[adventured]

Maybe in the future so much content will be created by so many (eg digital photographs, youtube), that the notion of preservation will lose a lot (but not all) of its former value, with the focus shifting on the next thing rather than enjoying the last thing for 400 years. Humanity as we understand it today, isn't going to exist in hundreds of years, we've already taken over control of our own evolution, and there's a high probability that we'll merge into the machines and never come back out. At the rate all of this is accelerating, long-term preservation is very likely going to be moot.

[flashman]

I have this idea in my head that one of the niche communities in fifty years will be people who trawl through discarded mass storage devices: cobbling together hardware fixes, undeleting files, and scanning them to see whether they contain anything interesting, like cached pages of lost websites, photos containing the faces of celebrities but from decades before they were famous, troves of old corporate emails, and so on.

[zardo]

Like historians? I also think they will exist in fifty years.

[sangnoir]

I think more like Verner Vinge's Programmer Archeologists[1], rather than Historians.

1. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4424

[flashman]

Like digital archaeologists, is more what I'm imagining. Not interpreting the primary sources, discovering them.

[galago]

:/