Saturday, March 31, 2012

How To Archive the Internet: The problem of the 21st Century



With new technologies flooding every week, month, and year, we forget that the Internet, the center of the creative technologies, is actually a recent phenomenon. The Internet acts as the most accessible public sphere of our time. ‘Information’ is gathered, created, and stored on the Internet. Emails maybe the simplest form of storage on the Internet, we believe that it is permanent but is it really? The idea of storage changed over the last twenty years. Now, to store often includes a computer, hard drive, or more recently the Internet to store and share on such websites like dropbox for any types of file and vimeo for videos. This concept of storage creates business for many by providing a personal space within the public space. It is never secure and personal. We all know that someone somewhere can access any ‘personal’ space on the Internet.

The problem is that nothing is permanent on the Internet. We are unsure of the fast pace advances of technology. While important information is shared on the Internet as well as personal information, it is hard to figure out what information is actually worth to archive. Social networking has became a way of living. Facebook, twitter, tumblr, and more are what people evolve around. While these methods of sharing information embraces the freedom of speech to its maximum and thrives to makes changes, create social movements, making it seem like they can actually make changes. However, people need to understand that everything is being controlled on the Internet by some kind of authority, which works against the spirit of the public sphere and what individuals do on the Internet. The topic of archiving has not been addressed although national and official archives attempt to store the Internet in someway. How to archive and what to archive remain as a problem of the 21st century has not yet gained enough attention due to the public’s fixation on the ‘cool’ social networking and remain as a problem that many are unaware of.

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