Then Internet Archive.html
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Tom Wujec's 10 minute demonstration of the astrolabe illustrates an important point. Know "something," like what time it is, even if that something is hugely useful, isn't itself, education. Putting other things together that help us arrive and understand the "something" we have come to know is where real education, and innovation, happen. Libraries try to store all these things and education tries to use them productively. Collecting all the information in the world for everyone to access is a tall order. But the Internet Archive says it can be done. It’s not Google and it’s not the NSA and it’s not Facebook. What makes it unique is that it’s a non-profit that has as its mission, “universal access to all knowledge.” It argues that every culture has made an effort to record, in one form or another, its own cultural artifacts. Some cultures pass down stories from memory. Some collect artifacts in libraries. Some establish formal institutions like religions and schools. But everyone wants to know where they came from. Since more and more of our culture is express in digital form, then a new way of archiving it has to be established. There is a terrible irony in all this and we’ll talk about it in future modules. But it seems that the easier it is to collect and store our cultural archives, the less people seem to want to do it. People can easily access and read an enormous amount of material, much more than ever before. But people read less and less. |
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| The internet archive is partly about making it possible to access all this. But it’s also about storing it. In addition to archiving books, videos and images, it took on the task of archiving the entire internet and making it available through the Pick a website such as cnn.com. Enter it into the Wayback Machine. Pick a date like 2001 and a date like September 11. It will return the webpage as it looked on that day, archived forever, or so the Internet Archive hopes. |  |
| This is a little like the re-discovery of the Library of Toledo only much, much, much bigger. Can you imagine the implications of, not just the collection of everything that’s been said, but the cataloging of it all in such a way that it’s easy to find, copy and use. Some of it is small potatoes. You can find my old resumes at daeuber.com. I can’t get rid of them and, if I had a more interesting past, I’d be worried. But the point is, nothing that’s said can ever be forgotten ever again. And that’s been the way we have always filtered our histories, sanitized our past and written our myths. What will the future look like if we can retrieve our past so easily? |
