Contrary to oft-repeated wisdom, the internet isnโt written in ink. Physical ink on paper is often a far better method for carrying data forward into the future. Manuscripts that are hundreds and even thousands of years old are still with us, and still being discovered every day. Will the same be true of our own data a hundred years from now?
Physical collections benefit from their form: by taking up space in the real world they demand attention and care. Digital collections more easily fall into the trap of โout of site, out of mindโ. How many online services have you signed up for, added data to over time, and then later forgotten about? How much of our data, the traces of our lives online, are permanently lost?
Itโs amazing how fragile weโve let our data become.
Managing our data has only gotten more difficult as personal computing has gotten more sophisticated. So much of our digital lives have moved from our machines and into the cloud. Our documents, photos, and music used to exist on our devices where they could be backed up and preserved, but now they exist more and more in privately-owned corporate silos.
Our computers should be databases! We should be able to script them, access them using browser APIs, browse them via a first party application, etc. They should accrue data and knowledge over the course of our lifetimes, becoming more useful as we use them. They should be ours, something we can control and back up and preserve long after weโre gone.
All of our emails, recipes, playlists, text messages, Letterboxd reviews, TikTok likes, documents, music, photos, browser histories, favorite essays, ebooks, PDFs, and anything else you can imagine should be something we can own, organize, and eventually leave behind for those that come after us. An archive for each of us.
From We could all be archivists | Chase McCoy
I couldnt agree more with all its said in this post. I was highlighting almost all paragraphs.
