Vanishing Culture

The internet has evolved into the primary archive of our history and culture. Yet social networks get left behind and close up shop. Digital media sites go bankrupt. Companies stop selling their online products. Links rot. Files aren’t found. Everyone, obviously, has seen the following message countless times: 

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. The internet is a vast sea of content, and let’s face it, 90% of it is pretty rubbish anyway. So the loss of a single weirdly formatted, outdated webpage isn’t the end of the world.

Then again, as an article in Business Insider recently summarised:

It’s a topic that our community has picked up on a few times, most notably when directing everyone to Vanishing Culture: a Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. Coming in at 134 pages, it would be an understatement to call the report anything less than thorough. Remarkably, according to a graphic in it, an analysis of 5.4 million URLs shows that 26% are no longer working. RIP.

The report also includes some great quotes, like this one:

Overall, the report highlights the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives play in preserving culture for future generations. By empowering these institutions legally, culturally and financially, the public’s continued access to our cultural history and digital future remains safe. Without this support, however, the following becomes a reality: loss of public accountability and transparency, historical revisionism and manipulation, the destruction of cultural and historical records, and a negative impact on education and knowledge sharing.

The report includes essays and interviews with leading thinkers in this space, among them:

• Brooke Palmieri: artist and writer working at the intersection of memory, history and alternate realities
• Claire Wardle: co-founder of the non-profit First Draft, which helped organisations tackle the challenges of misinformation
• Josh Renaud: journalist publishing computer history research on his website, Break Into Chat, and interested in recovering lost or obscure software
• Jason Scott: software curator of the Internet Archive
• Jordan Mechner: American video game designer, graphic novelist and screenwriter
• And a special shout out to JD Shadel, who contributed an essay to the report, titled, 'What Early Internet Era GIFs Show Us About Preserving Digital Culture'.

“When we preserve and revisit the remnants of digital culture’s recent history,” their essay concludes, “it behoves us to remember that this networked realm, as imperfect and as frustrating as it can feel sometimes, is what we make it.”

Elsewhere, Shadel’s work covers lifestyle and tech, often focusing on trends where the online and the offline worlds seem to blur. Sidenote: the homepage of their website is something worth preserving possibly forever. See here:

Thankfully there are several organisations, such as the Internet Archive and the Web Design Museum, working hard to archive as much of the internet as they can. Web design, apparently, has come a long way. Remember these?

Digging deeper into our vanishing online archive, we came across the OAIS Model – The Open Archival Information System – which has informed much of contemporary thinking in this domain and defines role for creators, archivers and end users.

Community contributor Günseli Yalcinkaya pointed out another useful reference when looking into our vanishing culture, in the form of a 2023 book by James Bridle, called New Dark Age: Technology and the End of Future. Its blurb:

 “We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension.”

Broadening out the concept further, Noelle Weaver, another community contributor, talked about the idea of permanence versus transience in today’s modern world more generally. “I went to a UN futures event last month and we were talking about this,” she said. “A young man spoke up and said that he sees the idea that ‘nothing is permanent’ as a strong belief among his peer group, who have this sentiment about everything. And this is what he said that kind of blew my mind: ‘People my age even think why fall in love when chances are that love will not be permanent?’”

(Quite sad?)

She added, “There are a few other connected dots that point toward this loss that come to mind,” and linked to an article in The Week, published on April 9 2024, titled How Technology Helps and Harms Endangered Languages.

Looking ahead, at some point we’d like to revisit the topic of our disappearing web, with a special focus on the growing role AI is playing in shaping its future and if you missed our earlier Seed on Brands as Libraries, it's relevant and related.