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Archives and Continuity
Aug. 4th, 2020 12:14 pmThis year in particular, I've been doing a little editing on the Creatures Wiki, as well as working to thoroughly save some of the remaining Creatures fansites to the Internet Archive. (Their crawler stumbles a bit on pages with lots of little zip downloads or small images and tends to produce incomplete archives.)
I've been thinking about why I'm finding this compelling, and why archival efforts in general matter to me. Where's the line between an archive and a kind of digital hoarding? Does any of this stuff actually matter? I think individually these elements- defunct fansites, game mods, the little stories people told about a game and the way they told them- might seem (or be!) trivial, but in aggregate they can tell a picture about the ways people interacted with media and each other. Even the last 10 years the way we all use the internet has changed drastically, and building an archive of things like this can help provide context. That's what I get out of archives and historical efforts, I think: context for the ways people behaved, and how they were different from the ways they behave now, and the ways that they're still the same.
It's a pretty trivial example, but one thing I ran into recently that amazed me was the set of newsgroup posts you can find through this page. Someone trolls a community for months on end, with a slight focus on an individual. That specific individual eventually makes a post about how they got the troll "arrested for copyright violations", and they turned out to be a 15-year-old loser, and they were for some reason present at their arrest and humiliation, and that they've vanquished them and they'll never trouble the community again.
From an outside perspective (and from personal experience of existing, once, in communities of tweens online, where everyone made shit up constantly) it is incredibly obvious that the "troll" was an always has been an alias of the person who supposedly "had them arrested"- but nobody catches this??? The entire thread is just person after person congratulating them. It's honestly astonishing. Was this a uniquely gullible population? In newsgroups in the year 1998, had no one realized you could just go online and lie whenever you felt like it?
Anyway, that's why archival efforts are important: because you can bump into teen drama from the year 1998 and feel like you've made contact with an ancient civilization.
I've been thinking about why I'm finding this compelling, and why archival efforts in general matter to me. Where's the line between an archive and a kind of digital hoarding? Does any of this stuff actually matter? I think individually these elements- defunct fansites, game mods, the little stories people told about a game and the way they told them- might seem (or be!) trivial, but in aggregate they can tell a picture about the ways people interacted with media and each other. Even the last 10 years the way we all use the internet has changed drastically, and building an archive of things like this can help provide context. That's what I get out of archives and historical efforts, I think: context for the ways people behaved, and how they were different from the ways they behave now, and the ways that they're still the same.
It's a pretty trivial example, but one thing I ran into recently that amazed me was the set of newsgroup posts you can find through this page. Someone trolls a community for months on end, with a slight focus on an individual. That specific individual eventually makes a post about how they got the troll "arrested for copyright violations", and they turned out to be a 15-year-old loser, and they were for some reason present at their arrest and humiliation, and that they've vanquished them and they'll never trouble the community again.
From an outside perspective (and from personal experience of existing, once, in communities of tweens online, where everyone made shit up constantly) it is incredibly obvious that the "troll" was an always has been an alias of the person who supposedly "had them arrested"- but nobody catches this??? The entire thread is just person after person congratulating them. It's honestly astonishing. Was this a uniquely gullible population? In newsgroups in the year 1998, had no one realized you could just go online and lie whenever you felt like it?
Anyway, that's why archival efforts are important: because you can bump into teen drama from the year 1998 and feel like you've made contact with an ancient civilization.
