4.27.2008
on the nature of "blogs"...
Right now, our computers are touching, kind of. I typed into my computer and then sent the information through the telephone wires above the street, presumably to some box, owned by the company that hosts "blogger" and no doubt many others, where it was stored to be accessed by anyone who happen to type in the appropriate code to view this particular blog, which means that as you read this now, you too are (or were) connected to that storage box. What are these boxes, how many of them are there? Will there one day be fields of them, filled with the written history of people's opinions of the 21st century? Or maybe we'll store them vertically, underground. An elevator shaft of hard-drives, storing meticulously every word written by anyone with the most basic computer skills, in perpetuity. Or maybe we'll erase some, save space, after a time limit. Keep us relevent. Every hundred years, maybe less. Or maybe someone will decide, maybe it'll cost money to store information, or maybe, just maybe, everything and more, at the break neck speed of 6 billion people typing away at keyboards, all of it, stored in some new smaller hard-drive. Catalouged by date, place, and genre. Millions of opinions. Millions of individual opinions. And so, looking at one of these boxes, hundreds of years from now, having known nothing of the time before your own life, what could be learned?
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2 comments:
take the blue pill, neo.
An interesting thought, #15. I was talking to a web developer recently who commented that most early web page designs were simply overwritten with new code and not archived. As a result, millions of pages of web graphics, early HTML code, animations and data are just gone. It reminded me of reusing film stock in the early days of cinema and how 1000's of silent films vanished as a result. A larger issue worthy of consideration might be how this tidal wave of contemporary personal musings, most of it bogus nattering by bored imbeciles about minutia and bicycles, might be collated and used down the road? Will it have any future value? Will August Low become the center for some future schools of thought in the mold of Plato, Descartes and Hegel, with students pouring over his cryptic scripts uttering Fuck You! as a form of greeting to one another? Who knows? We’ll all be dead by then, the cold hand of fate casting us as mere disciples, obscured in antiquity by the long shadow of The Great McCombty, actor… scribe… philosopher… king.
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