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 porn,
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'll stick around.
The Internet and computers
are archival technology,
storing any media we want to
search, measure, or simply lose
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 judgment call
about what we want
to remember, what
we think now will be
worth recalling then.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
I'm erasing you and I'm happy.
[END PLAYBACK]
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 Inkjet 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.
OK, 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 web
host-- is that at least
insofar as it serves
another purpose, which let's 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
therein meaningless by default.
If you are not intentionally
saving something
but you are saving
it nonetheless,
do you still have an archive?
Heck, I mean 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
like, 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've quote, "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 gifs,
and whatever else people
thought the Internet was
for in the mid-'90s,
GeoCities is now ruin porn.
Like Pripyat or
Centralia, Pennsylvania,
it's interesting
mostly because it
is 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 doobly doo-- 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.
How am I not myself?
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' 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.
(SINGING) LOL.
(NORMAL VOICE) Let's
see what you guys had
to say about people
hating Internet memes.
Joe Hansen from
It's OK 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.
And we could-- yeah,
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 the YouTube
comment thread.
But, yeah, claiming that because
the Internet is connected,
everything is subject to
the same fitness is-- yeah,
is-- 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 Know Your Meme article
about the idea of meme elitism.
And Stefan Hayden
talked 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, um, smart?
No.
Australian.
You know, like a-- 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 as they're
showing up in more
marketing, used
by corporate entities
for advertising.
That it's hard to see them
as the, like, authentic thing
they used to be.
I-- 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
and not hoping for a laugh.
And, yeah, I've definitely
been in situations
with people in
meatspace where I say
something like ermahgerd and
then someone sneers at me.
And then I realize what I've
done and feel bad about myself.
Dwoodruf-- um,
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, you know,
maybe this is just this
particular moment in history
in that these things will
have a new meaning in X number
of years.
And that's also what I meant
by saying that, you know,
iPhones and Doc Martens and
tattoos are over, right?
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-- just, yeah.
I totally agree.
To TheMightyForeskin,
I thought the way
Brady said pokemons
was adorable.
I choose you, [INAUDIBLE].
This week's episode
is 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 Tom Wellmann
who points us towards the
five most interesting uses
of punctuation in literature.
It's so good.
Who would have thought a
dash could be so artful?
