User:ThomasW/Notes small notes

The internet might make you feel smart. That doesn’t mean you are

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/02/internet-smart-information-google Fay Schopen

"Knowledge has always been, partly, an illusion. Consider the popularity, a few years ago, of a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Its French author, Pierre Bayard, points out that culture is “a theatre charged with concealing individual ignorance”.

"I, like many, treat my smartphone as an extension of my brain. Can’t remember something? Google it."

--- http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-collection-and-the-cloud/

The Collection and the Cloud

By Amelia Abreu

Cerf argued earnestly. “We don’t have a standard way of hanging on to the software as well as the disks.” As an archivist, what shook me so deeply in Cerf’s comments was his disconnect with the political economies of internet content production, or content production in history.

There is a huge difference between searching and finding.

Unless you feel a desire to engage with your past self, it’s easy to leave these platforms alone and forget those versions of yourself ever existed, along with the troves of data associated with them.

I quit Facebook in 2012. But in “Hotel California” fashion, my data will greet me if I check back in. (It’s part of what keeps me away.)

s Paul Jaeger points out, “geographical considerations” such as physical location, environmental resources, and legal jurisdiction are key questions for evaluating the integrity of cloud services for archival storage. Cloud computing, he argues, represents “centralization of information and computing resources in data centers, raising the specter of the potential for corporate or government control over information.”

Loss of control of the personal archive means a loss of societal control of the cultural record.

Platforms collect and structure our personal data in such tidy compartmentalized ways, yet the utter lack of context in data mining continually catches us off guard.

Archival institutions tend to have a point of view. University archives collect records of their institution; governmental archives collect government records. The Internet Archive, and other collections of its ilk, collect from the standpoint of old-guard Internet culture.

Distance from one’s data is a design feature, and ownership of one’s data profile seems impossible. What from our digital environments can become historical and archived?

I wonder if the data collected by platforms will at some point become more transparent, and at what cost or contextual shift. Will my daughter be able to sift through my dark data profiles and learn about the egregious number of times I looked at someone else’s profile? Will there be a new round of data mausoleums, offering to sell us peeks at the past? Is data like defaulted debt, ready to be bought and sold at a fraction of the price and subject to a secondary market?

Where are the future archives? Moreover, where are the future points of canonical extinction?