History teaches us that there was a time where there weren’t machines that reproduced huge quantities of info.
Looking back to the past, we can recall the monks in the Middle Age that had the incredible and tedious task of writing and transcribing barely one or two copies of each paper to save the Heritage and advances like it was yesterday. In a blink of an eye: the Printing Press, and then BOOM! Internet
Nowadays, it is no secret that Internet is gradually replacing the traditional media, but yet, is there anybody out there preserving the worldwide heritage on the web?
The Big Encyclopedia of Internet: Digitization (passing physical documentation to digital format) and the web are being used to manage and disseminate cultural heritage.
Where Does Internet Live?
Everything’s on the web, but where is the Internet? It seems incredible how many people interact information daily through the network.
Technically speaking, the Internet is a network of computers and diverse teams scattered around the world. Most of the services we use are hosted and provided from computers called “servers”. The Internet is just the communication network that connects these servers with their clients in different ways, with the rest of the computers, which means, ours.
So he lives between Earth (ground cables), space (satellites), and is recently moving to the ocean: It is submarine transoceanic cables that allow the Internet to reach our homes and work.
It is a cable, several centimeters thick that was designed to withstand the inclemency of the ocean floor, the most common form of these cables is a core of a material with high conducting capacity.
Today the best option is fiber optics and is coated with materials of great strength to prevent this break.
Largest communication network ever
Today the number of cables has multiplied, but with routes that continue to obey in many cases to historical reasons; the largest interconnection nodes in the world are located in only four countries: the United States (New York and Virginia), Germany (Frankfurt), the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and the United Kingdom (London).
It is from these neuralgic centers where the rest of the world connects, now where is the information?
Internet’s Heart
Well, at least that’s how Google calls its operations centers. And it must be admitted that by weighing the presence and action of the great G in today’s network, if it is not, it looks quite alike.
Data Centers are made up of huge servers that store internet pages, videos, photos and even this article you are reading. Data that must be kept in enormous facilities located in places of cold weather and cheap electricity…
I’m sure we are on the right direction, but who will do justice to our ancient monks and will record everything we know today? Is it we from the daily use of our devices?
According to this Very Short History of Digitization timescale compilation, every minute in 2015, Skype users made 110,040 calls, Twitter users sent 347,222 tweets, YouTube users uploaded 300 hours of new videos, Pinterest users pined 9,722 images, Netflix subscribers streamed 77,160 hours of video, Snapchat users shared 284,722 snaps, and Facebook users liked 4,166,667 posts.
While it is true that there are lots of strong data centers collecting the present information around the world, is the important data being saved? I’m not pretty sure.
The manage and dissemination of cultural heritage must become a priority among our influential digital companies or, ironically, in an era of more access and knowledge flow, the future will be an empty, no roots place.
