Headline, October26, 2013

''' =!^ THE DIGITAL AMNESIA ^!+ '''

Lacking cultural artifacts, society has no mechanism to learn from past and previous mistakes. It is not hard to see where that can lead?!

The library of Alexandria   -built during the 3rd century BC to house the accumulated knowledge of centuries  -reputedly had a copy (often the only copy) of every book in the world at the time.

It burned to the ground sometimes between Julius Caesar's conquest of Egypt in 48 BC and the Muslim invasion in 640 AD. It remains unclear how, when or why the fire started.

But it destroyed many of the works of Aristotle, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and countless other ancient astronomers, mathematicians, poets, playwrights and philosophers. 

All that remains today stems from a small fraction of Alexandrian archives that had been backed up in a daughter temple called the Serapeum.

Some historians believe the loss of the Alexandrian library, along with the dissolution of its huge community of scribes and scholars, created the conditions for Dark Ages that descended across Europe as the Roman empire crumbled from within. 

A millennium of misery ensued, with ignorance and poverty the rule until the Renaissance dawned. No one is saying that today's digital dark age portends any such disaster. 

Nevertheless, there could be serious ramifications for education, scholarship, government and even national security. All are legitimate concerns for the future.

Tracking down early web pages can be a huge problem. Imagine there are not even any screen shots of the world's first web page   -the one that actually launched the World Wide Web in August 1991. Type in its address and you will see

 A modern site that provides details of Tim Berners-Lee's seminal achievement at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research where he devised the web browser and server.

Amid the explosive growth of internet services such as e-mail, music downloads and video streaming, along with the growth of web itself, little thought has been given to recording information for posterity. 

The rapid turnover of content on the web has made total loss the norm.

''Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result,'' says Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation. Danny Hillis, a pioneer of parallel computing and machine intelligence, fears the world has become such a digital dark age, with few cultural artefacts from its digital past to point the way.

The Samurai and !WOW! must keep this in mind and preserve every things with great care in its original form:

So that both the Students and the Historians of the future never have to wish that web pages had been preserved more carefully?

The post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Slovak Republic. See Ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' !!! The World Students Network !!! '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless