Last year, Nanna Schilstrup our digital past. Old blogs, once buzzing with activity and personal memories, are unceremoniously deleted by platforms and users. The Internet Archive, a bastion of digital preservation, is under constant attack. Search engines continue to erode, making information increasingly difficult to find and access. Movies and TV shows disappear from streaming platforms without warning. You realize too late that your VCR doesn’t work and your DVDs are out of print.
How many of us have lost entire chapters of our youth due to a Photobucket account that became inaccessible? When our children want to look back at photos from our youth, we often say, “Sorry. You may be forced to say the disappointing words, “Baby.” The memories we once cherished are lost to the sands of time, scattered across defunct platforms like Instagram, Google Photos, and iCloud. You can forget your password, close your account by mistake, lose your external hard drive in transit, or become obsolete in ways that traditional photo albums can’t. Big Tech collects and destroys our data with impunity, and we can’t stop it.
Perhaps even more important than the loss of personal memories is how we evaluate the content we post online. We often fail to recognize the importance of what seems like trivial or irrelevant information at the time. As a result, online activities such as the Facebook groups that may have shaped our online identities and the private LiveJournal communities that built entire subcultures are lost to thin air, never to be archived.
In her book Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture, Judith Mae Fasala laments the state of some of the sources she needed to write her book, saying, “This project… The sites we are considering are not necessarily archives in the real sense; they do not necessarily seek to preserve text, and they are not necessarily easy to navigate.”
The instability and insecurity of our digital age is the fact that no one is taking screenshots, bots aren’t crawling the data, and content is being excluded from archiving tools like Wayback Machine. It gets even worse. It never existed. This loss of context is further exacerbated by the political nature of internet culture reporting, and journalists who report on these issues themselves are often unable to accurately capture the nuances and complexities of their subject matter. As a result, digital communities have become siled, suspicious, and unwilling to talk to the people who want to record history. Lore in the digital world is passed down from generation to generation, sometimes erasing tribes, families, subcultures and factions.
We sometimes feel like we live in an oral culture that relies primarily on the spoken word rather than the written word. Although the Internet is a text-based medium, the task of contextualizing the unique creole of memes, slang, and digital subcultures requires context that preserved fragments cannot always provide.
Why isn’t it more urgent to preserve our digital past? We should all know by now that there is no such thing as “just the Internet.” The internet is part of our culture. Will future generations have access to a complete picture of the digital world, or are they destined to be fragmented and distorted?
