Not just another pencil: Computer-mediated communication from a senior's point of view.
A permanent home to outlive the authors.
Voices of reason laced with experience and understanding of the human condition are being tested on the World Wide Web. Unfocused for the most part, they could go unheeded and disappear forever, or could be channeled, distilled and put to use. More importantly, the methods learned and used by seniors today as they move cautiously into the World Wide Web build a foundation for tomorrow. When voices without faces become a basis of trust, the current debilitating wisdom deficit will be overcome.
Discrimination against anyone over a certain age will go out of style as electronic information from the older generation becomes routine.
Computer-mediated communication has changed many other attitudes as well. Once upon a time, foreigners and strangers were automatically considered to be potential enemies. Lack of knowledge about others engendered hostility, similar to todayıs tendency to view extraterrestrials with caution, fear and disbelief, enhanced by official denial.
Canadians chat regularly with net pals in Brussels, Sydney and Maui. People from far away are no longer strangers. Whenever beings from outer space learn our language, or we learn theirs, horizons will widen further. Now that porpoises and whales are learning to speak to each other, who knows what we humans may achieve, as we continue exploration and discovery in the field of communications?
As I wander, Alice-like, through the looking glass of this medium, Iım entranced with the way it gives voice to everyone, without prejudice. Like an astral traveler, I have gone far afield, befriending people in societies I would never have known existed.
One of the old folks' cyberclubs in the U.S., The Geezer Brigade, publishes such mottos as "Itıs frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions any more." This attitude will go out of style as the need for common sense drives society to seek wisdom where it exists, among the elders. Ninety-year-old members of groups like The Geezer Brigade will be sought after for advice, not as members of an old folks club but as experienced, knowledgeable individuals, available on the Internet.
Awaiting this era of insightful valuing of the wisdom of the aged, a serious concern remained to be addressed. A means was needed to preserve the best work of our Internet elders; not only the works now online but, as more and more people engage, the information stored on the Internet will become formidable. Then, when the authors have passed on, where will this trove be treasured?
Seeking a permanent home for some of the excellent Web sites that spell out the pith of our generation, one finds several public services for preserving memorabilia both past and present, but not in this electronic medium.
Historically, libraries fill this need, but even in these safe places evidence of knowledge has been known to fall victim to fire, flood and fracas. Before the advent of movable type and the printing press with availability of multiple copies, burning a book could wipe out a lifeıs work. Similarly, if a personıs work is contained in a Web site it can vanish the moment the author ceases to pay his fee to the Internet Access Provider.
When the world famous library at Alexandria was mysteriously burned down it was reputed to contain every book in the world at that time, over 900,000 unique manuscripts. By accident or by intent, when these single existing works were gone, there was no retrieval. Today, in the case of the Web sites of our oldest Internet generation, what hope was there of saving them, after their authors have gone?
The search for a safe repository brought to light numerous valuable resources, but none has facilities for selecting and preserving current Web sites, though each maintains an excellent Web site to display its own work.
Established in 1973, The Heritage Canada Foundation is a national, membership-based organization and registered charity. Its mandate is to preserve and demonstrate, and to encourage the preservation and demonstration of the nationally significant historic, architectural, natural and scenic heritage of Canada with a view to stimulating and promoting the interest of the people of Canada in that heritage.
Then there is Canadian Heritage, a department of the federal government, responsible for national policies and programs that promote Canadian content, foster cultural participation, active citizenship and Canadaıs civic life, and strengthen connections among Canadians. Neither Heritage Canada, nor Canadian Heritage holds individual citizensı Web sites to be heritage.
We also have the National Archives of Canada with its strong Living Memory area. Here the displays use media under various headings: Documentary Art, Audio Visual, Postal Archives, Maps, Photography, Government Records, Manuscripts and Private Collections. As yet there is no room for Web site archives.
The National Libraryıs own Web site includes Early Canadiana Online (ECO), a digital library started in 1997 to provide access to Canadaıs printed heritage. ECO features works published from the time of the first European settlers up to the early 20th Century. It is produced by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM), a nonprofit organization for preserving and providing access to early Canadian publications, first on microfiche and now online. By the time todayıs Web site contributions to the social history of our time are old enough to be called "heritage", many of them could have vanished. They are not being archived by the National Library.
Most exciting and innovative is the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), created in 1972 to promote the proper care and preservation of Canadaıs cultural heritage and advance the practice, science, and technology of conservation.
The CCI has worked closely with hundreds of museums, art galleries, academic institutions, and other heritage organizations to help them better preserve their collections. As a Special Operating Agency of the Department of Canadian Heritage, CCI has widened its scope and now markets its services and products around the world. Recognized as a world leader in the area of preventive conservation, with a staff of about 80, CCI has treated more than 13,000 objects for the heritage community, published hundreds of scientific papers, distributed over a million publications, but has no accommodation for Web sites, other than its own.
Many excellent groups are at work moving along to the next step of usefulness for the Internet in governments, academic research and commerce. Governments have come to lean heavily on the Internet in every department and at every level, but are slow to use its full potential as a means of preserving memorable Web sites which are built by anyone outside their particular departments.
This lack of concern for preserving information, which could disappear with the present generation of seniors, would be troubling were it not for Internet Archive and the WayBack Machine.
