| Subject: | To preserve is to affect |
| Date: | Mon, 09 Nov 1998 08:07 |
| Author: | Naief Yehya [nyehya@erols.com] |
| Reply To: | forum1@hkw.kbx.de |
One of the main concerns of Bladerunner's (Ridley Scott, '82) Nexus 6 replicants is the despair they feel, not because they are mortal, but because they know their memories and experiences will disappear without leaving any legacy or heritage. One of the first consequences of acquiring a conscience is the need to extend the influence of each individual and the community, the urge to create a culture. Today, some of the people who work, rely and enjoy the Internet feel the need to preserve its contents, especially those sites considered particularly valuable because of their cultural or historical significance. Nevertheless, the Net is first and foremost a fluid medium, with a vitality that depends on it's liquid-like quality. Most of the industry people do not care much for the past because they consider the Net to be about the future and nothing in the web is built to last forever. Obviously, Olu Oguibe has a much broader vision of the Internet and feels that Internet culture should be saved from vanishing and protected from involuntary and deliberate censors.
I perceive that the problem of keeping the content of the Net in some kind of stable files is a process that will not only affect the form but also the content itself. I think of the web "snapshots" created by alexa.com or afterlife.org, which preserve sites after the decease of their creators or when their administrators can't keep them up anymore.
Other companies and individuals are committed to preserving the web in a frozen state. If the medium is (still) the message (as McLuhan established), it is clear that moving content from cyberspace to a stable and safe environment will alter it inevitably.
I agree with Oguibe, the Internet is intrinsically fragile and eventually unreliable, and it has to deal with ignorance and hundreds of colluding agendas. But if we create a mechanism to save some of it's contents, we will have to discriminate and will impose our own agenda for the preservation of information.
naief yehya
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