What happens to all of this?

Think about how many posts you have made since you started posting on a connected computer. For me this goes back to Compuserve in the 80s. Then came GEnie. Then Prodigy. Then PC-Link. Then AOL.

Then of course it exploded across the web in so many places I can't remember where my ramblings might be or what name I was using.

So what happens to all of this information? Is there any way for someone to research material going back to the early 80s? Can we still review a recipe forum? Or a discussion about upshifting a modem from 300 baud to 450 baud once connected?

What about all those deep, profound postings whilst tripping and listening to Depeche Mode? Will anyone ever be able to sift through all of that and figure out what any of us were all about? Think of it as digital archaeology.

Imagine all the great ideas that we can't retrieve because the BBS they were posted on vanished with the owner's storage unit. Now consider how many web sites are no longer there.

Are we all just posting into a useless, bottomless bit bucket?

 

Dicks? Plural?

Really though, I wasn't concerned with the ramifications of what people post. Only with the fragile nature of digital communications in general. The general thinking is that "nothing goes away on the internet", but I don't think that is entirely true. Especially when I consider how many pre-internet services are no longer around to be perused.

 

My tits and ass are immortalised on the internet.

 

But what if I only wanted to know what John Dennis thought of the new Eve 6 album from back in 96, will his review still be available somewhere in the world?

 

That's your folly, you're comparing pre-internet to the internet.

With cloud storage, external storage, etc. if someone is really intent on keeping their posts, blogs/vlogs, data, etc. they can. Although they may have to migrate the data to different sites or something.

I don't think most people are concerned with the legacy of their standard message board post tho.

 

Sweet, Sweet pixels... I didn't see your tits actually.

 

Nobody sees them if they call them that. I can call them that, you'll want to call them breasts.

 

i think most of the stuff on the internet just goes away when it goes away. yes, it's possible for someone to save any of it. but i would guess 99.9999% of the stuff that has been on the internet, nobody bothered to save.

but i could be wrong, my computer programming skills are at about a first grade level so i'm really not the one to ask.

you are obviously encouraged to immortalize your breasts anytime you want.

 

I know, I have 100% ratings on my account galleries too. No thumbs down.

 

I'll call them that when I see them carbon based rather than silicon based.

 

I started off with Windows 3.1 on my 286 back in 92’

My best and most profound work was arguing cases on the Court TV message boards and battling trolls on B.E.T.

What happened to all of that data? My guess a high-speed crash on the information superhighway

 

yeah, my best work was 10+ years ago too. aging's a bitch.

 

You think I have fakes? Lol

 

archived on magnetic cylinders locked under ground. lots of it on the ethernet fixed wire for direct light speed access ..

If I didnt want to be on the internet. I wouldnt be on the internet..

 

the long and the short of it, is no guarantee either way, that any block of content, will either remain for as long as there is an internet, or evaporate like a snow man in july.

and what about the internet itself, or life on earth, or at least human life on earth? this too is indeterminate.

it would be nice to dream about servers, multiply redundant and mutually providing each other with physical maintainence, floating around in legrangian orbits.
but until that happens, they may or may not ever come to be.

but if they are, when they are, then whatever humanity does to itself, whether by intent or neglect, THEN MAYBE nothing will go away,

but still maybe, because if 'the city of the mind' were intelligent enough to do that, it might just on its own,
decide to purge, what to its own taste, it considered crap.

 

Exactly. With some of the places I have worked their network data is only backed up for a finite period, usually 7 years. Then it's truncated into nowhere. Paper records last longer. If I go to an IT guy and say I need a version of a record from 3 years ago to be pulled from the backup, he won't be getting back to me anytime soon. It would require a restoration of the office data for an entire day on the development server.

While that's a localized example, how would anyone perform such a forensic operation on the internet? I can't buy the idea that the whole thing gets backed up and yet, my Yahoo mail goes back to 2005. Email used to be my backup system for important stuff. So I would say it's not a universal construct that one can go back and grab anything from a time slot on the internet. Just backing up a few minutes from the entire planet would be dreadfully expensive.

In a century will people even want to know what we were yammering about? It would be like searching through 19th century records to piece together the life of someone using their bank drafts, letters and legal paperwork. People have done exactly that. But today's data is far more voluminous and fragile at the same time. Imagine when someone finally writes the end-of-it-all virus that manages to crash the whole internet. It took years to get going in the first place. I remember watching it take form.

I remember naively thinking we'd have a massive encyclopedia that was absolutely accurate and would usher in a new wave of human creativity and advancement. While some of that has certainly come true, I never considered the rest of it. I never thought it would be a massive porn dispensary. And I never thought people would use it to spread lies, hatred and crime. Is all of that being backed up to "The Cloud" (a cute term for global server farms, anchored tightly to the ground)?

Disk drives don't have an infinite life after all. They are nothing more than a collection of very weak magnetic zones. Solid state memory doesn't get far when the power goes out. And I haven't seen magnetic bubble memory since the early 80s (it was pretty cool though, it could be removed and replaced without losing any data). I've heard some rumblings about biologic memory systems, but biology gets sick and dies, so I don't know what will come of that.

Perhaps what we'll do is encode all of the data into a particle beam and aim it where the earth will be in a century. That way our backup shoots through space at sub-light speed and intersects people who aren't even here yet. What will they think of our chat logs, porn links and ghetto bong diagrams?

 

There are a lot of posts, both on here and on other forums, that I would be happy to see disappear into the void.

 

Sometimes I feel like I want to know what happened to my American internet friends of 2001. Last time I did a search for random names I remembered I found some Geocities sites we used to make. Learning basic HTML to customize what was basically our own version of a myspace/facebook/snapwhatever

Anyway I never managed to track any of them down.

 

Imagine if one of you were one of them...!

 

It would be interesting to see what info lasts long enough to see the next millennium. What if an emp bomb exploded across the world, we could have our second dark ages.

 

When someone says, "you are the last person on my list I would want to hurt", there are two things to consider.

They already have a list, and you are on it.

 

"where's the pubic hair?"

also: "i don't know why we aren't deformed; people 100 years ago only had sex with their siblings."