I did not know Opalcat. I think you would be hard pressed to find a thread that we both contributed to. We frequented different parts of the boards. I was therefore very surprised at how hard it hit me when I heard of her death. She was a unique individual and big part of this place. I found myself tearfully reading tribute threads and browsing her websites.
Which got me thinking.
Here is a woman whose sphere of influence was so much greater than her physical footprint. She affected a huge number of lives and much of that through her online presence.
Suppose some day in the future – for the sake of argument, let’s say 100 years from now, someone wishes to assemble some kind of biographical work on Opal. (I was going to say, write a biography, but that would be to presuppose the format.) Obviously, this person would need to do some research. The question is, what resources would he or she have available?
There would likely be some descendants and a few oral stories, but no one who had met her personally. There would obviously be her surviving artworks and probably some photographic records of them. There may be diaries and mementos, physical official records – that kind of thing. However, a significant part of her presence was her online blogs, her websites, messages on boards such as these, digital conversations and emails etcetera.
At present her websites are still up, but will no longer be maintained. Eventually the sites she paid for will expire, platforms will change. What is currently available will be either archived (by someone) or deleted.
So, my question is this: 100 years from now, if someone was attempting to reconstruct the story of Opal’s life where a significant amount of it was in a digital form, how would it be done? Would future historians have access to the records necessary? Would there be significant privacy issues that prevent data from being available? Are digital records more or less transient or comprehensive than written records like Samuel Pepys’ diary or the writings about Julius Caesar?
Since this requires speculation, it’s not really a General Question. Since it’s about a specific board member, I’m going to move it to MPSIMS instead of IMHO.
Chances are that before one hundred years are up almost all of our current digital records will have become lost of nearly inaccessible. Most of it is mindless drivel that isn’t worth saving anyway. But there will be large stores of records saved for various purposes, and there will be perpetual storage services where people will select information to be preserved for eternity, always maintaining backups and copying to new technology as it becomes available.
No matter what, eventually vast amounts of information will be lost simply because someone who doesn’t care about it can destroy it with a temporal click.
Yeah. I struggled to pick a forum. I was after something as factual as possible about what happens to digital information and what research will be like in the future.
ETA Opal is my inspiration.
I think the Wayback machine keeps stuff indefinitely. Given that storage keeps getting cheaper, I imagine that archive is likely to survive a century.
So your great-grandkids will be able able to look back and see all the brilliant stuff you wrote back in 2013. Probably a good thing to keep in mind while posting.
The NSA will also have an archive in Utah. 100 years from now, the stuff on the web today will be declassified and I’m sure that there will be correlation engines that could piece together her entire digital footprint.
Beyond whether or not the data is archived somewhere, you have to be able to tie it to the individual. With Opal, that would be relatively easy, because she used the same handle for pretty much all her online activities (even her Facebook page, AIUI). For most people, it would be much harder.