Our digital life

I have spent fifteen and a half years taking shots, writing and recording the parish churches of the county of Kent.

I have visited nearly 400 different churches, taken tens of thousands of shots, of which I have posted, so far, 21,420 diffeent images of inside and outside each church, written about them, my visit, the history and so on and on.

I have the shots backed up on three external hard drives, but they are only filed correctly, with each church having it's own album on the photographic social media platform, Flickr. Its where I embed shots for the blog from.

If Flickr were to fail, the project, as it stands would vanish too.

Flickr must spend millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions on servers and the people to run them.

And it could all vanish tomorrow.

As could the whole internet if a burst of energy from a nearby supernova or even a mass corona ejection from our own sun were to bathe our planet in comic energy, most electronics would fail, and we would be back to the stone age.

I am reading an article by a writer, and a lot of her early work is vanishing. (https://www.theverge.com/24321569/internet-decay-link-rot-web-archive-deleted-culture)

The message used to be that the internet was forever, only it isn't. As companies merge, go bust, or upgrade systems, old stuff will get lost. Some of it important stuff, or stuff that might become important in years or decades to come. There might be a citation or two to suggest something important was there, but its now gone.

Maybe it doesn't matter, life is just a passing thing, and when life itself forgets you were here, does it matter? Possibly not.

From centuries and civilisations past, there are records of what they said, did, thought, written on clay tablets, papyrus, walls of temples, in scrolls or in books, magazines and newspapers, that sometimes these things survive and educate us.

What will there be left for our times, for history to remember us, or for future generations to study?

Possibly very little.