Monday, February 06, 2006

How can one really preserve culture using ICT tools?

In particular:

How does community knowledge on the web really get passed on to the next generation when the medium changes so quickly? Are blogs really going to be on the web for generations to come? Most of them barely survive a year or two before disappearing into the cyberether. It seems to me that the very speed and ease of social software which allows users to create and share local knowledge may also threaten the sustainability of that knowledge. Is it possible that local knowledge created on online will find ways to live offline, beyond the medium that gave birth?
These are basic questions that Tim Lindgren grapples with when he writes about locative media and blogging. He tells more about Thingster and those implications here.

Indeed, to engender a culture of permanence is a herculean if not an insuperable task. David Lowenthal bewails this reality in "Stewarding the Future"
(More in "The Future of Preserving the Past"). Then again, perhaps the answers may be found in the knowledge holders themselves.

1 comment:

Joel said...

Of course as the board chairman of the Internet Archive once said, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture." That was in 2004. I wonder what the figure is in 2006.