Today I’m really focused on what parts of the internet are more permanent than others. A decade from now Today I’m really focused on what parts of the internet are more permanent than others. I’m curious about what will happen in the future, “A decade from now will GitHub and YouTube still be housing content?” It is really about my effort to question what will remain online year after year. Back on May 20, 2021 I released an album on YouTube called, “This is an ambient music recording called dissonant dystopia.” That work of art is 33 minutes of dissonant music and it will exist online as long as YouTube houses it. That means its existence is pretty much tied to the permanence of YouTube as a platform. I’m going to guess that a lot of content faces the same constraint. The continued existence of that art is tied to the platform where it is hosted. I could probably post the album to a few other places to increase the odds of it outlasting YouTube as a platform, but I’m not sure that is an effort that is worth my time. My guess about the future of online permanence is that Instagram and YouTube will continue to exist for as long as the modern internet persists as a technology. 

It is times like these when I begin to wonder what will happen to the world wide web when pockets of private isolation creep up within the walls of applications. We are seeing a fragmentation of what was the open internet. Be at the continued growth of dark pockets of the online world or just application based islands. You are seeing parts of the internet that you can gain access to the front door, but they are not truly a part of an open internet. They are something else and that something else is evolving right now before our eyes. We could very well see a change in the format of the content in the next decade. Sure hypertext has connected the world, but a metaverse will potentially be a video/image stream that is way beyond a text based communication method. Keep in mind that this weblog barely contains any imagery and the primary method of communicating content is text based. In a metraverse of rooms, zones, areas, or community spaces it is entirely possible that it will be immersive and that image and sound will define the method of communication that will be occurring. 

Really the most advanced method of communication I have considered is either recording these missives as audio for a podcast or working to make a video version of a podcast which just really includes a perspective of me reading the content. Either way that will be a one way method of communication either via text dissemination, audio recording, or video recording. It will be nothing outside of an asynchronous method of communication. I might respond to a comment or a note that somebody provided, but it would not be within an immersive environment. It would be purely asynchronous in nature.