B4_#042 // The Tomb // Christopher Delahunt

This tomb questions if we should begin to preserve our collective digital pasts.

As websites go out of fashion and new forms of social media emerge, old ways of communicating become defunct and fall into ruin. These ruins of former websites such as Myspace or Geocities, were once digital homes to millions, if not hundred of millions of people. Unfortunately, due to the rapid evolution of digital content, we seem to place almost no gravitas on collecting, preserving and archiving social media content: it all seems rather throw-away. 

Perhaps in thousands of years time after the fall of our civilisation and the rise of another even more advanced one, the physical ruins of civilisations past will still remain (the great pyramids of giza as one example will live on), however, the digital ruins of our current civilisation will remain forever forgotten, only servers, data centres and defunct fiber optic cables will remain. Questions posed by the future of the human race may never be answered; “what were these ‘servers’ for”, “what was a ‘universal serial bus’?”…”how did people of the 21st century actually ‘surf the net’?”…

Future civilisations may never know…

Christopher Delahunt is a M.Arch Student at the Bartlett School of Architecture