And of course the flipside of disappearing websites is the knowledge vacuum of non-digitised media. Will future academics be able to explore not just physical books, but non-digitised pamphlets, flyers, fanzines, programmes, magazines, private letters and so on – even if these haven't been thrown away by overzealous libraries?
I had a similar thought a few weeks ago in a club. It was full of a great crowd dancing to non-mainstream music.As I looked around I suddenly had the thought that not only will the events and feelings of this experience be lost, so will everyone here and everything they know, one day, hopefully not too soon,
However, it will happen, most of it undocumented, skills, knowledge, insights, emotions and everything else that we are comprised of. It seems an obvious thing to say, as we are all temporary visitors to this life, and 99.99% will be forgotten completely in just a few generations.
Maybe in time it will be possible to download people’s minds to be kept and made use of. In the interim, it’s almost impossible to imagine the scale of knowledge that has left the world when people’s lives end.
Hope that is not too morbid an outlook, and I’m sure many deeper thinkers than I have articulated it better previously.
And of course the flipside of disappearing websites is the knowledge vacuum of non-digitised media. Will future academics be able to explore not just physical books, but non-digitised pamphlets, flyers, fanzines, programmes, magazines, private letters and so on – even if these haven't been thrown away by overzealous libraries?
I had a similar thought a few weeks ago in a club. It was full of a great crowd dancing to non-mainstream music.As I looked around I suddenly had the thought that not only will the events and feelings of this experience be lost, so will everyone here and everything they know, one day, hopefully not too soon,
However, it will happen, most of it undocumented, skills, knowledge, insights, emotions and everything else that we are comprised of. It seems an obvious thing to say, as we are all temporary visitors to this life, and 99.99% will be forgotten completely in just a few generations.
Maybe in time it will be possible to download people’s minds to be kept and made use of. In the interim, it’s almost impossible to imagine the scale of knowledge that has left the world when people’s lives end.
Hope that is not too morbid an outlook, and I’m sure many deeper thinkers than I have articulated it better previously.
Brilliant, thanks Mark.