Back in Egypt, the New Library at Alexandria has risen phoenix-like over the past few years. Rebuilt to become once more the greatest library in the world, one of its attributes is a state-of-the-art computer contingent where an enormous block of Internet information had been archived, for safe-keeping.
This Alexandria location was selected by Internet Archive, a California-based group preserving all the current Web sites and many other cultural artifacts in digital form. This company has been working since 1996 on their incredible WayBack Machine, which is now open to the public. All its files are backed up locally, and mirrored in Egypt.
The WayBack was invented by Brewster Kahle, director and co-founder of Internet Archive. He had been working to provide universal access to all human knowledge since the mid-1980s, developing transformational technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. A 1982 graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brewster Kahle invented the Internetıs first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) in 1989, and founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company.
With Internet Archive and the WayBack Machine, Web sites posted to the World Wide Web have been given a life of their own and now outlive the authors. The sites built and maintained by the lady who died of cancer, and the man who had the fatal heart attack, mentioned in previous chapters, are both therefore extant. This is good to know, but even more reassuring is the knowledge that brilliant contributions to the Internet by its oldest users will be preserved and made accessible to anyone in need of their special wisdom. What could have been lost forever is now online, forever.
A public nonprofit organization, Internet Archive already has over 100 terabytes (thatıs 100,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data in its Internet library, the largest in the world, offering researchers, historians, and the general public, permanent access to historical collections in digital format.
In addition to developing its own collections, Internet Archive plans to promote the formation of other Internet libraries, to elevate the content of the Internet from ephemera to enduring artifacts of our political and cultural lives.
As governments wake to the political significance of the World Wide Web, laws will be enacted regarding public accessibility of information only available on the Internet. Failing current archiving, much of this material could have been lost by the time the laws come into effect. The Internet Archive, meanwhile, has prevented such a calamity.
Electronic Frontier pioneer Stewart Brand, founder of the WELL online service in San Francisco, and of The Whole Earth Catalog among other good things, has written, regarding the Internet Archive as an essential service:
"Its founding is bound to be looked back on with the same fondness and respect as people now have for the public libraries seeded by Andrew Carnegie a century ago. Digitized information has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem properly.
"The Internet Archive is the beginning of a cure the beginning of complete, detailed, accessible, searchable memory for society, and not just scholars this time, but everyone."
As Donald Heath, president of the Internet Society in Reston, Virginia says, "We donıt know where this Internet is going, and once we get there it will be very instructive to look back."
"With a Way-Back machine," states James Pitkow, of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, "historians and others would literally have a window on the past."
Two major tasks of Internet Archive are to protect stored resources against accidents and data degradation and maintain the accessibility of data as formats become obsolete. They are studying ways to achieve this, and by maintaining copies of the Internet Archiveıs collections at multiple sites they reduce the risk of loss through accidents and natural disasters.
Cities, provinces and the Federal Government all agree to the advocacy of preserving written records. Archives, museums, and historical societies do what they can to keep our heritage alive. This is a sign of civilization. Writings on the walls of caves send the same message across the ages. Researchers seek out information in ancient scrolls, on tablets, and on paper in libraries around the world. These are all preserved, indexed and made available for all to see, and now it has been realized that the treasure trove of social history floating about cyberspace on the Internet also needs to be archived.
As the members of our first generation of senior computer journalists pass on, their contribution to current online literature, the social history contained on their Web sites, was definitely in danger of disappearing because they did not fall within the purview of any government, academic or industrial group. Among the countless Web sites being posted on the Internet every day, those produced by some of our seniors will now be considered, in future times, to be important documents of our generation. The advent of Internet Archives has made this possible.
Demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between the Internet and its older users, the Web site called "Old Folks at Home on the World Wide Web" links readers to examples of the seeds sown by seniors in cyberspace, and to sources from which they glean. Links to every reference in this work can also be found on that Web site at http://www.flora.org/oldfolks/
By expanding and sharing his personal file-finding system, Tim Berners-Lee has made life exciting for millions of people around the world. Though intended for business and research, the linking he invented now also brings people and information together everywhere and has added yet another dimension to the amazing life experiences of the oldest generation.
In 1996 the Public Broadcasting System interviewed this author for a TV series about understanding the Internet. Though not yet very knowledgeable on the subject, I managed to suggest that anyone who could bake bread in a wood stove, and manufacture childrenıs clothing on a treadle sewing machine, could organize a site on the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, interviewed on the same show, was much more lucent. He explained the difference between the Internet and the Web. "The Net is made of cables and computers, little computers, the root packets and abstract space, which is just what the authors of the Web have made it. big computers that set them up, send them out. When you explore the Net you find computers. The Web is an abstract universe of information. The important thing about the Web is that you donıt see computers and networks. So when you explore the Web you find documents, pictures, sound. You find people. Youıre exploring an abstract space, which is just what the authors of the Web have made it.
"Anybody who reads the Web ought to be able to write something for Web . . . itıs . going to be so much fun for everybody to be able to write hypertext. Of course, when everybody is producing things, as with paper, thereıs going to be so much rubbish out there, so much junk . . . weıre going to need to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, but the chaff is also useful."
And so it is, useful, fascinating, forever, for whomever is interested.
|