>Could said community then take _where’s body of work, and clone themselves a digital copy of him to carry on the legacy?

No. Some sort of neural net could create a realistic simulation of a person’s manners of speech, etc. it would be extremely hard to make a simulation that can have new ideas, and _why’s contributions to the community were mostly because of new ideas. Once you get to the point where the real person can stop caring, and a simulation of the person, at the point when they stopped being part of the community, you have an AI. And once you have an AI, why make it recreate a human? It would be better just to have the AI be it’s own person, and not be _why 2.0.

Websites I remember from my youth or GeoCities that disappeared can actually be found on the way back machine internet archives project.

They actually have quite a lot of things still preserved there. Its even interesting to see the evolution of the web too.

I was just thinking about the permanency of digital data on the way to work.
I guess I always assumed it wouldn’t be permanent, and so it didn’t bother me.

I hate to sound terrible but, I believe the impermanence would only affect those whom invested much of their time into the digital life. One exception I can think of is personal digital pictures, of which may diminish in quality assuming people continue to store them in lossy formats (I doubt this will continue very long).

It will be interesting to see the progress of whether the niche of lossless music/etc continues on to be mainstream. I believe it will, as people continue to have more data storage capacity.

What’s mind boggling is the idea that people are using an impermanent medium to transmit much of their thoughts, and so ridiculously miss out on a lot of what people seem to value in life: actual human interaction. And it is this we substitute with entertainment.

@ Eric:

Yeah, it is quite scary that future generations may actually know more about Ancient Egypt than about the 21st century. That said, digital information is easy to copy. So as long as we keep moving the pieces we care about, we will be able to preserve them despite the perishability of the underlying media.

In fact, the short lifespans of our hardware might in fact improve the amount of data we preserve. Given a very resilient, long-term storage method, we might be tempted to just leave the data be, and not touch it. And if we do, we might one day find ourselves locked out of it, possessing neither the hardware, nor the specs for the file types and retrieval algorithms needed to read it. Since our hardware deteriorates quickly, important information will be continuously moved and converted to modernized formats, making it readily available and accessible to future generations.

There are probably tons of links to URLs on my server that return 404s. Over the years contents come and go. I actually maintain a mixed ‘resources’ folder which contains images and stuff I used in different forums and that is linked from there. Sometimes things get lost and you don’t even realize it. I had a subdomain which hosted a large creative commons graphics packet as mirror-server – as the server had a serious hardware issue and was replaced some time ago, I had to reinstall it. I just forgot that subdomain even existed …

It is possible that our society will leave few traces in history. We know about those who carved their words in stone, we know little about older societies that wrote texts on paper or wood.

Most of the information about our technologies and society are stored on physical objects that probably last a few decades …