I'm gonna keep this short. Archives exist because people want to make sense of their surroundings. They exist through a set of systematic rules. And then I found this guy. He saved me a lot of time to be honest. I do agree that the internet is an mega archive of all kinds of data and information. There's a chance that the data could be shut down such as that one time when megaupload got taken down by the FBI, however the data that was downloaded by the users would intergrate such data into their own personal archives.
But again...I do feel that archived information are important in some form or another. I think of archives as a collection of records, but the thing is an archive doesn't have to be completely made out of data. It could be a collection of things, toys, books, etc. I collect toys personally and the ones I think are most valuable are the ones you cherish the most in the past. I recently excavated my Bionicle collection and I find it a piece of wonderful past that I now display next to my more recent collection.
The obsessiveness stems from the idea that people have a natural urge to organise data. Our brains have its own elaborate metadata for processing and ranking the usefulness of certain information. As such in society we do it as well just help organise our own collection of data. We use it to draw into our past, it could be useless since the information is fixed but by keeping a record of the past we could use it to shape our present and future. Much like how we keep a record of history, we could use it to understand why certain things happen and we celebrate it like Anzac Day.
No comments:
Post a Comment