[beAbU]

Very cool.

We're coming up to 150 years of being able to record and preserve the sounds of the world around us.

The era of ubiquitous digital recording is probably only really 30-40 years old, so there is a real incentive to preserve these older analogue artefacts, because this "prehistory" is larger than our immediately accessible history.

I wonder how the desire to archive and preserve things like this will persevere in the coming centuries. In 1000 years from now, there will only be a recording "prehistory" of ~10% of the total timeline. At some point historians will probably not even care about the digital revolution, because anything that happened prior to that becomes a vanishingly small part of our history. Kind of the same way that we lump 1000s of years of early human history into singular epochs, summarizing 100s of generations of lived experiences into a single paragraph. With the digital revolution, all that history will be stored in excruciating detail, preserved arguably forever.

This probably applies to any stored information, not just recorded audio. This is both fascinating and terrifying to me at the same time!

[jazzyjackson]

Don't take for granted that just because its stored digitally means its going to live forever. Data has to be copied to survive, if no one cares to migrate data from one platform to another, and that company goes under, probably the harddrives will be wiped. My entire high school experience was documented on myspace.com but when ownership transferred to News Corp and they tried to pivot the site to some other business model they accidentally deleted like half the user data iirc. So all those photos are gone, small blessing.

[ssl-3]

Indeed.

"The internet never forgets" was a fun notion to quip about when the WWW was only a few years old, but that was a quarter of a century ago.

The reality is that it forgets shit all the time.