Ephemera

[sholio]

I was thinking today about Internet and ephemera and archiving ... specifically, thinking about it in the context of my realname blogging. I want to start blogging more on my website. I used to use layla/laylalawlor for that, but whereas the purpose of this LJ/DW is just to hang out and chat with people, the purpose of my realname blog is at least partly to be noticed, or to do stuff careerwise, and with the general Internet population migrating away from LJ clones as a platform (and also away from blogging, but SHHHHHH) I figured I'd start doing more on Wordpress for the time being.

Anyway, one of the things that's been stopping me from writing Serious Author Posts is the idea of putting all that work and effort into writing a thing, when it stands a very real chance of being gone in five years due to yet another site upgrade or a Wordpress crash or migrating to yet another platform or god knows. I want to write stuff that I can archive and go find fifteen years from now ...

But then I got to thinking about how much is still around from fifteen years ago, let alone how often I have the urge to go looking through it, and realized the answer is "very little" and "almost never". Most of my online presence prior to when I got on LJ in 2006 is gone now. The Sequential Tart message boards, where I spent so much time in 2000-2004, were deleted awhile back. Some years ago I deleted the Trigun Yahoo group I used to run in the early 2000s, because it'd been dead for years, was getting overrun with spam and I was sick of dealing with it. (I don't think I've ever felt bad about that, either.) The Talkaboutcomics message boards, where I ran a Kismet board for awhile, got deleted after the site owner died. I suppose the archives of some of the mailing lists I was on in the '90s still exist, if they were hosted on a relatively stable site (I know the World-Building mailing list archives were still being saved as recently as a few years ago) but I don't care enough to go find out.

.... and that's the thing, really. I don't think I realized how little I mind all of that old stuff being gone, all my old message board posts and emails and so forth. For the most part, I just don't have any desire to go reread any of it. Conversations are things of the moment, and rereading what basically amounts to transcripts of old conversations is just something I don't find myself doing, like, ever. Actually useful web pages and blog posts are something a bit different, or my own posts about my projects and fiction (I save all the stuff I've ever written, too, because that's still interesting and useful to me). And sometimes it's fun to rediscover an old joke I haven't read in ten years, or stumble across an old comment exchange and go, "Oh, that's the first time I ever talked to so & so!" But mostly ... I dunno. Those old conversations are dry as dust to me now. I don't recognize myself in them, for the most part -- actually, no, it's worse than that; running across an old comment thread involving a younger me is mostly a squirm-inducing exercise in second-hand embarrassment.

Number of times I have reread my teenage diaries as an adult: never.

It seems like the general trend online at the present time is towards more ephemeral modes of communication: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Twitter-like chat things that operate via phone (I feel so terribly old saying that; I don't even know the names of the current hangout hotspots!). They're difficult or impossible to search through; once things drop off the current page, they're gone, for the most part. And I think a lot of us older folks feel a bit threatened by that. I know I do.

But actually, conversations are ephemeral by their nature. Conversations in real life certainly are. I think those of us who got on the Internet during a particular time in its history (mid-90s to mid-00s) ended up with a skewed sort of idea of the Internet as this thing that was constantly archiving us, freezing all our correspondence, taking continual snapshots of our social lives from day to day. And we thought we'd want to keep that stuff around forever, but ...

But I'm starting to think it's no coincidence that the generation that grew up steeped in a ubiquitous Internet are also the ones who view Internet text as a transitory thing. And I'm pretty sure they're right. Conversations are things of the moment. They're to participate in, not to reread in detail. There are some conversations that are worth saving (working out plot details, say, for me as a writer; some particular memory-archiving; stuff like that) but most online conversations aren't any more worth saving than you'd bother going around tape-recording every conversation you have with your friends just in case you want to listen to the tapes again someday. There might be a certain amount of nostalgia in it, but even when it's some sort of irreplaceable social experience like, say, rereading the words of a person who's now dead and gone, trying to recapture how you felt when you were with them back then, it's just kind of sad, more than positive. They wouldn't want you to be rereading all your old conversations with them! They'd want you to go out and have new conversations and find new things to be happy about.

I dunno if this is just me. Maybe other people go through their old LJ archives more than I do? I guess I've spent most of my life obsessively hoarding anything that had any sort of emotional value to me -- old letters, papers, diaries, emails -- only to realize, now that I'm approaching (help) middle age, that I almost never look through it and I don't think it would actually be a positive thing if I did spend a lot of time looking through it. For me I think it's more beneficial than not that most of my old online correspondence -- the old message boards, the archives of the email address I had in college, etc -- is all gone now. It's hard for me to throw it away myself, but I don't miss it once it's gone.

