This essay puts into words some thing I think about fairly often, mainly, what becomes of all this digital content we create? Take this silly blog for example. It does go back to 1998, 23 freaking years if you know where to dig in theory. They say the internet is forever, but stuff gets shut down and things get lost all the time.
“ In fact, up to and including the digital consumer cameras, communication and creation had always been a struggle with brevity and bandwidth. It was costly to send mail and time consuming to write by hand, so letters were usually kept fairly short: a few pages, perhaps. And they took up space: proficient correspondents, unless wealthy, eventually ran out of reasonable storage for their letters and had to discard some of them. Audio and camcorder cassettes had limited running times. Rolls of film had a fixed number of frames and once you'd snapped your 24 pictures, that was it. Even if you were a hobby photographer with an endless budget and your own darkroom, there was a physical and temporal limit to the number of pictures you could develop and keep. There was a similar process with the digital cameras: CF cards filled up and you had to transfer the files to your computer, in the process deleting the bad ones in order to save space on your external hard drive.
Then the smartphone happened, and the cloud, and something fundamentally changed.
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If you're young today, your formative years depend on auto-deleted snapchat videos, short-lived memes, stories told in computer games likely unplayable in 30 years (without running rogue game servers and emulating complex proprietary CPUs and GPUs), and whatever happens to flutter by in a feed. I'm curious what the future of reminiscing will look like, even if all of this is saved somehow. So much to sift through, so few tangible artifacts. Even traditional culture is less permanent: we get our music and movies from streaming services, we rent our e-books through EULA:s and consume them on devices controlled by the manufacturer. I do most of this myself - but I was young in a different era and I at least have my stacks of CD:s (including bob hund) tucked away in a safe place, and shelves full of the prose and movies that shaped me.
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And yet, despite these and countless other examples, we still put our faith in digital permanence. We create so many mementos we hardly have time to look at them and then we entrust them all to companies and platforms beyond our control, storing them on machines we don't own running services that could disappear tomorrow. Will Youtube still be there in 50 years? Will Instagram and Dropbox?”
