Will blogs enter the long term of memory of history?

I rather enjoy blogging as a relative new means of communication.  However, I do not use blogs as a way of expressing my own opinions, but more often as a way of giving wider circulation to questions to which I do not know the answer.  It is clear, from American experience that blogging can – in certain circumstances – have considerable political impact.

How are the historians going to record this?  A recent article in Prophile, the Magazine of the Friends of the National Archives, of whom I am one, raises the question of the poor archival quality of digital information.

Anne Samson gives some of the facts.  Westminster Council recently wrote off £35 million of old parking fines because the data has become unreadable.  Digital information (unless it is actually migrated) “risks becoming unreadable, and un-archivable.  Unless we solve these problems, there may be no archives in the future!”

If this is true of official digital communications, it must be an even greater risk to political blogs, which can be the key records of political events or propaganda.  In human life, loss of memory is a crippling illness.  Can we cure the loss of memory which threatens the digital age?

Comments

[dizzy]

http://www.archive.org

[James Kennett]

I mistrust digital archival media that are put away on a shelf until they are needed. Only then does one find that they have decayed beyond recovery.

A better plan is storage on multiple redundant disk drives, preferably in different locations. When a drive fails, it is replaced with a blank drive, and the data are copied from one of the mirror locations. The cost of disk storage has fallen to the point that this is economically viable. The technique has the advantage that all the archived material is rapidly accessible.

The digital age has other consequences. The decline of letter-writing, as a result of the telephone, left a gap in 20th-century records. Now, as email replaces the telephone, it produces records of a different kind on the computers of the senders and recipients. Probably rather too many records, but at least they are searchable for keywords. Also, emails are easily forged. Future historians will have a lot of fun sifting through the emails of politicians and writers.

[Tom Whitwell]

Blog posts are written in a standard, non-propietary format (HTML) - this is very different from dusty computer disks in government computer departments.
The internet is also archived: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://timesonline.typepad.com/rees_mogg/
Because they take up a tiny amount of digital space, blogs are easy and cheap to store and archive. This is very different from - say - they archives of the Times newspaper, which are restricted to paid subscribers, and not available in a universal machine-readable format (due to their pesky paper origin). It should be easy to migrate HTML to any future computer system, because it's so widely used.

[Tim Worstall]

Worth noting that the British Library also archives certain specific blog posts. Some of the stuff about 7/7 for example.

[billy]

If the archived data disappears it won't matter.
Archives are history and where is the evidence that people take any notice of history when making decisions?

[Neil Murphy]

Almost everything on the web is archived. Anyway, paper burns, decays and gets lost. Multiple redundant backups of digital data is easy. Migration to newer media forms is also easy, if time consuming.

[Ian Deans]

The National Library of Australia runs an archive service called Pandora for preserving sites of historical or cultural value.

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/

[John Charlesworth]

"---but more often as a way of giving wider circulation to questions to which I do not know the answer."

Yes, I write local Blogs but use them often to get answers and reactions at the time of writing. I find that Blogs date quickly. Historical events?. Thats the job of the Newspapers and other media.

[Walt OBrien]

At present, to my knowledge as someone whose clearance lapsed some time back (thank you, God), there are at least 30 to 40 points on the planet where the entire babble of what is whizzing back and forth on the Net is being scrupulously examined for even the teensiest type of clue to who is planning to blow up what next. One of these is your very own General Communications Security Establishment. The other big one is the U.S.A.'s National Security Agency. Then there is the Army Security Agency, and --suprise!-- the Homelessland Insecurity Agency (sic). I personally have a rather elaborate port blocker and proxy suite which enables me to examine in detail what .ASP, .NET and Net port attacks to which my computer is subjected, and so far the Communist Chinese are the most frequent visitors who try to broach port 139, which is the usual point of entrance to someone else's computer. I get perhaps, oh, 25-30 attempts at getting into my computer per 24-hour shift: they leave their IP address as a footprint, and I catalogue them at my leisure.

My guess is that at some point in the future, (a decade? twenty years?) all these recorded net archives shall become public domain so that employers can use your e-mail correspondence for the last 25 years as a tool to pre-screen your suitability for the position you are applying for.

Can't screen for terrorists without sorting, filing, cataloguing, then analyzing at leisure. So, of course, everything's jolly well recorded: there's a chap or lass in a beret with a clearance the PM can't get sifting through people trolling porn sites even as I write this. There must be at least 100,000 people worldwide whose job consists of nothing but this type sorting and screening and analyzing. Whether we'll ever have access to our own archives is another story.

20 trillion HTML & phone records per day isn't that much to sort through with the sort of parallel processing arrays available on just an off-the-shelf basis. In the 1980's Hughes Aircraft was working on using human brain cells in vitro connected to electronic computers, and I am sure they'd sorted all that rubbish out so it would work by around 1991.

The only people with privacy are those who rely exclusively on the mail or drop by to chat with whomever they wish to communicate with. Makes you want to buy a set of carrier pigeons for all your friends for Xmas, doesn't it?

[Ian Parker]

What of all the data that the government collects about us, the citizens. see my blog.

[tapestry]

Digital information is quick and easy to delete for those who find it inconvenient.

[Chris Sherwood]

Blogs will be one small element of the unimaginably large information resources that will be available to the historians of the future.

Where a historian shedding light on a minor aspect of ancient Athenian society may have several hundred sources to work from today, the historians of the future will have digital information sources on individual lives so vast as to be beyond comprehension.

The skills required will change - whereas the historians of today try to fill gaps in the historical record, the historians of tomorrow will be faced with the challenge of finding and selecting information, and building their narratives on a subset of the available record. The digital age has not only revolutionised our lives; it will revolutionise historiography too.

[Lewis Jaffe]

Thought you might enjoy my bookplate blog.
Http://bookplatejunkie.blogspot.com

Lewis Jaffe Philadelphia Pa.