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| The judges' library in the Constitutional Court, by Paul Jacobson (http://www.jacobson.co.za) |
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One of the many fantastic things about the social media (r)evolution is that it makes it so easy to upload and share videos, photos and our typed thoughts. We can connect to people anywhere in the world where there is an Internet connection and we can begin to create a media rich archive of our lives and our culture. In other words, social media makes it possible to capture our history in a way that was simply not possible a decade ago, certainly not in our parents’ time and before that.
All this content sharing really amounts to the creation of a pretty comprehensive and detailed living archive of our lives which can be organised and sorted using contextual tools like tags. When we connect those archives to other people’s archives we add a broader context to an emerging communal archive which is bound to be of considerable importance to our descendants just as albums of old photos and letters have been of interest of us when we look back at events in our parents’ or grandparents’ youth. Taking a stroll down memory lane in the past has usually involved perusing old, faded photo albums and watching stacks of slides projected on to walls at family gatherings. A family member would often recount a story about the photo or slide and the history of the family would be passed on, in part, by word of mouth just as it has for generations.
The Web changes that. Now we record our thoughts in blogs, we post videos of events in our lives and photos detailing much more than was the case in the past. Our record of our lives has become a lifestream and we have gone so far as to start documenting the minutiae of our daily lives using microblogging tools like Twitter and Jaiku. All of this is straight from the proverbial horses’s mouth. In addition, all this content is digital and won’t fade like old photographs.
Provided there are systems in the future that will continue to access this content there will be a comprehensive and enduring cultural record from the beginning of this new millennium that will dwarf what has come before in sheer volume. This is where there is potentially a catch though. At the moment we rely on services which appear to be open. These services are designed to facilitate sharing and ease of use. What happens if Flickr, YouTube or any number of social media services close down or their repositories of content become inaccessible for any number of reasons including unsupported file formats?
If we are to realise a goal of creating a truly enduring cultural database for future generations the content we create and share today has to be future-proofed as much as possible. This means that a couple things must be done. In the first instance the content being made available through these services must be archived in the most readily accessible location possible, given current technologies and solutions. Once the content is stored in a convenient location the question then becomes whether the content is in an accessible format and this is where open standards and open access become relevant. If content is stored in proprietary formats it will be a recipe for disaster. As those formats fall out of use or are no longer developed by their creators, that content becomes inaccessible and effectively lost to all save those who still have systems that can support those file formats. There has been a similar debate about document formats specifically and we can see open access and open standards coming to the fore in the debate over Microsoft’s push to have the Office Open XML document format ratified as an ISO standard.
Without truly open file formats we will find our collections of cultural resources fading like old photographs until one day all we will have to show our descendants will be antique grey boxes in museums rather than a living, vibrant digital archive showcasing human cultural development in the 21st century.
tags: johannesburg south africa media-events social responsible policy media social-media socially-responsible-media preservation cultural heritage
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