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Comment by nmridul | Hacker News Reader

"100 years from now, when another one of you goes spelunking around this basement, that data, those bits, today’s moments, will likely be long, long gone."

Well said. Back then the images were pasted on real walls and it adds to the emotional appeal. And now the images are pasted on virtual walls (aka Facebook/desktops).

I always wondered this. The new technology is great in spreading the images wide (wide in the spacial plane - I can see what was there in that room, and I'm sitting here far far away. That is the beauty of new technology. ). But it fails to spread it deep (call it in an emotional plane).

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To put things in perspective, 200 years ago there were no photos in existence to paste onto walls. So what we're feeling is a cultural nostalgia for a very short period in humankind.

True, but there are other kinds of images--paintings, sketches, drawings on a cave wall. We've been putting things on walls for a long time.

That's what I found so depressing in the (awesome) augmented reality video, "Sight":

http://vimeo.com/46304267

When the characters have their digital glasses on, the guy's apartment is full of pendants and shiny decorations. But you can see that without the glasses, the walls are bare.

Photography is new, but humans have affixed art to walls for millennia. It would be insane if that ended.

Interesting video.

After playing with user interfaces like Bump Top, the idea of just hanging an image somewhere doesn't have the same feeling as having it physically there.

Quite an interesting point. You suggest that the act of doing something mechanical does add emotional value to it. But what adds even more is time. Look at your Facebook posts from five years ago, or even your tweets from last year. Time passing makes you feel different about things.

I think the emotional appeal of those pictures pasted to the wall comes from the sheer age of them, in sharp contrast to the high tech equipment in the same room.

I am more concerned about the preservation of our postings than the emotional value. Things that really matter will produce the same emotions regardless of the medium.

You've hit the nail on the head. I (very) occasionally visit a messageboard that was active about a decade ago out of nostalgia.

Best we can hope for in the case of Facebook is some kind of rescue and archive act like for Geocities - although I think the Geocities archive started too late and some of it was lost :-(

I think that applies to a lot more than images. I think that this new technology spreads our friendships wide (we can have many friends, including people we haven't met in real life) but not deep (more text messages saying "what's up?" and fewer long conversations in person).

Conversely, it can spread our interests wide, and much deeper than before (for those that we really care about).

I've worried about this. While we can sift through hundred-year-old photos of our great grandparents, what will our great grandchildren sift through a hundred years from now? We generate more photos and written word by orders of magnitude, but often this data gets lost as we fail to back up data, social networks shut down, or we simply no longer have computers or software designed to view antiquated data. I guess what scares me is that our digital heritage is so easy to wipe out or at the very least, misplace.

There's a flip side, though: digital material is also easier to copy than physical material. This means copies are more likely to get made, which means it's less likely that the loss of any one copy will totally remove the material from the historical record.

And you won't have boxes of super-8 film in your basement slowly rotting because no one has the time to encode them to a digital media. My family has tons of super-8, VHS and simple photos which will, in all likelihood, rot into nothingness because no one will fish them out of the basement in time.

There are problems with digital media (e.g. easy to lose it all if you don't have a good backup scheme, or don't continually keep up with current formats). But its easier that physically copying old media.

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