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I worry about this a lot, given that my newsletter Tedium relies on old newspapers to tell stories and we've effectively gutted the farm system in interest of b

I worry about this a lot, given that my newsletter Tedium relies on old newspapers to tell stories and we've effectively gutted the farm system in interest of big business. I think the internet is going to have a rough long-term effect on history because, while information is easy to present online, preserving it can be nearly impossible. In an ephemeral world, it's easier than ever to destroy the ephemera. That scares me. It should scare you too.

DamnInteresting 3y ago
I am likewise a historian/author who relies on newspaper archives for a lot of my research. I have been maintaining my site for 17+ years, and if one visits my older writings, many of the source links are long dead. Of course there is the Internet Archive, but if one looks into the stewardship of that project, it is quite vulnerable in the long term. There are key people whose departures would compromise the viability of the project. Perhaps we need the digital equivalent of the Svaldbard seed vault for digital archives--a state-maintained facility storing the bulk of Internet history in a geologically stable server farm.
- shortformblog 3y ago
  It’s disappointing to see that my comment was voted down. I wasn’t trying to self-promo, but rather trying to highlight that my point of view was valuable to this discussion. Like DamnInteresting, I literally work in this space. I see these issues up close. And I think that there is a real risk that we’re going to have echoes of what actually happened long-term because of link rot and similar factors. I once did a piece about an early internet-era book in which, as an experiment, I tested to see if the links worked. Most of them were dead. But the book was still with us. That is the real problem with internet culture. All the stuff from before 1995 or so will make it online because it is largely in physical form. We have already lost most of the good stuff produced after it, despite the Internet Archive’s best efforts.
jccalhoun 3y ago
I've been doing some research on early 90s videogame industry and so much of the stuff on early websites is just gone because it was before archive.org started or it was things like proto-podcasts recorded to real audio that archive.org didn't capture. Interviews with creators of games and beta screenshots are just gone.

DamnInteresting 3y ago

I am likewise a historian/author who relies on newspaper archives for a lot of my research. I have been maintaining my site for 17+ years, and if one visits my older writings, many of the source links are long dead. Of course there is the Internet Archive, but if one looks into the stewardship of that project, it is quite vulnerable in the long term. There are key people whose departures would compromise the viability of the project. Perhaps we need the digital equivalent of the Svaldbard seed vault for digital archives--a state-maintained facility storing the bulk of Internet history in a geologically stable server farm.

shortformblog 3y ago
It’s disappointing to see that my comment was voted down. I wasn’t trying to self-promo, but rather trying to highlight that my point of view was valuable to this discussion. Like DamnInteresting, I literally work in this space. I see these issues up close. And I think that there is a real risk that we’re going to have echoes of what actually happened long-term because of link rot and similar factors. I once did a piece about an early internet-era book in which, as an experiment, I tested to see if the links worked. Most of them were dead. But the book was still with us. That is the real problem with internet culture. All the stuff from before 1995 or so will make it online because it is largely in physical form. We have already lost most of the good stuff produced after it, despite the Internet Archive’s best efforts.

jccalhoun 3y ago

I've been doing some research on early 90s videogame industry and so much of the stuff on early websites is just gone because it was before archive.org started or it was things like proto-podcasts recorded to real audio that archive.org didn't capture. Interviews with creators of games and beta screenshots are just gone.