ETA: Talking about this with Orion, I think the paradigm shift here, for me, might be from thinking of the Internet as a thing that's full of stuff you keep, versus thinking of it as something you do.

Comments

[mific]

I'm old and curmudgeonly so I can mourn the loss of diarists. So many great books of letters and autobiographies relied on paper diaries and journals. We thought we'd re-created that with internet blogs and journals, but as you say, not so much. It doesn't last. It's like ripping pages out of your paper diary and dropping them into a slow-moving river, or in tumblr's case, into white-water rapids. I can't get philosophical about viewing it as the moving finger constantly writing and moving on, because there's some amazing stuff being swept away, unarchived, unsearchable, lost when a site goes under. But on the other hand, there's just too much out there - impossible to keep up, in any sense, so if it were preserved, it'd be overwhelming I guess. It still bothers me, though, that the great diarists of the past will be blogging today, because it's easier and it's what we do, and there'll be no record unless they're self-archiving off-line. And who has the time for that, with all those journals out there to read?

[theladyscribe]

IDK how into libraries and archives you are, but this is a HUGE discussion happening in the world of archivists right now. How much of our digital footprint is actually worth saving? And what is the best way to save it? (Some archivists are arguing that the best way to preserve things like emails and twitter feeds and the like is to print them! Because analog copies of digital things will survive harddrive malfunctions and server crashes and file corruptions!) It's definitely more important for things like Major Company's memos and invoices, but it's something that affects basically all realms of future historical research. There's a lot of fear of a "digital dark age," where we lose important information because the digital data is lost to all the things that can go wrong on the internet.

(Um. This is something I'm really invested in, but your comments about not actually missing most of the things that have disappeared is a perspective that's not really been covered in the discussions I've seen about it.)

[ambyr]

I go back and read through old journal entries and correspondence when I go through a break-up, or someone dies, or there's another major rift in my life. It is as you say sad more than positive--like poking a bit of nerve-damaged flesh to see if there's still feeling. I don't necessarily think I'd mourn if they weren't there to pour over.

[merisunshine36]

Ooh, this is such a fun topic to chew over. All my friends know me as a compulsive gmail delete-er because I hate "digital clutter". People who archive every single e-mail "just in case" blow my mind. I do enjoy going back over old the journal posts, college-era correspondence, and letters I selected to keep.

On a macro scale, compulsive electronic hoarding like what we see with the internet archive/wayback machine is ridiculous. It is not a great tragedy if we fail to save every recipe blog or tweet from the White House. And on a practical scale, this digital clutter ultimately becomes physical. Whereas my mother's college letters could stay in a box in the basement, mine are housed on a server somewhere, which needs a land and a building, tons of electricity, and trained staff to manage it. Will the direct and indirect costs of maintaining everyone's data ever out pace the benefit of having it?

[muccamukk]

I actually like rereading my old LJ entries. I was a pretty embarrassing twenty-something, but it's neat seeing what I was doing ten years ago, and how my posting style has changed over the years.

Now, if the TORC boards died without a trace... my teen years don't need to be on record.

[sholio]

Yeah, believe it or not I DO really get this, because I'm also into history as a thing! But, like you said ... the sheer volume of data, and so much of it is stuff that would have been lost forever a generation ago -- the fact that we're writing down SO much more of it now gives us the possibility of "listening in" on what basically amount to other people's after-work bar chatter and water cooler talk and so forth (not to mention saving our own) ... I just feel like, in a way, the Internet magnifies by about a million times the whole hoarder "It's easier not to buy the thing in the first place than to throw it out once you've got it" mentality, but we were all pretty much okay before all this stuff started getting saved, and will be okay once it's gone. I also feel that "BUT SO MUCH INCREDIBLE STUFF IS BEING LOST" urgency, but I also wonder (this is something I was talking about to Orion last night, too) if having grown up in an era where you could, if not literally read the entire Internet, then you at least knew about most of the good bits, possibly gives us -- on some deep and fundamental level -- a skewed idea of the Internet as something where you have to obsessively save the good bits, because there's not really so much of it. Except now, it's so enormous that you could never possibly read even a fraction of the stuff worth reading in a whole lifetime.

But still, yeah, I definitely get what you're saying, especially the ever-increasing void of non-digital alternatives. And blogs are sort of a different animal to diaries anyway -- they're more performative, more public, more geared towards putting on a persona for others. So paradoxically, even as we're putting more of ourselves out there, we might be denying future generations of historians access to some of our most private thoughts.

