We spend so much of our
lives online, yet the internet has many properties foreign to
anything else in real life.
In the physical world,
things decay. Rocks wear down, all living things die, and memory is
transient. In stark contrast, data posted online may very well be
there forever. A concrete example being InvisionFree websites, a free
web hosting service, whose websites have no expiration. They aren't
even tied to real hardware, as if one server fails, another will take
over in its place.
The way people interact
online doesn't always represent these differences between the real
and virtual worlds. When a secret is told in real life, after a long
time, it will be forgotten. On the internet, however, this secret
will be logged and archived. When people can reference the secrets
they have been told, they are not so easily forgotten. This combined
with social networking sites like Facebook, means that not only are
secrets not forgotten, but they are easier then ever to share.
Having a secret or website
on the web, however, does not mean anyone knows it is there. For a
very long time, unless you knew the URL, you couldn't visit a
website. Even with the advent of Google and other search engines,
wading through the myriads of webpages makes an individual hard to
find, excluding the most popular of websites. In addition to this, a
large percentage of websites aren't even indexed by Google, meaning
that any amount of searching will yield no result; to visit the
website requires the URL.
This blog, will likely
remain online for at least 10 years, but how many people will have
read it in that intervening time depends entirely on how many people
have the physical URL.
2 comments:
"Rocks wear down, all living things die, and memory is transient. In stark contrast, data posted online may very well be there forever."
This made me do a double-take. I couldn't disagree more.
Consider this: Our main resource, when exploring ancient and dead civilizations, comes from their writings. When the people are dead and gone, their writing can survive for centuries without them to care for it.
'In stark contrast,' however, digital media is INCREDIBLY transient. You're trying to compare a slab of rock or clay to tiny variations in optical ribbon or microchips. Solid state memory actually degrades significantly with every USE, as compared to papyrus or even animal skin, which can last thousands of years under comparatively harsh conditions.
I do not disagree with your main point, however, I simply think that the CAUSE of that phenomenon is misplaced. The internet is by no means permanent, and it's important for our generation to remember that, but it IS incredibly complex. Servers get replaced and moved, information copied and altered constantly, and mostly without our knowledge. So when you say that a secret on the internet is difficult to get rid of or destroy, I feel it is important that we keep in mind the difference between 'difficult to destroy' and 'difficult to access.'
I think the assumption here is that, since we're making a separation between the physical world and the internet, the corporeal bits of the latter are ignored. However, you do bring up a good point. What will future societies think of ours as they search through our rubble centuries after our collapse? What information will survive? What will they think of all those awful Facebook statuses?
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