future it's a time to think

millions of years later, here i am. i really am going to try and MAINTAIN. promise!

ginny has proposed that we start more of an anonymous "female perspective" type blog. i have no qualms with this and think it could be kind of interesting. i wonder how many half-started blogs there are on the internets. many many. will they be studied some day as cultural artifacts? how will our digital remnants be preserved? i know a blu-ray disc lasts about 40 years.. back ups upon back ups would be required to allow this data to survive eons. i had a daydream thought the other day of sorting through a closet 20 years from now and finding an old external hard-drive and wanting to show the old pictures, songs, files to my children. would the data be corrupt?

how are we preserving this important era? is the library of congress backing up and re-backing up the primordial internet soup? i've seen some archived websites from the early 90's.. animated GIFs, etc. it's fascinating. the older i grow, the more i see the humanity in everything. or rather the imperfection. everything seems so fragile. the websites of huge multinational corporations from the 90's are so cute. i just did a search on archive.org to try and find some examples and i got an error (not a good sign).

i had an oasis fan site in the 90's.. it was extremely basic.. but i taught myself HTML and wrote the whole thing out in notepad. i was really proud of it, as cheesy as it was. it had some union jack animated gifs, a champagne supernova MIDI playing in the background and a blinking night sky background. i had a lyrics page and a photo page. i really wish i had archived that site or at least taken some screenshots. it's lost forever.

i also had a "internet diary" before blogs came about. again, it was very basic.. but my friends read it and commented in my guest book. i remember i took pictures with my webcam and uploaded it to the site.. all before myspace, before friendster, before makeoutclub automated the process. this also, is totally gone.

i'm not trying to brag here that i was so advanced when i was 13-15 years old.. i'm just sad that i'm not able to look back. that i can't archive these feeble attempts and share them with future generations. are people going to be interested in the first attempts at websites? i think so. it may be a small, hyper nerdy group.. but i'd like to think that this is an extremely important time. it's a crux and we are the first of a generation to have our lives intimately entwined with online space. it's important to remember all that we can.