mediated history

Roy Rosenzweig’s post reminds me of “web art.”  He talks about the changes the internet has gone through since the mid 90s, how the technology of digital data might not be compatible with developing technology, and how this is already a problem with digital works from the 80s.  All the technological reasons aside, there are also copyright issues that could destroy a large chunk of our history from the early digital time period, since that tech needs to be addressed now, but under current copyright laws we can;t touch it for awhile and all those records go to the next of kin.  Whenever I read articles about preserving digital records, I always feel bad for the small amount of historians compared to the GIANT amounts of data created on the internet.  I can’t even imagine trying to look through message boards or forums of a certain group to look for information.  The amount of content created on one message board a day can be overwhelming, having all that data about 20 years worth of digital content would take a lifetime to look through; trying to preserve all this data and create better search tools to look through it seems exhausting.

The part in Rosenzwieg’s article about the September 11th attacks and the Bert is Evil crossover was pretty cool, I know that it was supposed to highlight how information can be deleted so easily in the digital age, but I think it also highlights how the digital medium allows for spinoff terms to be created. If you are trying to look up a certain term from a certain age on the internet, yo have to realize that the internet is a plane on it’s own.  Wikipedia had the problem of it’s niche and cultural articles popping up when looking for historical information, and the internet is definitely going to have this problem when people look up certain terms.  In the future, when people try to look up something like the Olympics, they are going to get a lot of hits for cultural content, like the “McKayla is not impressed” image macro or terms like that that have a very strong presence on the internet.

The 9-11 memorial is a weird historical site that is a history of an event.  The archive has all these strange Photoshop pictures, personal stories, and art submitted to create a history of the event, but not in a traditional way.  So many different faucets relating to 9-11 are covered on the site, but the personal information is pretty goofy. The testimonials are good to have but it almost seems like they tried to compile as much data they could without really seeing if it was relevant or useful.  The documents, timelines and maps are straightforward and the usefulness of those documents is pretty clear, but the images an art feels like trying to get meaning out of a Google image search.

~ by aledere1 on November 19, 2012 .