Internet Archeology: Partying like its 1997

CERN batiment 40 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was interested in finding some of my old webpages after reading about CERN rebuilding the first webpage back in April. I remember first seeing that website and thinking "why would anyone want to do this when all you have to do is log on to a bulletin board and download a hypercard stack and get all the information you could ever want?" I also ridiculed my little brother when he burst into the room with news of the "floppy disk." I told him it was idiotic since someone could go into any Radio Shack and by a cassette tape and store all their programs on something that only costs a couple of bucks. Please do not look to me for investment advice!

Anyway, if you have an old URL and you want find the information that was there even if the site is now down, the best thing to do is to go to www.archive.org and search in their "Wayback Machine" - a search engine that searches their archive of the internet. You can go there to recover old data or you can use it to find out what webpages looked like in the Dork Ages: "Browse through over 240 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported." Another important use for the Wayback Machine is that the URLs that you will find there won't change. This is particularly important for course materials in online classes that use links. If I find an article I like, I will look up the article in the Wayback Machine, take a URL from a year ago and post that. Then if the site goes away or the URL changes in the actual site, I will always have the resource.

I find this particularly interesting because by looking at old webpages, one can find all of the strange metaphors that people were using to build webpages which can give you clues to how we adapt (or not adapt) to new technologies. The early web was rife with book and magazine metaphors: there are websites out there built in the mid-90s that used a spiral bound notebook motif. 

Another strategy for finding old webpages is to search for terms like "Optimized for Netscape 2.0" - that was something that we actually bragged about. This search will help you uncover riches such as:

Yes! We are optimized!

• The Jethro Tull Discography -Why, oh, why did we give up on tables and background images?
• Kid's World - and what a strange recursive world it is too.
• Slovak Cultural and Information Center - Go for the food, stay for the technological advances.
• The Official Wicked Home Page - It is so wicked, it even has a phone number for a BBS (bulletin board system).

If you really want to go old school you can still explore "Gopher Space." That was where really sophisticated cybernauts in the 90s searched for information.

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The Internet and the Collapsing Past

I used to have memories. They were selected, chosen, and like old photographs, shifts of color and tone have changed them over time. Some memories are more highly selected and crafted than others. Some may even approach a certain degree of accuracy. There were things I thought I would never remember: names or friends from grammar school, that favorite Saturday morning cartoon character's side-kick, or what the old downtown of Santa Maria, CA looked like. Now all of this is coming back. All of the images, people, and places. In Facebook, I am talking to people that I met in middle school and have not talked to since. There was three and a half weeks once in the 7th grade when I was nearly not quite entirely unlike cool and that is how a couple of them still remember me. There are websites dedicated to the music and popular culture of the pretty much any year or decade. There was a time when the past would always remain the past. You didn't have to remember much of went by you so you didn't. Now, someone, somewhere, is uploading the play list from their junior college dance from 1982 up to Facebook, MySpace, their blog, ect. and you get to relive the Motels and the Bangles all over again. Between the 3.5 million articles in Wikipedia and the 24 hours of video uploaded per minute, your memories are up there somewhere. Friends and family send links to music, images, and people that I know that I would not remember, or more importantly, would remember differently. Sometimes, the way I remember a film, for instance, has more to do with my interests and values at the time rather than any merit the film may have had. I remember warning my wife that "Five Million Years to Earth" was a scary film. It is a good film, but like many Pinewood Studios films from the 60's, it ends with an apocalypse of "aliens" (plastic grasshoppers on the end of Popsicle sticks). Needless to say, she found the end very funny. I swore it was the most frightening movie I had seen as a 13 year-old.

We look at the internet as authoritative. It is becoming like the collective unconscious of the species (or at least the overly-connected subspecies, Homo Iunctus). It is a form of memory but again, as selective and faded as brain memory but "authoritative" because it is an external record, a scrapbook. People can upload images, but they can't upload my context for those images, but I look at an old photo on the web and think, "My god, that is how it was." In other words, how I remember things is changing because of technology, but because of the limitations of technology, the "memories" on the web are no more authoritative than the memories that come from my brain.

No other generation had this. We used to be able to move forward through time with just the shadows of recollections, content with vague images. Now we are using technology to mediate those memories. What does the game "Trivial Pusuit" prove now? That you don't have access to Wikipedia? I am not one of those who thinks that the internet is making us stupid - I think if the brain is freed up by not having to remember details of the career of Larry Storch or what was the name of the hotel on the corner of Broadway and Main in 1966, then the mind goes on to other things. Maybe this will facilitate extra intelligence or creativity?

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