Comments on: The Black Hole: How the Web devours history

By: sweeny

sweeny — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:01:34 +0000

eric is justified in his concerns that
mega-corporations, such as ‘enron’ are able to irretrievably alter history by deleting their brushstrokes.

what, I find, even more alarming is the richness, colour and tapestry of ’80s to 2009 and beyond has been lost to
civilisation with the rise and rise of digital photography. the percentage of work that reaches the finished, hard copy (onto photographic paper) is at an historical low. this equates to more photos being taken, then at any time in the history of our civilisation, (for want of a better word[uncivilisation, perhaps]) but less photos being produced to the final medium.

all these spurious friends’ shots stored on camera memories, uploaded onto equally random pc memory’s results in a massive black hole in our collective consciousness in this particularly vulgar and turbulent epoch.

well crafted footage and documentation of current species, as they decline into extinction, may not be available and/or accessible, and man will be left with shakey artists’ sketches to reminisce and ponder.

when the last animal of the wild has alighted the
spirit of Man will
pale to a
blue moon…
will they leave a toa for our solace.

toa= a marker left by departing
indigenous Australian
tribes to indicate the
direction in whence they
had departed.eg.feather

By: honico

honico — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:28:42 +0000

One word:

Alexandria.

The greatest of all libraries stood more than 700 years then, burned. While much of was the collective history, knowledge -it was that which was…appropriated…from other collections, increasing its uniqueness. It was called it ‘laying claim’ once a place was over ran; to collect for this Great Library. Much like Baghdad, it’s tradition.

Point: This one vaporized into smoke however, and with it went all the great collections; all the one-offs. It seems eerily similar to a digital age where the knowledge gets dropped, corrupted so easily.

honico//

By: amattei2000

amattei2000 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:25:06 +0000

some humble ideas:
Dont forget your past or you will have to repeat it.

No one says the internet is an infallible information storage facility but it is an information storage facility.
all the info is not true? we know, we learned that reading books on libraries and paying attention to all kinds of news and politics.

Who tells the story? the one who won the war? honestly i prefer to read the multiple points of views of diferent people.

We do have the technology to save all that information and a lot more, the thing is some still very powerfull people have no interest in thtat.

we the people are the keepers, of all history google other search engines and internet are just tools.

By: Walter Roth

Walter Roth — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:56:18 +0000

There is one project that is attempting plug a hole in the “leaky vessel for historical preservation”: the Wayback Machine on http://www.archive.org

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Ar chive#Wayback_Machine

By: Andrea

Andrea — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:46:48 +0000

We are the gatekeepers. Archive, collect, reproduce and distribute.

By: Simon Smelt

Simon Smelt — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:36:32 +0000

Stuff gets misplaced.
Stuff gets conveniently altered
Stuff gets misplaced
Inconvenient stuff gets dumped
Irrelevant stuff makes the relevant stuff hard to spot.
Over time, hard to distinguish truth from fiction or lies.

Sounds like the human mind.

By: boredwell

boredwell — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:05:17 +0000

Most true, Susan Feldman. Often a combination of keywords is needed to find the information. Though this is no guarantee, either, since one might discover the information doesn’t answer all the question sought after. The biggest problem, as a researcher, is this: facts varying from site to site. Even government agencies provide differing information on the same topic especially when it comes to number, statistics, dates. This forces one to scrounge around in order to find enough information that corresponds as closely as possible with the with the others. Therefore, information is tabulated by means and averages. Never accept the face value of the written word until corroborated by more than three-my criterion-other sites. “History is not what has happened,” Julian Barnes warns in A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10 1/2 CHAPTERS, “it’s what historians tell us.”

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:16:51 +0000

and no metion of http://archive.org, which exists to solve this problem?

By: Shii

Shii — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:21:07 +0000

The author has it backwards, there is now more information available than ever before. In fact there is too much information and the loss of some of it is both inevitable and not all that damaging to civilization.

By: Ian Kemmish

Ian Kemmish — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:13:17 +0000

I don’t see what’s new. Receivers have always and still do send out paper copies of the affairs of the businesses they wind up to interested parties, but I have always shredded these after keeping them became pointless, and I imagine most other shareholders and creditors do too.

The author’s point about Enron, Parmalat and Stanford appears to be that the Web does things a bit better than paper archives, but not by very much. Well, nothing’s perfect, and only journalists ever pretended that the Web was going to be…..