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Here's an idea: the internet is an archive, just not the best one...yet.
Besides the conflicting opinion that the internet is EITHER for cats or ***, there is another
set of conflicting senses regarding its nature.
On the one hand, the digitization and databasification of culture--and of THE WORLD--is a BOON--stuff
will be organized, and it will stick around.
The internet and computers are archival technology: storing any media we'd want to search, measure,
or simply loose a Sunday browsing.
The growing sea of books on Google and Gutenberg, images in the Library of Congress, and films
on the Prelinger Archive is easily celebrated.
BUT! On the other hand! The stuff FROM the network... that stuff is often considered fleeting.
An email isn't as REAL or impressive as a letter, status updates and image macros are
momentary, meaningless, a dime a dozen. Just ephemeral.
In other words: things from the "real world" are worth saving; things FROM the network
... are just ... stuff.
But what if this attitude is TOTALLY wrong?
Somewhere in here is a judgement call about what we WANT to "remember" - what we think
NOW will be worth recalling THEN.
And by that I mean historically, and culturally worthwhile. The recollection of facts and
ideas, more practical stuff, is another, though just as important matter entirely that - actually
- our friend Mr. Anthony Carboni is talking about on DNews today, so you should totally
make sure that you check that out. Our sense of memory though is pretty different.
We have always used our technology--media and otherwise--to REMEMBER. Cave painting,
knot tying, from printing press to ink jet printer--
--the ability to record and recall that which we can't or don't is a necessary, if sometimes
secondary, feature of media. There is no piece of media that does not record the world; EVERY
piece of media ARCHIVES.
Okay but let's talk about WHAT Archive means. An archive is the purposeful collection of
stuff WORTH something, at the very least worth REMEMBERING.
Ephemera is the opposite of the archive's contents. Like cocktail napkin notes, to do
lists, and pictures of other people's family members you find at the flea market, ephemera
serves an immediate purpose, and is then exhausted of its WORTH.
Once disembodied from its original context, its importance fades. It might as well be
sky writing or a drawing in the sand at low tide.
"Who needs to dredge up old emails? Or Advice Dog? Or this tweet?", says a deeply buried
part of the brain that judges the weightlessness of digital objects to be an indication of
their worth.
But, I mean, the very promise of search boxes and bookmarking tools, tagging and databases
and any and every service built on top of them--
--Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, your webhost--
--is that, at least insofar as it serves another purpose (which lets be honest is usually advertising)
the stuff you're looking for will still be there when you try to recall it.
When we put something ON the internet we usually feel like it has been "saved," like the internet
itself is always already archiving.
Which is maybe why we don't value so many digital things; besides their ephemerality,
their mere existence usually suggests that they're already preserved. No extra scrapbooking
needed.
The internet is the parts and practice, the ACTION of an archive, if it is not the intentionality
and cultural importance of an archive like the Library of Congress is. Which I guess
you could very easily argue makes it exactly NOT an archive, and therefore makes the things
contained there in MEANINGLESS by default... ?
If you are not INTENTIONALLY saving something, but you are still saving it nonetheless, do
you still have an "archive"?
Heck, in some cases and places the internet is the active disregard of the archive.
Most famously and purposefully: 4chan lets inactive or not-active-enough threads 404,
to be gone forever unless they're submitted by a user to 4chanarchive.org
But the evaporation of digital content is not only or even mostly technologically determined.
Much like your favorite childhood comic book shop or that bar you really liked... sometimes
things just ... go away-- downed servers, shuttered websites, broken links.
The internet is not and has never been the perfect archiving machine we sometimes assume it to be.
This is exactly why people like Jason Scott and the Archive Team exist: when a piece of the
internet is marked for deletion, they try to save it.
They have "done [their] best to save history before it's lost forever."
That fifth to last word, "history", is an important one. Because... well... it's true:
the internet and its contents are now PART OF OUR HISTORY.
The archive team, most famously, saved almost the entirety of OG web host Geocities before
it was razed by Yahoo!
Once an internet metropolis of song lyrics, animated-jaifs and whatever else people thought
the internet was for in the mid-90s--
--Geocities is now... ruin ***. Like Pripyat or Centralia Pennsylvania, it's interesting mostly
because it's frozen in a particularly evocative state of decay.
Disembodied from the greater network--because Geocities exists now as a torrent that you
download, and not a set of websites that you visit, link in the dooblydoo--we see how alive
the internet is in its references.
Full of broken links, missing images and flash... Geocities has become, in a weird way, a kind
of faded memory.
