One of the areas of focus in my research on the past few years has been the ephemeral nature of modern journalism within the newer platforms of communication. The use of Instagram and Snapchat as a means to deliver news has been of interest to me as it represents news finding its way to citizens to create a better public sphere of engagement. At the same time, this focus of these type of site seems to accelerate the disappearance of the history of culture and society.
A major concern is how link rot, unreadable content from the older formats, and a lack of backing up information online is leading to the elimination of vast swaths of online content and resources. The history of the Internet is being lost to the ether of time. This fact can be seen as being harmless. One could look at projects like OoCities, the Geocities archive, and not feel a sense of cultural loss.
Heck, I still use my GeoCities page as an example of lousy Web 1.0.
Also, I can understand why some people want the “Right to Be Forgotten” as the Internet has a tendency to be a cruel place. The loss of this type of harmful content is probably for the best. The kind of content and knowledge I’m concern about is more about the elimination of cultural by-product that makes up the strata of eras within the Internet timeline.
I’ve been concerned about this information decay from the standpoint of somebody that is interested in the field of information studies. Information decay is one of the main reason that I’ve been using archive.org as the linking source for my articles currently as a means of fighting the “Digital Dark.” Lost information leads to the loss of knowledge.
This truism has primarily been on my mind after discovering my entire website was deleted.
It was a few weeks ago that I discovered that my old site was replaced by a “Suspended Page” as I forgot about this page for so long that my account was no longer up to date. The hosting company therefore rightly deleted the previous site. This loss of information has encouraged me to more diligent in my backing up of work online and to always follow Rule #32 from Tilton’s Laws of the Academic Universe: “3:2:1 is not just a good idea, it’s the law. You must remember to back up correctly or else.”
I suffered the “or else” in this case.
My lack of backups of this archive, and by extension me forgetting about this site, came from a significant change in my workflow. Mainly that most of my communication online has been produced to be broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I enjoyed the quickest of expressing my thoughts and artifacts via the platforms of various social networks that I belong to. I fell into the trap of the “ease of use” of the platform, which moved me away from producing more extended content on my own site.
This trap led me directly to the ephemeral walled Gardens of Earthly Delights, feeding the streams and feeds of the social network to pour out into the sea of static. I would be more likely to share and watch the content be lost in the flood of others’ content and shares. I was less concerned with being thoughtful with my time, attention, and effort to be better connected to the larger “whole” of the community online. It was easy to focus on the pathos of an argument rather than the logos or ethos of the position.
This rationalization of being drawn into the more base and emotional responses on Facebook led me to redesign shanetilton.com and use this platform more often. I think I have recovered all but one of my previous posts that were lost in the great purge. It was nice to go back over my earlier works and look at how I’ve changed on the course of this decade. It’s given me a chance to clarify previous ideas and present incomplete thoughts in a more explicit manner.
The process I’m following to try to get back to ground zero is what my Internet Friend Merlin Mann would call a fresh start and a modest change. I’m trying to maintain a central archive, back it up once in a while, and avoid placing all of my Internet baggage on the disappearing platforms.