[sholio]

Yeah - like I said in the comment above this one, I do get the historical/archival concerns, since history is one of the things I'm into. And yet ... I almost feel like for us as individuals, it's better to let more of it go, even if ultimately it leads to us being more poorly documented as a society? IDK ... I don't think the concerns about losing it are foolish or trivial, but for me as an individual, it feels like a sort of digital hoarding and it feels so good to have gotten myself around to a headspace where I view all these digital snapshots of my life as a series of transitory states of being rather than something to be saved forever and ever. Not that there aren't things I save -- I have a hard drive full of stuff I'd be devastated to lose, photos and writing and whatnot. But it was kind of a revelation to realize that most of my early digital life is gone, and I don't feel bad about that, any more than I feel bad about not having recorded all the conversations my friends and I had in our dorm back in the '90s. It belongs to a different era of my life now.

But I think the concerns about archiving are definitely valid, not trying to say they aren't!

[sholio]

Yeah, I kinda almost feel like ... speaking as someone who has slight hoarder tendencies, it's easier to not get something in the first place than to get rid of it once it's here, and the Internet's archival nature tends to create that problem. I definitely haven't lost the feeling that I need to hang onto it (I'd be terribly sad if my LJ got hacked and deleted, for example), and I do reread old entries occasionally, or old emails -- but yeah, it tends to be almost bad-nostalgia rather than good-nostalgia. It's like reading my really old fanfic: I'm not going to delete it all because of embarrassment, but I also don't feel the urge to go reread it for fun. Or, even if it reminds me of the good times, it also reminds me they're gone; it's like going back to your old hometown and doing a drive-by of your old house, but realizing that you can't go in because someone else lives there now. I'm actually glad to have lost most of the '90s and early 2000s stuff so it's not there to keep doing that with.

[theladyscribe]

I didn't think you were! I was just thinking that yours is a perspective I've not seen discussed very much in the academic circles where people are talking about it (and much of my own comment was for context more than anything).

It is a big question I think about a lot, though--how much of what I have written and posted on the internet in the last decade and a half is actually important, either to me now or me in the future (or future researchers/historians)? If/when FF.net dies, will I regret no longer having access to my fanfic from 2002? Do I really miss the comments section of the old Barrow Downs fic archive? The journals section of Council of Elrond? Answer to all of the above: no, not really.

[ranalore]

I think too there's been a shift in the bulk of the type of internet user, though whether the change in forum came first is probably a chicken or egg argument. As writers, I suspect it's taken us longer to achieve this paradigm shift, but I think there are a lot of internet users out there for whom the very text-based nature of many of the older Internet user interfaces was a bug rather than a feature, and making that bug shorter and more transitory makes it less buggy. Then you throw in other interface options, like audio, video, and photo files, and I think both the Internet in general and online fandom in particular are probably less weighted toward the diarists and long-form writers and archivists and readers than previously. Of course, I can only back this up with personal observation, so I could be way off-base. I am, after all, old. ;-)

[sholio]

Yeah, digital hoarding is exactly what it feels like to me too -- and I'm coming at this from a hoarder-type mentality. I'm one of those people who saves all the emails. Do I ever go back and look at them? Nope. Would it be good for me to throw them away? Probably. I'm actually glad the choice has been taken out of my hands with most of my early Internet presence.

And, speaking as someone who's slowly trying to undo my hoarder mentality, being more selective about the stuff you keep makes it more special. Going through my absolute shit ton of digital photos isn't nearly as much fun as looking at the handful of photos I have from my childhood.

[sholio]

*nods* Yeah, a couple people on LJ said likewise, and there have been times when I've been happy to refresh my memory on an old entry, now that I'm thinking about it. I don't want my LJ to vanish! Still, I remember how incredibly upset I was about the possibility of having my LJ deleted back in 2010 or whenever it was that DW started up, when it was all relatively recent and I was still actively involved with the same group of people I'd known more or less since I'd started on LJ. Now that all of that has receded into the past somewhat .... I mean, yeah, I'd still be devastated if it got deleted, but I feel much less attached to those older entries than I did when they were new entries, and I don't miss my old message board presence at all.

There are digital things I want to keep, and things I'm glad I still have, but I also feel like the most important part of the discussions I have online is the "now"-ness of them: it's the experience of the moment, not the fact that they've been archived so I could pore over them and try to recapture how I felt then. It's just not the same.

That said, however, there are a million different ways of doing the Internet, and I still hope everything doesn't go entirely to ephemera and leave us fogeys behind. ;)

[sholio]

Oh wow, that's a really fascinating point! I hadn't thought of that, but you're very right, I think - the Internet in the beginning was most welcoming to a certain kind of person, and now it's open to a much broader variety of people, with corresponding shifts in how the culture works. Interesting!