The Geocities torrent is a snapshot of what millions of people thought a website was for.
It is an archive of what they considered WORTH archiving.
But the archive team didn't save Geocities, they saved a ghost of it. Once removed from
the network it becomes a faded image of itself.
By comparison a book, materially at least, is an island. It doesn't need to be in a library
to fulfill its main purpose; the same is not true of most networked server contents.
Usenet, 4chan, Geocities and even the internet in general thanks to The Wayback Machine,
are all "saved" in locations that are not their original, but they lose something of
themselves in that process.
Maybe because these things are themselves Archives? We have archives archiving archives,
and a recording of a recording always loses something.
But, like Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room, something else is also gained.
In his awesome book Mechanisms, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum talks about how, although we
treat them as fleeting...
...each digital object is in many ways more itself than any physical document.
He explains that though they behave "immaterially" through near-instant transfer, copying, or
deletion... each file, even the "same" file in different locations, is verifiably unique.
Even the most ephemeral digital thing--like a youtube comment, an image board post, or
any random bit from the geocities archive--can and if you look closely enough DOES have all
of the distinctiveness of a physical object.
It is our attitude, supported by technological practices, that causes us to see this ... stuff
as mere cruft...
as not worthy of remembering--even though it is, like all media--remembering something
of the world for us.
You can point to one tweet, ANY tweet, and say "that tweet is not important".
Same with personal websites, image macros or Facebook photos.
But what of the image of the world that is constituted in MILLIONS of those things? What
does the Library of Congress's TWITTER VAULT say about US? And does that justify archiving it?
What do you guys think? Does the internet need a more purposeful archive? Will we want
to remember this digital ephemera later?
Let us know in the comments and we keep all of our subscribers in a database because we
think you guys are worth remembering.
Also, don't forget to check out Anthony's companion video to this one over at DNews
about whether or not the internet is messing up our recollection of things.
Also check out DNews every day. Because they're cool and good.
Loooooool!
Let's see what you guys had to say about people hating internet memes.
Joe Hanson from It's Okay To Be Smart provides some helpful biological perspective and boils
down some of these ideas to that of memes and fitness in groups and yeah, you know I
wonder how many of the people who show this dislike are from the originating groups and
how many want to appear as though they are from the originating groups. We could have
talked a lot more about who those people are and who those groups are, where they are,
like I see it on Tumblr and Reddit and definitely ye olde Youtube comment thread. But yeah claiming
that because the internet is connected everything is subject to the same fitness is yeah, I
totally agree, not a responsible point to make and also not true, and I hope we didn't
make it.
Relatedly Trombe De Riz points us to a Knowyourmeme article about the idea of meme elitism and
Stephen Hayden talks about the, I guess timing of the internet, making it so that popularity
can kind of move in waves and that it's not like broadcast popularity, that it doesn't
just hit the population all at once.
To Yann Mirnoir-- smart? No! Australian! You know, like a burning campfire on the beach
during a beautiful sunset... in Sydney.
Markhor Matt says that it is getting maybe harder to find humor in internet memes because
it is not always clear where they come from, that as they're showing up in more marketing,
used by corporate entities for advertising, that it's hard to see them as the authentic
thing that they used to be. I know that feel. I can't believe I just said that.
Unqualified Gamers says that maybe we're looking for humor in internet memes where we shouldn't
and that these things are just ways that we talk now. It's not someone trying to make
a joke, it's just someone communicating an idea, not hoping for a laugh. And yeah, I've
definitely been in situations with people in meat space where I say something like "errmagurd"
and then someone sneers at me and then I realize what I've done and feel bad about myself.
To dwoodruf, yeah, I absolutely remember forwards and chain emails and all that other stuff.
I think this kind of gets to some of what we were talking about where maybe this is
just, this particular moment in history, and that these things will have a new meaning
in x number of years. And that's also what I meant by saying that iPhones and Doc Martins
and tattoos are 'over'. That they're not actually 'over', they just don't necessarily mean exactly
or only the thing that they originally meant when they were new or novel. So yeah, I totally agree.
To TheMightyForeskin: I thought they way Brady said Pokemans was adorable. I choose you Pikagoo.
Pohk-ee-mohns.
This week's episode was brought to you by the hard work of these Good Guys and Gals
Greg. We have a subreddit, an IRC, and a Facebook. Links in the doobly-doo.
And the Tweet of the week comes from Thom Wellmann who points us towards the 5 most
interesting uses of punctuation in literature. It's so good! Who would've thought a dash
could be so artful.