Youtube, the modern day seventh wonder of the world, the proverbial library at alexandria

what do you think. Youtube is a store house for videos from as far back as people can remember and listed so that people can view them as long as youtube is around. More importantly videos that would go lost forever due to lack of commercial interest are suddenly given a place to rest on a bookshelf so someone someday can view them.

like the library at alexandria its a library of immense wealth of knowledge.

some not so popular but nonetheless still useful.

Think about it. losing youtube will be a loss of knowledge of our present day and past that the future generations can only guess at.

the loss of library and even the knowledge of the roman people put Europe in the dark ages.

No youtube isnt going away but the information stored is still useful to us and our future generations.

 

Don't we already have a YouTube thread?

We could turn that one into a copyright thread and this one into a sociopolitical ramifications of digital archiving.

 

I^m more impressed with wikipedia. 1.7 million articles in English, nearly 600k in German. Even if a significant percentage of it is useless, my feeling is that percentage is still relatively small. Relative to YouTube, I wouldn^t necessarily conclude that a video clip is worth a thousand words.

 

a video clip can have a powerful impact.

Remember the tiananem square massacre, remember that one lone chinese soul who stood as the tanks pulled up. the lone rebel

Remember the march and massacre of kent state. Kent State

ever heard of the Sikh massacre in 1984 by the indian government. never forget84

Bloody Sunday in january 30, 1972. Bloody Sunday

dont tell me video clips are meaningless.

 

Mm, but for everyone of those theres ten of Stargate: SG1 in Sockpuppets



or biggest burnout ever!!!!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UkNzL9PRBuM

 

I'd be more likely to consider archive.org for being the proverbial library at alexandria.
Similar to how a library doesn't contain neccessarily the sources, but bodies of work.

 

Always thinking outside the square.

It is pretty amazing though, when you consider how digital connectivity and storage capacity make traditional storage venues near obsolete.

And how prescient William Gibson was...

E_S

 

On the other hand, I think its interesting that how quickly its developing and changing is, in fact, one of the stronger points for traditional archiving methods.

 

Additionally, digital media is fairly easy to manipulate or permanently erase. Sure, books can be burned too, but someone can scrub a hard-drive in about the same amount of time. I think one of the biggest advantages of digital storage formats is the volume of data they can store---a single 5cm USB drive can store the information contained within hundreds of books, or more.

 

By the way, I didn't mean to devalue the importance of moving pictures in my last post. Video is the medium of our time, sure.

An Achilles heel of the digital age I think is the fragility of digital storage. Books can last for a thousand years. Digital media breaks down, becomes obsolute. I have shoeboxes full of old floppy disks and no easy way to get to the data. Moving digital media out of legacy systems is a challenge. What percentage of the content on the Internet will never be permanently archived in a meaningful way? People are still uncovering lost archives of film stock from the silent era - and a lot of this stuff can still be preserved although different kinds of film stocks have their own catastrophic storage issues.

Are we archiving our knowledge in a way that will make it accessible to future generations 50, 100, 200 years from now? I have doubts. It seems to me that much of our civilization's "content" is narrowly, vanishingly stuck in the present.

 

On the flip side of the fragility of digital storage is the ease of copying. Huge amounts of information can be copied in seconds, switched to a different medium, or reencoded in a more up to date format.

I would think that more copies + more mediums + more preservation through updated coding formats > fragility of digital coding formats + fragility of digital mediums.

 

Maybe. This may be even more true taking into account the percentage of our text and video that will be totally useless and uninteresting to future generations. Information can be a kind of waste product of human civilization, not completely unlike used pampers in a landfill.

 

But again, unlike non-digital information, digital information is extraordinarily easy to search through.

 

The trend toward standardization of databases, xml, meta-data, etc., is truly an amazing continuing revolution. There's no downside to this process, except, again, the warning about the potential fragility and transience of the storage of all that data.

 

I agree with Jabba, and I saw this same concern reflected recently in an article about pictures. So much of what we have is digital, and some unforseen catastrophe could wipe out so much of what we take for granted, with no easy backup, or way to replace that which we depend on.

 

Youtube+Wikipedia=badass

Both are equally nice

 

I can imagine, centuries from now, archaeologists rediscovering an old floppy drive will bear the significance of recovering the Rosetta Stone.

 

The Library of Alexandria was not a wonder of the ancient world, at least when I was taught them.....

Anyway, if copyright laws were remitted for youtube clips, then maybe, since although you can watch them you can't legally use them.
But youtube does not chronicle the whole of present knowledge and understanding, wikipeda doesn't even, although its amount of information is addictive!
Perhaps if there were two internets created...one for stupid youtube stuff and one for all sorts of valuable (free) learned stuff... maybe.... But that would be heaven on earth.