Digitizing Our Lives

For this week’s readings we read about the September 11 archive website that was set up after the attacks to collect and make public personal interpretations of the events. The author, James T. Sparrow goes into great detail about how and why they started this on-line archive. He states that there was a need for a place where people could go and contribute their own little part of history. He states “the website they visited- and built in the process, in many cases- was the September 11 Digital Archives, an online archive built by ordinary people who chose to document their small parts of this globe-shaking event…”  (pg. 398). The idea of creating digital archives so close to the event was probably very therapeutic for some people because it gave them a place to share their stories while also making a significant contribution to history. Sparrow continues on to talk about the trials and triumphs of the digital archives and a lot of it was unnecessary (the parts about how they came up with the domain name and such) but the whole project was a really interesting idea.  I did a little poking around the internet and I found that other digital archive sites that do the same thing that Sparrow and his team did. There is one forHurricane Katrina for example.

This is what came up when I Googled myself.
The top on is the only one that is really me. 

I also enjoyed the video about preserving your reputationon-line. I think that is very important these days because it is super easy to just Google someone and basically find out whatever you need to know about them. I Googled myself and it was creepy the amount of information that was out there on my. I have all my social media sites blocked that I use and I limit my posting on the sites I can’t limit. I think a lot of people especially students need to take the time to Google/ Bing themselves and see what comes up and really take this video’s advice. “Would I want my Grandfather to see this? Would I want my employer to see this?” Those are important questions to ask yourself when you post something on the internet.

The video entitled Big Date: Drowning in Numbers is on a website with cookies by the way so be careful. Also the video was very interesting to think about. I was actually talking to someone yesterday (during the Super Bowl and their endless GoDaddy.com commercials (beware, very awkward) about the vastness of the internet and she was so confused how a company like GoDaddy.com can sell space on the internet when, according to this video, it is almost completely limitless. I guess that would be an interesting question to think about but it probably comes down to if you want to figure out how to write the code to get your page up, as well as many other things. The video does make me wonder, are computers going to take over the world, I mean think about how many millions of servers we’re going to need to hold all of that data, soon there won’t be any room for us on this planet… just servers and computers.. dun dun dun!!!!