"life" after death

Interesting topic (and welcome back Alex). Our lives are increasingly being lived virtually, and almost nothing is in a physical medium. That in itself poses a threat to the survival of our output, as everybody knows. My fiancee has tens of thousands of digital photos and videos (she's a professional artist) and she spends a lot of time backing everything up. Sometimes she loses a HD which has not been back up yet. Tears are shed. Fortunately, her officially published videos are kept in a state run art archive, and they are responsible for backups and transferring the data to new formats as technology progresses.

I guess the cloud is the way forward, but this requires still heavy development to cope with the amounts of data many of us generate. Privacy and security is a question mark with commercial services. Should the cloud be government run? Maybe Facebook will give us immortality.

In the end, maybe only the goverment records are the only thing left. A number.

And maybe we need to ask the question, are the output of the masses interesting/valuable enough to store for the future generations? And who makes that decision?

and why would they be interested in us? I know I wouldn't.

I think even with all the downsides of digital media, there will be a heap pile of stuff from our generation left over. Heaps, too much I'd almost say. There might be a lot of it digital and therefore less preservable, but then again there is also 10 times more stuff being published since you basically don't need to have a publisher for any medium these days anymore, presumed it is digital. You're not dependent on a record label, a book publisher, a software company and not even on a gallery to make your stuff accessible throughout the whole world.
I have now since 2 weeks internet again after 8 months, and one of the things that over-encumbers me is that it's an infinite medium. There's no end to it like there is to a book or to a music-track, you have to set it yourself to not get lost in an infinite flush of information.

So to sum up my point, I'm more questioning myself what will get selected out of these enormous wades of shit to survive future generations than if there will be something surviving at all.

well, we'd go deeper into aesthetic philosophy here - before I'd go completely OT I'll sum it up that there are mainly two divisions. People who believe that you can't argue over taste and people who believe you can, which is the side I'm on. I believe there just are things that are more aesthetic than others, and while personal influences and tastes encloses my horizon, the combination of different tastes of people with a good recognition of aesthetics can make up a vague construct of the more aesthetic.

Anyhow, that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of stuff that is just not getting recognized as it doesn't fit the current fashion or numerous other reasons (not enough marketing, etc.).
I'll bring an example to show what I mean with piles of shit: take the internet as an example. It was a great medium for information from the start, but the way too get to information often meant for me having too wade literally through shit as in mirrored websites of google-results full of ads, scam-sites with payed access and so on. Now of course it's easier, as we have google which basically has it's main work in censoring out all this sites, and some centralized networks like wikipedia etc. But in between there, there's a heap of dot.com-scams and porn, sites that neither look interesting nor have any appealing purpose to anyone but the owners who can make some bucks with it.

In the end when we like to enjoy media of back in the day's, we also get mostly just a selection of the good stuff that survived and the not the huge amounts that it really was.

Another easier example - go to a recordstore and search the 80's crates. While we all know how much great stuff there was made in this time, there's even much more commercial bullshit that is $$-music, made to make bucks back then and to be forgotten tomorrow, which is what it sounds like - aesthetically bankrupt!

all of it? I'm the same way with the early stuff. Still like Faith and Pornography. Loathe that mid period nitro pop bit in the middle with the exception of a few tracks. Disintegration is a masterpiece. Then they started making the worst music in the world.

Basically if you lost being able to listen to Disintegration, I want to give you a big hug...

I'm not sure U/WE have to decide what will be remained..
Important/aesthetic/good value etc (call it as u like) things are already, or not, part of "history" either u want it or not, and whatever the used media..
It's vain to think of any kind of controlling/directing what will be remainded..
But nothing prevents u from collecting/sorting/sequencing/displaying your own life/things if u think it has any kind of interest...
History will tell later.. not u, not me, not us.

life is to be lived, not recorded