World of Tomorrow: Humanity in the Outernet

"We are now connected through a neural network"

Archives are used to store information and to pull information from the past. Many archives are accessible and can be sorted through with ease. This being said, there are archives that require paywalls. These paywalls restrict the access to the content inside. This raises the question of who can access information and what information should be archived as well. Should everything be archived and preserved? What makes an archive an archive?

Archive can be defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: A place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept. This has not changed since most archives have now been digitized and transferred from print media into digital content. The study of archives have had some critique upon it since being digitized. 

Archives can hold many items ranging from specific to diverse. But what makes an archive an archive? Many digital humanists argue upon this because of the many different works being done. Does a personal archive of tweets constitute as an archive that everyone should be able to access? Or does an archive of the work of an author mean more to archives as whole?

In World of Tomorrow we can see this question being raised of what gets stored and where it gets stored in this massive archive of the Outernet. Anything and anyone can be accessed, uploaded, downloaded, transferred, watched, and followed through this neural network. Anything or it should be said anyone has the potential to be stored within the outernet.

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