2009-03-10

Archeology

James Allen said something very interesting:
Someone yesterday said that I got it wrong about Honda and Michael Schumacher back in January. Sure, it did not work out, but they were talking… In the old days stories like that ended up being wrapped around fish and chips after 12 hours. In the modern age they are carved forever into the ether.
(Emphasis mine.)

It is interesting how the Internet appears somehow more permanent than some of the media which has gone before it. Posts made ten years ago are almost as findable as posts made today; our collective history is available to everyone as never before. The history can be accessed in as raw or as filtered a format as you'd like.

True, in 200 years it is likely that practically none of it will remain, and as a resource for the future it is likely lacking; archeologists won't be able to resurrect a RAID group from a single recovered drive. But it is interesting that our ability to recover the near past from internet activity is changing how we think about permanence.