The week without FRN, brought up some of the old trauma of the demise of The Secret Naturist Society’s loss. In spite of the banter, I believe that this site is now a wealth of information on pertinent naturist topics and a piece of literature. It is good for the newbie. It is good for the newly enthused. It is good stuff to have access to for memory and research. It a fun place to wander through. It is important.
Bluetrain wrote, “It is said that anything written on the internet is there forever but I have my doubts. All good things must come to an end someday.”
"All things must pass," I think is the popular line. I am curator of several venerable old pieces of information and collections of cool stuff, for example, a personal library. Some good things hold, but, yup, Bluetrain, you nailed it, stuff passes on the internet. For instance, old nude pictures, might become a part of vintage collections, but heck, I stopped looking like that, i probably look better, it was a different life, if someone did continue to distribute them. Of course I’m not mentioning, “how many people would I give a dang seeing a pic of me with my clothes off, let ‘em look.”
Unless you are some viral hot babe pic, your picture will probably not go very far and the internet being as vast as it is, the likelihood of discovery producing any harmful consequences is not much. Even porn sites get cluttered, "millions of amateur pics!" What are the odds that your old "lifted from another site pics" will be seen on that venue after a short time among millions of pics.
The net's durability is yet to be proved. So far, it doesn't have many old book-like collections, except the rude intrusion by the NSA collecting EVERYTHING. It has always had this "1984" character to it. All of the literature gets destroyed after a while and there is no history, or it gets rewritten. Often it gets buried under the newer references to the same subject. The past gets wiped out and nobody learns from it. There are now, literature collections being made available to the public, like libraries on line, but it is classics mostly and will those sites endure? Even public libraries act like that, tossing all sorts of needed information out. If it doesn’t get used like it used to. Attempts are made, but the internet isn't such a good repository.
I like to see that really important obscure Youtube stuff is out there. But there are no guarantees. Somebody tries to make them their intellectual property and just stuffs them away where nobody can enjoy them, or expand their knowledge of history. The commercial movie distributors have a limited selection, based on popularity, which limits what is available, by its "commercial potential" (Remember Frank Zappa, "Freakout"). Good art, doesn't endure like it used to. It gets tossed out at the push of a button.
Popular trends overwhelm the old trends. Our memories are overwhelmed, which are fallible in the same way, we lie to ourselves, more often than we would prefer. That's one reason that we need access to these libraries, repositories and records. In some cases it is like book burning. One man's rubbish is another man's valuable.
So, I figure that my website has an important message and I'll keep it up in order to keep informing people about it. Still, there is the trend for most of it to be ignored. People see the new stuff, but much of the older stories, which are just as good and some maybe more relevant, are not read by them. So, I wonder about the value of posterity.
Wordpress was even promoting rebranding and refurbishing old popular stuff and republishing to increase traffic, keeping the site active. Will we be influenced by that trend?
Then there is all of that old stuff that you don't want out there that just won't go away.
At least, I have an ass kick collection of memories on my website that will be wonderful to look back at for many years, personally.
Jbee