Thoughts about cyberspace
You know, something just occurred to me. Something that struck me after spending an evening browsing through blogs and arguing about politics in a forum, as I watched the interaction of so many people in so little time. And reading other's journals as well, trying to find in them the common lowest denominator that drives all of them/us to pack up our experiences, brainwaves, delusions and inner thoughts and send them to a place that doesn't exist.
No wait, it's really not that banàle. At least not all of it.
Up to that it's pretty everyday stuff, right? Information age is hardly news for anyone under sixty, and very close to everyday thing for large, large numbers of people. But here's the little short-circuiting parallel: we have learned about our ancestors, about ancient civilizations and cultures from things from the past, from the Pyramids, from everything that now resides in Museums all over the world, from fossils, bodies embalmed in ice, pretty much anything we could guess- or carbon-date. Physical stuff, objects we could read, touch, climb, examine, hold in our hands, excavate, discover.
Some people don't use paper diaries anymore, but gladly give their innermost thoughts to a computer, somehow feeling that only like that they're going to be as fresh as the first time they jotted it down, untouched by time, no worn pages, no frayed edges, no spilled liquids or accidental fires (happened to me once, the damn thing went up in flames in seconds).
What if, by any reason, all of what is now stored into computers and the Information Age infrastructure just vanishes overnight? What would the reaction be in not two days but, say, two hundreds? What could an archeologist possibly guess out of a hole in human history where everyone just happened to sit and stare at something a lot? What if he or she had nothing to guess what we ate or how we lived from, what we thought and how we perceived our lives?
A lot of people I talked with about this feel that this kind of infrastructure is safer and stronger than any traditional means of data storage, and they're surely right as the number of activites brought to and made new by computer technology is growing everyday.
But isn't it going to be the first thing to utterly vanish in case something goes horribly wrong somehow?
I wonder.
Made a very funny morning program today, had a great time and also managed to keep shit music out of the broadcast as I possibly could. Giovanni Elia, freelance airwaves cleaner at your service.
Time to go to bed before I let this kind of things take over my hands and transfer themselves on the journal to haunt me forever (a.k.a. the "The fuck did I do?" feeling). Don't worry, I'll start with the main topics of the journal as soon as I can get some hosting space to upload some photos and let you see what it means to walk around a place like this.
No wait, it's really not that banàle. At least not all of it.
Up to that it's pretty everyday stuff, right? Information age is hardly news for anyone under sixty, and very close to everyday thing for large, large numbers of people. But here's the little short-circuiting parallel: we have learned about our ancestors, about ancient civilizations and cultures from things from the past, from the Pyramids, from everything that now resides in Museums all over the world, from fossils, bodies embalmed in ice, pretty much anything we could guess- or carbon-date. Physical stuff, objects we could read, touch, climb, examine, hold in our hands, excavate, discover.
Some people don't use paper diaries anymore, but gladly give their innermost thoughts to a computer, somehow feeling that only like that they're going to be as fresh as the first time they jotted it down, untouched by time, no worn pages, no frayed edges, no spilled liquids or accidental fires (happened to me once, the damn thing went up in flames in seconds).
What if, by any reason, all of what is now stored into computers and the Information Age infrastructure just vanishes overnight? What would the reaction be in not two days but, say, two hundreds? What could an archeologist possibly guess out of a hole in human history where everyone just happened to sit and stare at something a lot? What if he or she had nothing to guess what we ate or how we lived from, what we thought and how we perceived our lives?
A lot of people I talked with about this feel that this kind of infrastructure is safer and stronger than any traditional means of data storage, and they're surely right as the number of activites brought to and made new by computer technology is growing everyday.
But isn't it going to be the first thing to utterly vanish in case something goes horribly wrong somehow?
I wonder.
Made a very funny morning program today, had a great time and also managed to keep shit music out of the broadcast as I possibly could. Giovanni Elia, freelance airwaves cleaner at your service.
Time to go to bed before I let this kind of things take over my hands and transfer themselves on the journal to haunt me forever (a.k.a. the "The fuck did I do?" feeling). Don't worry, I'll start with the main topics of the journal as soon as I can get some hosting space to upload some photos and let you see what it means to walk around a place like this.