Not everything is deserving of being treated as historical artifacts worthy of retention. A friend has lamented that when he was in college in the late 80s, he used USENET as a way to connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges. Retaining his personal struggles is hardly "history" - if anything, the historical value of retaining the struggles of one inconsequential person is far lower than the direct impact a google search has on his life today. So as you said, some things aren't as important as you think - in his case, privacy and respect are a bit more important than a historical record of a teenager seeking people to talk to. Every minute detail of history isn't as important as you think.
You'd be surprised from what is considered history. Nowadays, insights into the lives and emotions of ordinary people are considered invaluable tool in recreating the past: the context in which political, economical, and cultural developments happened. In fact, the spontaneous nature of certain artifacts makes them more valuable, because what we would call "official history" is always editorialized and subject to the influence of only few people and not produced by the entire society it originates from.
It is something that I've thought about - the contradiction between privacy and the need to communicate yourself to the generations to come and the broadcast into the void it requires. If your friend is okay with his privacy in the archives, he might be glad to know that in hundred years, there will be an AI whose PHD will be on the emotional significance of new technologies in the lives of early adopters of the Internet, the case of user John Smith 1988.
I think the biggest difference/problem is that these people are still alive in many cases, whereas the authors of historical letters are not. This is a big difference, I think.
O, yes, I agree. It would be ideal if peoples actions are like state archives (accessible 50 years after the fact). However, I wanted to underline how inconsequential people actually matter in history.
Once you publicly post something, or even post something privately to someone else, it’s not entirely yours anymore, in an important sense it’s theirs.
Yes Usenet used to gave a spool lifetime, but that was clearly variable and there were no guarantees about it. Anybody could set up a mirror and frequently did. Also anyone could copy out content to other media and there was no expectation that they couldn’t do that.
We are all responsible for what we post to other people and in some cases also the effect it has on them. Consider bullying, abuse, criminal conspiracy, the record of receiving a message belongs to the receiver not the sender.
Every single minute detail is exactly equally important, because you, nor I, nor anyone, has any idea what will be important or why it will be important.
When pompeii was discovered we saw into homes 1,000 years ago. Without any regard to privancy for those covered in rock we broadcast their lives around the globe.
I don't think we give a lot of weight to what the original publishing intent was for anything published 100, 200 years ago, why would the change in the future?
Not really, that information gradually gets bit-rot and evaporates away to nothingness as website after website gets old and vanishes.
In the early days of the Internet, I often used to Google/AltaVista/Jeeves my own name. There used to be quite a few hits. Over the years, those old hits have just faded away.
That doesn't necessarily mean they disappeared, although chances are probably better that they did than didn't. Google has increasingly started incorporating recency in how it ranks search results, so if it's more than a few years old it'll fade away from Google results regardless if it's still around or not.
What's inhumane is making every small transgression into some stigma that should follow a person around their whole life. I don't think we fix that by erasing all traces of the transgression, which in many cases may be practically impossible.
It's not obvious to me whether changing the view on transgression and stigma is practically possible.
In my experience it's strongly tied to personal experience: if I committed a transgression in my past I'm going to be more understanding towards others doing the same (still depending on the nature of the transgression and my rationalization of it). It's also worth nothing that what constitutes a transgression changes with the times, and often the public seem to forget/ignore this fact and retroactively apply stigma and resentment.
Even if this were true, it would be better if the archives were not available for some decades after the original posting. I’m OK with my content being analyzed by historians, but the definition of “historian” presumes some professional detachment that is not available short years after the post was made.
I think even leaving aside historians - the idea of making everything posting transient by default would have robbed us of a lot of stored knowledge. I'm feeling quite bitter about the rise of Slack and Discord over mailing lists and Usenet.
The ease in which one can find clues and solutions to decades old technical questions relies on everything being stored.
And more than just technical issues - I'm no historian but I've wasted endless hours following fascinating discussions from the past that suddenly become relevent because of recent events or unforeseen connections. I love how much is preserved by accident. It makes me slightly sad to think that it might be otherwise and that others would wish it otherwise.
And yet I used to regularly find answers on a Usenet or Google groups mirror with Google. Even sometimes in public irc logs. I have yet to find the answer in a public slack or discord log.
> but the definition of “historian” presumes some professional detachment
The idea of everything you've ever posted becoming part of a giant "digital permanent record" used by data brokers, advertisers, credit bureaus, trolls, nosy people, etc. is somewhat unappealing.
