Posted on 10/27/2009 11:17:54 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
Sorry, folks, but all you techies just cannot convince me that the Internet is as permanent as a book. The information in books can have several thousands of years of life. But what of the Internet? In many cases info on the Internet is not even around for mere decades. A recent story in the L.A. Times about the now defunct web platform GeoCities is a perfect example of what I am talking about.
Back in the mid 1990s in the early days of the web, when blogs had yet to get their eventual sobriquet, when there were no programs that assisted you to create the html code to create a web page, GeoCities was launched to great acclaim. It become one of the hottest platforms on the web and GeoCities sites were ubiquitous.
But as of today, October 26, 2009, GeoCities is no more. Its current owner, Yahoo, has shuttered the site taking offline millions of webpages all with the flip of a switch. And where did they go? Where did all that information, all that effort, all the history, all that social ephemera... where did it all go? It went nowhere, it went up in smoke, it went bye-bye.
That's right, it is all gone. As if it never existed...
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
If you see info you absolutely want to see later, it’s best to snag a copy for local storage.
My computer has this little box thingie on it that if I click it, paper with the printed image of everything on my screen comes out of a plastic box in another room. I save those pieces of paper for future reference. I only click on the box thingie to capture things I really, really don’t want to lose track of.
The internet is far less permanent... especially if it concerns facts that are embarrassing to the current crop of commies in the White House.
> What say you tech-heads?
I’ll ask Manbearpig. He invented it.
wayback machine!
The idea is that you go into a shop in the mall, you choose a leather cover -- maybe green leather, since the book you want is "Leaves of Grass" by Whitman. You choose gold lettering and a nice font for the cover. Then you select one of the paper choices. Perhaps a high rag content sheet, with a mellow ivory tint. Next is font size (how good are your eyes?) and a typeface that seems pleasing to you. Helvetica? San Serif? Whatever you like. After making your choices, you pay and walk out of the store to do some shopping.
You come back in half an hour, and a brand-new custom-made book is waiting for you. Perhaps you will have a book collection in which every book follows the same template -- or perhaps your collection will contain very individual books of wildly divergent styles. Who knows?
With some good software, access to digital copies of books, a very high-quality printer, and a machine for covers and sticking, you could turn out custom books pretty rapidly.
I think people would pay for the service. Print 'em on acid-free paper and they will last a very long time.
Apparently thi “expert” never heard of the wayback machine! (everything is archived)
I copied my Geocities pages to a disc, but as of this morning, they’re still available on the Geocities site.
The Internet is not a big truck...
That’s actually a brilliant idea. That way books aren’t wasted being printed up and then not sold, therefore wasting material. All you have to do is pay the fee for what the book would cost and the other stuff you mentioned. Great idea.
How about that . . . the internet can service the memory hole in ways Orwell could scarecely have imagined.
Wow...I have one of those little box thingies too. And it prints out data on paper just like your’s does. Amazing!!!
Really. It’s way cool. I have a whole file cabinet full of those pieces of paper I have saved. I love that box thingie.
Google’s already got it. I read an article about it the other day. 300 page book in 5 minutes for 8 bucks.
The link takes me to a different article and I can’t seem the find the one that is referenced here.
Thanks. I had not realized that google books offered a printing feature. Cool!
Here’s the link I read—Espresso Machine.
Down the memory hole!
A thousand years for a book? No. Nearly all books published are gone after a 100 years, very few older than that. Good question as to what was the half-life of a book published in each decade of the last millennium.
Books age. Unless republished, they rot, get eaten, burnt, or otherwise become dust. Especially modern books on cheaper short lived paper. Books have to be cherished to be kept — that costs money. Proper safe storage costs money. And even when a library hold very old books — who reads them?
For example there are some histories of New Holland, including auto-biographies and personal journals, in Dutch, unread almost, in Dutch libraries — why should a Dutchman care about the history of America?
Yet some ancestry researcher or historian might trouble to do so — who then would trouble to read out of date books on science or geography of the time? Or religious tracts. compiled sermons, general stories and journals that are not of historical interest? Books have a short lifetime.
The net, digital storage, computers are mediums that allow almost costless, instantaneous copying, wide search, indexing, metrics.
What is the measure of the reach of a some work — in any media? How many people are effected, and how deeply? What is the measure?
The first time I tried clicking on this topic, I got a 404 error.
And I didn’t check to see if someone thought of that joke first.
You are just wrong. I have several books in my collection that are over 100 years old.
Still, it’s nice that you ignored the whole point. Let’s say you are right and a book last 100 years. That seems bout 80 years longer than EVERYTHING on GeoCities! The Internet STILL loses!
Give me a book over the Internet for permanace of record still to this day.
Lastly, we have to realize that everything man does eventually goes away. My contention is that books last longer than the Internet no matter how you look at it.
You are just wrong. I have several books in my collection that are over 100 years old.
Still, it’s nice that you ignored the whole point. Let’s say you are right and a book last 100 years. That seems bout 80 years longer than EVERYTHING on GeoCities! The Internet STILL loses!
Give me a book over the Internet for permanace of record still to this day.
Lastly, we have to realize that everything man does eventually goes away. The contention is that books last longer than the Internet no matter how you look at it.
I have a shelf right above with well over a dozen books over one hundred years old. However they are lonely survivors of the printing and bindery run that made them.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are about 2K years old — very few fragments of the tens of thousands of scrolls and bindered books that once existed in that time.
The only reason that the Torah, and the Bible are intact is not by any one document, but due to a most careful copying process that constantly creates exacting copies. In the Jewish tradition the Masoretic scribes — the copying of a Torah scroll is a religious service of a sort. In the Christian tradition — the monks of the Middle Ages, some of them copyists of texts illustrated in the most beautiful manner. Such copyist traditions exist also in the Oriental religions.
Yet it is never by one book, or parchment or stone which is the keeper of the longterm storage of human knowledge — it is a rigorous copyist tradition — in written material and in spoken. Indeed as languages adapt and change over time, even the most exacting of copyings can not vouchsafe the retention of meaning. The knowledge keepers must also be able to keep meaning in words and idioms long forgotten by means of adjunct, parallel chains of exposition and explanation, constantly adapted for currency.
Digital media can easily be copied, and the amount of textual and graphic information they can carry is huge. Thus digital media will out survive books, yet only if the copyist and adjunct traditions are maintained from generation to generation.
You might be right. But I am skeptical, to say the least.
Hear, hear.
I can read a book from the 16th century.
I have a bag full of 3 1/2” diskettes that I can’t access because the computer that could read them is now obsolete.
And the Wayback Machine (archive.org) doesn’t archive EVERYTHING. TheSpark and its lovely zaniness are lost in the mists of time, never to be recovered completely.
And don’t get me started on USENET. DejaNews had a lot of newgroup postings from way back when, then sold its archives to Google (Google Groups), which apparently did some severe digital pruning.
THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!
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