Durable Ephemerality

July 28th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

Jeff Rothenberg once said “Digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first.” This is basis of an interesting debate between New York Times writer Jeffrey Rosen who recently published “The End of Forgetting,” and Scott Rosenberg’s rebuttal on his blog. (Excerpt from Rosenberg below)

But Rosen is too busy hatching plans for “expire dates” on social-network postings and other artificial-forgetting schemes to give his head the Janus-turn his subject demands. The idea that the Web has a long memory is hardly new (here’s J.D. Lasica’s piece on how “The Web Never Forgets” from 1998). But there is a flipside to this notion: Information online can be fragile and fleeting, as well. There is an entropic quality to everything that is shared online. Data gets lost; servers die; databases are corrupted; formats fall into disuse; storage media deteriorate; backups fail.

Rosen’s piece along with new projects such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere project are reactions to a feeling that we are losing privacy in the digital age. These reactions have an unfortunate side effect however – if we encrypt or auto delete our data, we will lose it forever.

Privacy and security concerns generally have a short half life. While you might not want your drunk college photos to be a part of a future employers decision making criteria, you will certainly lament losing all your chilhood photos by the time you are 60. If we lost the treasure trove of human to human interactions that is now being recorded on the web it would truly be a tragedy. Imagine how much more we would know about ancient Rome, Egypt, or the Mayan culture if we could sift through their Facebook logs…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 02010 at 3:05 am and is filed under Digital Dark Age.

jason

Last night’s Long Short:
New York invasion by 8-bits creatures
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxX_bVluflo&feature=related
Gwern0

> Rosen’s piece along with new projects such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere project are reactions to a feeling that we are losing privacy in the digital age. These reactions have an unfortunate side effect however – if we encrypt or auto delete our data, we will lose it forever.

Bad example. How on earth does encrypting traffic on the wire damage preservation projects? The same content arrives at the end and is rendered in the browser.

(Things that really damage preservation are things like Web 2.0 – pervasive use of JavaScript and dynamic elements mean that projects like the Internet Archive simply don't have anything to archive, or if they do, it's difficult-to-impossible to, years/decades later, render them sensibly. The Internet Archive can handle even frame-based webpages well, but I have yet to pull up a JS-heavy website worth a damn in it.)
Zander

I fully agree that the more interactive and database driven web applications are going to be some of the most impenetrable. And I really like HTTPS everywhere as an idea as well as EFF as an org. I do believe though that any level of encryption creates a potential archival problem. My bet is that the studios that institute DVD movie and iTunes copy protection would make a similar “on the wire” argument since the end user still gets their movie or song right?

But those schemes, and the others in the future, will make archiving and recreating traffic patterns etc more difficult. In the case of the HTTPS I think it will be the latter, learning the ways different types of net traffic moves, that will be lost to archiving. Whole companies have been made on mining that relational and pattern data – Google for one, and Alexa Internet for another (Alexa was the for-profit end of Internet Archive)
Karino

We should also note that the drunken college students in the FB photos will not only be future employees but future employers as well. Having chosen to make their private lives more public than any other generation I think they will be able to overlook minor indiscretions in their perspective work force. Same with tattoos and ear extenders, piercings, etc. It's sort of social evolution.

Durable Ephemerality

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