![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oceania Had Always Been at War With Eastasia: One More Repetitive Meditation on the Fragility of Present-Day Knowledge
Someone else’s server transfer yesterday, accompanied by the usual glitches with the existing links to my LJ posts, reminded me that for the past twenty years I have been reading writers' meditations about the rapid transience of digital knowledge: Any older essay you read online is likely to have links that lead only to dead URLs, so that in some cases you can’t follow up a single reference.
When you reach a live URL, as often as not the writer has linked to a page that lists only What Is Happening Today, not the information the writer wanted you to know regarding What Was Happening Five Months Ago and Why. If not, then the maintainer or author of the page will as often as not have thought better of it all, and rewritten the entire text so that the quotation that was accurate at the time of citation is no longer even to be found in the document.
We can’t get rid of our slightest or most injudicious piece of typing; our e-mails and our web pages continue to exist on some backup server no matter how assiduously we set out to eradicate our traces. But we live in a world in which if we don’t make our own personal copies of things we cherish, the entire edition, every last copy, will be obliterated, except for the Master Copy which is kept in an archive to which we have no access and, as many court cases have shown, sometimes even no clear idea as to exactly who has maintained it or whether it actually still exists.
I’ve written before about my experience with the website of Howard Finster, who in 1986 I called the first postmodern folk artist. (It was in the introduction to the Art Papers issue on “The Crisis in Knowledge: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postmodernity,” which still exists in lots of hard copies, but good luck finding someone who can sell you one.)
In late summer 2001, I had just realized I should copy the jpegs of Howard’s new artworks as they were scanned and posted on the site—his family had turned into excellent marketing webmasters at the dawn of the twenty-first century—both for the sake of keeping track of the number written on each work and for the texts that Howard inscribed on the back of each otherwise pretty much standard piece. (He did angels, heroes of American invention, visions of other worlds, and so on…you could look it up.)
The day in beginning-autumn 2001 that his death was announced, I rushed to the site and downloaded copies of everything. As I had expected, by the next morning the entire site had been transformed into an improvised memorial and all the images removed.
Unfortunately, I experienced a hard drive crash before I had done my usual diskette backup, and I have never spoken to a Howard Finster scholar who also made a copy of the website as it existed on the final day of Howard Finster’s life.
Thanks to historians of material culture, if we know which archive to go to, we can find complete sets of supermarkets’ weekly newspaper inserts (well, maybe not) and the monthly price lists mailed out by minor presses. I assume that historians of digital culture are likewise making backups of the state of certain websites every time the page changes, but just as with the aforementioned hard-copy archives, knowing how to find them is not quite as simple as one would think. I have been trying to track down copies of my own reviews as they appeared on long-since-defunct web archives, and in some cases, someone’s personal copy will appear momentarily and then sink back into the search-term ether.
I seemingly managed to destroy an ancient website proposing a World’s Fair for Atlanta just by bookmarking it, downloading highlights that I found of greatest interest, and thereby apparently reminding its creators that they hadn’t ever got round to taking the thing down after the proposal wasn’t accepted.
Someone else’s server transfer yesterday, accompanied by the usual glitches with the existing links to my LJ posts, reminded me that for the past twenty years I have been reading writers' meditations about the rapid transience of digital knowledge: Any older essay you read online is likely to have links that lead only to dead URLs, so that in some cases you can’t follow up a single reference.
When you reach a live URL, as often as not the writer has linked to a page that lists only What Is Happening Today, not the information the writer wanted you to know regarding What Was Happening Five Months Ago and Why. If not, then the maintainer or author of the page will as often as not have thought better of it all, and rewritten the entire text so that the quotation that was accurate at the time of citation is no longer even to be found in the document.
We can’t get rid of our slightest or most injudicious piece of typing; our e-mails and our web pages continue to exist on some backup server no matter how assiduously we set out to eradicate our traces. But we live in a world in which if we don’t make our own personal copies of things we cherish, the entire edition, every last copy, will be obliterated, except for the Master Copy which is kept in an archive to which we have no access and, as many court cases have shown, sometimes even no clear idea as to exactly who has maintained it or whether it actually still exists.
I’ve written before about my experience with the website of Howard Finster, who in 1986 I called the first postmodern folk artist. (It was in the introduction to the Art Papers issue on “The Crisis in Knowledge: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postmodernity,” which still exists in lots of hard copies, but good luck finding someone who can sell you one.)
In late summer 2001, I had just realized I should copy the jpegs of Howard’s new artworks as they were scanned and posted on the site—his family had turned into excellent marketing webmasters at the dawn of the twenty-first century—both for the sake of keeping track of the number written on each work and for the texts that Howard inscribed on the back of each otherwise pretty much standard piece. (He did angels, heroes of American invention, visions of other worlds, and so on…you could look it up.)
The day in beginning-autumn 2001 that his death was announced, I rushed to the site and downloaded copies of everything. As I had expected, by the next morning the entire site had been transformed into an improvised memorial and all the images removed.
Unfortunately, I experienced a hard drive crash before I had done my usual diskette backup, and I have never spoken to a Howard Finster scholar who also made a copy of the website as it existed on the final day of Howard Finster’s life.
Thanks to historians of material culture, if we know which archive to go to, we can find complete sets of supermarkets’ weekly newspaper inserts (well, maybe not) and the monthly price lists mailed out by minor presses. I assume that historians of digital culture are likewise making backups of the state of certain websites every time the page changes, but just as with the aforementioned hard-copy archives, knowing how to find them is not quite as simple as one would think. I have been trying to track down copies of my own reviews as they appeared on long-since-defunct web archives, and in some cases, someone’s personal copy will appear momentarily and then sink back into the search-term ether.
I seemingly managed to destroy an ancient website proposing a World’s Fair for Atlanta just by bookmarking it, downloading highlights that I found of greatest interest, and thereby apparently reminding its creators that they hadn’t ever got round to taking the thing down after the proposal wasn’t accepted.
