[LINK] Internet Archival

[David Lochrin]

On Wednesday 30 September 2009 09:06, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>> It's history, so yes it's important to save at least a good part 
>> of it.  Our descendants need to be able to see where their 
>> fore-fathers have been.  I can think of a few popular shows 
>> on commercial TV, not  to mention parts of certain newspapers, 
>> which are the absolute dregs of "lowest common denominator" 
>> culture IMO (and of course I wouldn't watch them :-) but they do 
>> shed a lot of light on the mind of the late 20th - early 21st century man.
> 
> Funny how some cultures have managed to do this for thousands 
> of years without resorting to any technology at all... 'Saving' something 
> in our contemporary society is a very different process.

True, but as Marshall McLuhan observed in 1964 (I've just looked it up :-) the medium and the message form an inter-related whole.  The dynamics of a culture passed down by social customs and stories told around the fire are quite different to a culture passed down by TV.  Or to put it another way, it's not possible to abstract the culture from the medium and still understand it properly.

David