Most Online Content Is Crap. How Will We Decide What To Save?

This week the Library of Congress mapped out an ambitious vision to expand its collection of digital content and broaden access to all of it. On the surface, cataloging all of this data seems like the ultimate impossible task because of how exponentially it is growing. It’s hard to imagine how any one group will be able to make sense of it all.

Yet this week there were also stories of a tool developed at MIT that can help automatically erase anyone or anything from a photo and Dropbox introduced a new feature that will allow users to search for text inside of images. All of this innovation points to the fact that the biggest challenge in the future may not really be cataloging all the data that is out there.

Instead, the even greater question we will need to answer is what data is even worth cataloging and saving in the first place.