I'm interested in history, moreover I'm fascinated by how civilisations forget things that are always around us, for example why have we forgotten what Stonehenge was built for or why we have to guess at Roman ruins.
We have a natural tendency to collectively forget that which is mundane around us, for example the broken axe which the caveman throws out is now in a museum.
As we live in a digital world what will future generations find interesting with us?
We think we are lucky that everything seems to be recorded digitally and therefore preserved. But is it?
At The British Institute for Learning and Development we are about to launch a new website. But what of our old one, it'll be lost for ever. That is a small part of our collective history, gone for ever.
And what of companies who close, people who die, what happens when we stop paying our web hosts? What happens to those websites. Some companies only have a web presence and no shop front, what will we know of them in the future.
In years to come what will they find of the 21st century? Will USB keys with random documents on them be our digital legacy?
We press forward with our digital technology but the future generations will have to piece together our history the same as we do, but rather than searching for hand tools it'll be USB keys and Hard drives that will be searched for.
No comments:
Post a Comment