the internet leaves behind a trail of stillborn blogs and websites covered in digital dust, forever evolving in tandem with the human psyche.
Love this line: the internet leaves behind a trail of stillborn blogs and websites covered in digital dust, forever evolving in tandem with the human psyche.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of leaving behind digital archaeology and falling in love with an old person when he or she was young online, have you see Voices of a Distant Star? It uses cell phones instead of the Internet, and the idea of signals being sent from far out in space, so that when they are received, they would be from people no longer as young as they were when they sent those messages.