[helen_c]

Number of times I have reread my teenage diaries as an adult: never.

Hee. I have them somewhere. I took a quick look at one of them, when I finished college, and wow, was that painful and embarassing to read. :D

They're difficult or impossible to search through; once things drop off the current page, they're gone, for the most part.

Which is why I don't like FB very much.

FB and Twitter have their uses (and reading Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking made me realize what wonderful tools they can be, when used correctly) but it's difficult to have fannish discussions there. They weren't built for that purpose.

I dunno if this is just me. Maybe other people go through their old LJ archives more than I do? I guess I've spent most of my life obsessively hoarding anything that had any sort of emotional value to me -- old letters, papers, diaries, emails -- only to realize, now that I'm approaching (help) middle age, that I almost never look through it and I don't think it would actually be a positive thing if I did spend a lot of time looking through it.

You know, I'd never really thought about it. Intersting point.

I have old letters and diaries in the attic, and pretty much never even think about them. I like knowing they're there, and maybe one day, I'll take a look at them (just like you occasionnaly dig up old pictures of high school or college, spend a few minutes/hours remininscing before going back to your life).

And I like having my LJ archive around, but I almost never go through it. I sometimes look for a specifi discussion about fanfic, or about an episode because I happen to be re-watching a show and I know there was a discussion about the plot or the characters that I found interesting, but that's about it.

I used to burn CDs with pictures of tv shows, email discussions and so on, so I'd have copies of it, but I never go back to them.

The one thing I saved on my hard drive and I regularly go back to is the fanfic (mine, and stories from authors I loved). *That*, I don't want to lose.

[sholio]

Yeah, there's definitely digital stuff I keep and don't want to lose (losing everything on my hard drive would devastate me!). And I probably will never "throw out" my old LJ archives. On the other hand, it surprised me to realize that I'm not sure how much I'd actually mind if my old LJ entries did get deleted, considering how much I don't mind that the old message board archives and so forth are gone. I'd probably be sad for a little while, and there's definitely stuff I miss (like you, I do occasionally go back looking for a particular thing) .... but I know I'd get over it.

I'm glad I still have things like my parents' old letters to my grandparents from when they first got together and had me and my sister, and old family photos and such. If I had kids, it's possible they'd one day enjoy looking through my old journal entries (or possibly not, who knows XD) ... but I don't, and can't imagine my nephews and nieces being interested in it.

I guess we'll see how things develop in the future. What's old becomes new again, and maybe the generation that's growing up in an age of digital ephemera will eventually crave things that last. I just find it interesting that I'm kind of going the other way -- I'm getting less nostalgic and prone to hang onto stuff as I get older.

[torachan]

The main thing I look back on old posts for is to see when I did something or when something happened. Otherwise I would have no idea! I know it's possible to search Twitter if you archive it, so if I did most of my blogging on Twitter I'd probably want to make a backup just so I would be able to see when things happened.

But just looking back at old posts and convos randomly? Nope, not at all.

[sholio]

Yeah, I occasionally do that too, or look back over some event I described at the time to refresh my memory. It does serve as a sort of auxiliary memory-booster. But based on how rarely I look at them, I don't think my life would be meaningfully impacted if most of my conversations weren't being archived, which was a startling thing to realize.

[torachan]

Yeah, I mean, it's not a huge thing and without that I would just go back to pre-internet days of not really remembering when things happened. But it is nice to be able to pin down when I started a job or something major happened, even if it's not a feature I use every day. For fannish stuff, though, I honestly never look back at old entries.

[ranalore]

I'm just remembering a time when many of us would lament how difficult it was for vidders and artists to post their stuff on social media sites, how they'd usually have to buy their own space to host such files, and it seems like many of the new sites make putting up some of that content easier. It also seems like there's more room for more immediate reaction shots to media, that people who don't feel as comfortable trying to do long-form in-depth critiques can still share their views on new movies and shows and such, and so maybe we're losing some of the long-form stuff, but I think we're also getting input from people who just didn't speak up before. I feel like maybe some of the ephemera might, in fact, be what used to be lurkers now speaking up in the moment.

[sholio]

*nods* That's a good point, especially about lurkers becoming non-lurkers. The barriers are SO much lower now, in so many ways -- technological know-how, cost, accessibility, etc. (I'm still a little surprised when people who spend a lot of time online don't know HTML, but anymore I guess it's like knowing how to do anything on your car other than put gas in it: some people do, but the days are long gone when you couldn't even own a car without being able to rebuild the engine. And that's definitely a good thing for anyone who just wants to get to the store without having to spend half an hour just getting the car running. :D)