John Cabrera Quotes

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet, everyone decided everything should stick around forever.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.

I love documenting. Having these videos forever is priceless to me, so I think I will be doing it forever, but who knows if YouTube is gonna be around forever.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

I want to prevent us reifying 'the Internet' as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written.

We've had a digital revolution, but we don't need to keep having it. And I'd like to look after that, to look what comes after the digital revolution.

So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

Snapchat changed that perception of deleting something as bad. Online, typically you delete something if it's bad or if it's really embarrassing.

People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.

If we don't record our own history on the Net, it will disappear.

Your next SMS will probably be around longer, and remain more legible, than your tombstone. For, unlike your tombstone or even your mortal coil, your texts may be worth something.