M4TS: The jrichmanesq Blog

barthel:

In proofing a manuscript that’s examining online engagement for a 2009 London protest, they mention that the Facebook event page (right) is still up and active, with all the comments visible and able to be analyzed, while the actual organization’s website (left) is dead, vanished into an incomplete archive.org snapshot, with all its user-generated content gone as well. (The researchers saved their own copy of the website at the time.)

The idea that something posted online lives forever is massively wrong; in fact, its life depends on the type of content and where it’s posted, all of which determine how much interest other web actors will have in preserving it. (Not to mention how much accompanying contextual information they will be interested in preserving.) Ask anyone who’s tried to write a history of some part of the web more than 2 years old.

This is SO true. So so much of my online past, from mailing lists and BBS message sub posts to years worth of conversations on Makeoutclub and Consumating and other sites is just totally, almost-certainly-irretrievably gone. I’ve been online since 1992, and have spent virtually all that time “being social” (as opposed to, i dunno, gaming or web surfing), and there’s no record of 90% of it. And that saddens me, because I assumed at the time that that could never happen.