Thinking About Internet History
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Thinking About Internet History
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Re: Thinking About Internet History
#2I think Archive.org wayback machine and archive.today are going to be extremely valuable resources for "historical research" in the future. I hope they can continue their work via donor funding.
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#3I've been thinking a lot about this too. I was thinking people should start collecting written histories of their recollections of the internet, so future historians can understand the dynamics which shaped their future-present, like the "Great Digg Migration" and the "Tumblr Exodus", etc.
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#4I've been thinking a lot about this too. I was thinking people should start collecting written histories of their recollections of the internet, so future historians can understand the dynamics which shaped their future-present, like the "Great Digg Migration" and the "Tumblr Exodus", etc.
Even with written recollections and archives, it's going to be so difficult to follow. Things just change so quickly. The irony and memes that require you to understand 5 other memes are just going to be so difficult to capture in any meaningful way.
I also think people might not care that much. They'll have an even more sophisticated and oversaturated version of the internet and I'm thinking they'll only really care about a few big highlights from our time. Whatever is contained in the Wikipedia page for Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook will probably be enough for most future people.
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#5I much rather think about real history, there is more to learn from it for the future.
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#6Internet history is one part of the history of technology and you have people already trying to preserve it. Look at all the vintage computer groups that talk about the history of computers and computing. Some even talk about the history of BBS systems. They are the groups already involved and would enjoy the support of others who are interested
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#7I've been thinking a lot about this too. I was thinking people should start collecting written histories of their recollections of the internet, so future historians can understand the dynamics which shaped their future-present, like the "Great Digg Migration" and the "Tumblr Exodus", etc.
Even with written recollections and archives, it's going to be so difficult to follow. Things just change so quickly. The irony and memes that require you to understand 5 other memes are just going to be so difficult to capture in any meaningful way. I also think people might not care that much. They'll have an even more sophisticated and oversaturated version of the internet and I'm thinking they'll only really care…
This is true for most people regarding any part of history. But for any part of history there are those who take a deep interest and want to piece together the minutia of what happened. The limit case of that is an actual trained historian who specializes in that part of history.
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#8I think Archive.org wayback machine and archive.today are going to be extremely valuable resources for "historical research" in the future. I hope they can continue their work via donor funding.
Are there any developments towards helping these efforts out by decentralizing / backing up parts of the archive and way back machine data?
I know torrents are hugely important in helping to decentralize and maintain many important files in academia and such (e.g. NN weights and CERN data) but I think cephfs is also trying to allow decentralized data storage with redundancy.
It seems like there is some solution which can provide a huge data source to be decentralized over arbitrary number of nodes, where each node can hold or back up just some part of the data, and allow for a dashboard view that shows the level of redundancy over all of the data for each of its parts.
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#9I much rather think about real history, there is more to learn from it for the future.
"real"? If it's not archived or documented on the Internet somewhere, did it really happen?
Re: Thinking About Internet History
#10I have come to the conclusion this will best be left to professionals, and a significant amount of oral history has in fact already been collected and curated, by professionals.
I wanted it to be me. The more I thought about it, the less equipped I felt. In some ways, it's the technologists curse, to believe your meta sense informs "the best way" when in fact, you're disrespecting another disciplines praxis assuming your amateur spider sense is the way.