Is the Internet, the new stone? (Details)

Stone? Sand on the beach.

We are displaying things people in the past didn’t ever considered significant so…

200 years from now only the stones will remain readable.

Art on the internet is ephemeral. Sites will go down; posts will be deleted; servers will become obsolete. Like so much in our culture, it gives at best a snapshot of a fleeting moment.

It certainly takes more talent to sculpt a block of stone into a work of art than it does to create a meme, and certainly more talent than to post on sites like these. I’ll take the statue.

there’s plenty of bad art and bad writing to go around. talent and taste are relative and arbitrary.

But. If Internet servers end up running for a LONG time, the stone will crumble to dust, while the info is still like new. Assuming humans don’t go extinct, but that’s another thread.

It all depends on future historians having a digital Rosetta Stone to decode ar hives. Just like iPhones not being able to use 32 bit apps, and no one being able to really print out WordPerfect documents anymore, or grab that file on the 1.2 mg diskette (let alone a t inch floppy) the preserved digital forever is only as good as the retrofitting hardware.

^Good point.

Stone is indeed the hardest material that people can observe. It may burst and turn into sand eventually, but that process can never be observed within not just one, but even several life times. If stone burst like that, those rocks at Stonehenge wouldn’t be there thousands of years after they were placed there.

It was no pure coincidence that Jesus named Peter “a stone” or “a rock”.

As the Internet is concerned, it’s such a specific and mystical thing, you know. Alone the three “W’s” are a very odd “coincidence”, given the fact that in Hebrew the abbreviation WWW reads 666.

I’m not superstitious and I don’t give a damn about it. Even if the Internet was called “Interchrist” or “Antichrist” it wouldn’t bother me at all, because I stand above all those religious or mystical interpretations of things. It’s not me to fear the Antichrist – or any other superficial figure for that matter – but it is them to fear me. Not me as a physical person of course, but me as an Intellect or as an Individuum. Or as a HUMAN, to be more precise, because a HUMAN stands above every thing.

The Internet is indeed a kind of “new stone”. It makes it possible for people to connect world wide. In my opinion, it exactly resembles the process that is going on in our brains. I imagine the world as a huge brain, with the Internet being all those bio-chemical processes that happen on its surface (and probably in its interior as well).

The problem with the Internet is not the Internet as such, but the fact that it is being used for inhumane or destructive purposes. The same thing is the case with oh-so-many other things, such as a knife, to name one of the simplest things in that connotation. A knife can be useful i.e. used constructively, but it can also be used destructively.

Our quasi civilization will not perish because of the Internet as such, but because of the fact that it always finds a way to misuse every thing, and turn it into the opposite of what it was initially meant for.

Answering your last question inside your question, I’d say it is by far better to have something carved into stone than on the Internet, because the Internet depends on several things, electricity being the most important basic. When electricity disappears, there will be neither Internet, nor anything else that depends on it.

For those among you, who believe that there was at least one civilization on Earth that got lost in course of time:

They surely had either Internet or something similar to it, but we never found anything. All we were able to learn from was some fragments written in either stone or wood or things made of wood (such as parchments or paper).