Hacker News Reader

Comment by Claudus | Hacker News Reader

Digital media is going to have a very interesting effect on future generations. Imagine what it would be like if you could watch videos, view thousands of pictures, and read a detailed account of your ancestors actions for generations before you.

We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly, history before the digital age will fade away, much like oral history (before written history) has for us.

View on HN

> We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly

... but we don't know yet if all the data that we create will still be around in a few generations, and it's far from obvious to me. It seems unlikely to me that the platforms we use today will still be around at this time, and my guess is that there won't be a sufficient incentive to migrate legacy data from one platform to the other (remember Geocities?). Managing the digital memories of the living is a profitable business, but managing that of the dead might not be.

If future generations judge me based on what I post publicly online (and that includes Facebook), they will get a very superficial picture of me because I'm careful to not post more. Perhaps I should keep a diary.

History will be a lot easier, which is good, less myths is always good. But maybe it will allow our brains to be lazy since there's no more missing link to solve.

I don't think history before the digital age will fade away any more than it already has, thanks to the likes of the Internet Archive and Wikipedia.

We're talking about Facebook. Even if you mark something as totally public, the Archive still can't crawl it. Facebook is not a part of the public Internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com