The internet is revolutionary in so many ways. But the most impressive may be its penchant for preservation. The World Wide Web has amounted to essentially the creation a free running human encyclopedic. For the first time in the history of our existence we can watch the passing of a life on the internet. Like sure, I’ve used the internet basically every free moment between the span of 11 and 22 years of age, but I never had access before those years. And never did we have anything that amounted to facebook in those early years.
I grew up using two things on the internet exclusively. Porn and Instant Messenger. Sure both are impressive human communication tools in their own right, but they aren’t documented accounts of a human life. In a couple of years we’ll be able to see baby pictures of a person, and then them as a teenager through the course of only a few clicks. It’s truly remarkable. And it’s not only you. It’s your friends, their friends, and people from Australia, Russia, Pakistan and every other place on earth.
Talk about an object being an archive. The internet is the very definition of an archive. It’s democracy at its perfect representation. Everyone has equal access to information (except for China I suppose) and at next to nothing. You don’t need to pay 35,000 dollars a year like with an education. But it’s the most expansive tool we’ve discovered to date. You can talk to people from around the globe, track news throughout these same distances, and be entertained in endless ways.
And as I said previously, soon we’ll be seeing the first generation of this web boom grow up right before our very eyes. We’re at milestone place in the development of internet. Mothers are posting and tagging pictures of their babies as we speak. In a matter of a decade, we’ll have been able to see that very same child grow up on this medium. No use for household photo albums anymore. The internet has become our archive. Not only is it for personal preservation (because let’s be curt, I really don’t care about anyone else’s family photos but my own), but also acts as a much more vast historical record. The “term record books” has been in existence since the advent of the printing press. But now there are no record “books.” Everything will be kept track of on the internet. It is a communal record book for the whole world to use.
Its significance can sometimes be taken for granted, or viewed as rote because of its pervasive nature. Directly comparing the internet to sources before it, however, draws attention to the magnitude of this time period even further. Innovation quickens by the year and we are reaching a precipice. Times will only become more grandiose. Where will we be tomorrow?
