The skeleton of the Internet
You know how when archaeologists look back at ancient cultures like Egypt and Babylon they find like statues of gods, and extrapolate from these papers, or these scraps of writings of how they lived. It is amazing how these scholars can pull so much, or make so much up with these minuscule findings. As for the last several thousand years texts have been the most important to our historical understanding of the past. There are countless texts that have been lost in the ages of time. Many laws of rules are not around any more, all kinds of gems are gone due to the wars of stuff. A con to books is that they can be burnt, like the libraries of Europe are subject to wars and fire. These libraries are such gems, that are so fragile that need to be replicated and preserved for our academic culture. For cultural historians and such looking back at the past can look to archeology and contemporary texts of what stuff was like. Obviously they cannot look at every aspect of medieval society because we have such limited information.
What is the internet leaving behind as evidence of our society? what happens when wars bring down the internet, and all this electronic data is lost to us, how fragile is the internet? For example what happens if there is a world electricity shortage? Will all that online information being supported by those servers be destroyed? Will historians look back at this time and say, ya the internet was a big thing in the lives of the people of the twenty first century and we have these vague conceptions of how things work. They will have to rely upon the cryptic accounts of scholars, and such about the internet, and if it does not exist any more they will have equally elaborate explanations of how our interconnected society worked like the ancient Egyptians did, or other ancient civilizations.
I just hope that some doom sayer, prepared scholar, puts much of how our society works and all of our compiled information is put into a hard copy time share, that we can store for those academics later in life.
