Computing Arts • Net Culture • Hypermedia • Cyberfeminism with KYRA OCEAN ⌭⌬⌮⌲⌾
As participants adjust to the prevailing conditions of anonymity and to the potentially disconcerting experience of being reduced to a detached voice floating in an amorphous electronic void, they become adept as well at reconstituting the faceless words around them into bodies, histories, lives […] and the boundaries distinguishing “real” from “virtual” begin to fade.
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#David Porter #Internet Culture #1997 #internet #culture #IRL #AFK #reality #virtual #voidAs an Internet archivist/researcher, my work involves the pre-web era (1980–94). The archives that exist for that are mostly text-based with Usenet being the motherlode along with supplements from others (FidoNet, Gopher, isolated BBS archives, etc). It’s far from a complete record and yet it provides great insight—the ability to zero on specific cultural events and glimpse how Internet users were reacting as they happened.
I often get asked about what should be preserved from today’s Internet. I lean towards something omnivorous and there are numerous groups (Internet Archive, Archive Team, Rhizome) capturing what they can. It’s a loaded question that affects all of us [and how our history is perceived after we’re gone]—Jenna Wortham does an excellent job of digging in.
Catch the wave with Internet In A Box for Kids and start shredding the Net with the best of them. Swap e-mail with pen-pals in South America, whoop the computer at chess, or send e-mail to the President.
The mid-90s software kit was developed by Spry for O'Reilly Media and included: “a complete set of Internet software tools, FreeZone (an on-line “club” for children) and SurfWatch filtering software.”
These mock-ups of FreeZone are by Gary Moses from when it was still called KIDNET.
Patent drawings of the “Sourceless Orientation Sensor for Virtual Reality applications” by Ono-Sendai. This was the primary technology used to power the never-to-be released SEGA VR headset.
“How Coolness Defined the World Wide Web of the 1990s” via The Atlantic explains how crucial awards were to early net culture.
These recognitions were regarded as welcomed honors, visually stamped on the distinguished site with a graphical status icon that bestowed a mark of “quality.” Accumulate enough of these accolades and new awards.html pages would be erected to showcase the entire collection.
Earlier today, I posted this on WWWTXT:
I’ve never programmed in C, I’ll let you know how it works out sometime in 2013. ☯90FEB
Afterwards, I set out to find the poster and see if he had ever learned C. He turned out to be Internet pioneer Bob Munck! Here’s his response:
Hi Kyra,
I wrote a bunch of C++ for my first web site, for DARPA in 1994 (it was the third government site and among the first couple hundred total). I was at the time deep in the Ada community, and C++ was so irrational by contrast that I flat-out hated it. Nowadays I write mostly PHP code and am resigned to the horrors of C-like languages.
Incredibly, he worked as a manager (aka the heavy) at the original Hypertext project at Brown University from 1967–73. He first logged into the net in the Fall of ‘72 [41 years ago!] and, although now retired, still responded to my email within an hour of receiving it.
It’s these moments that make me realize WWWTXT has a long life ahead. Thank you, Bob!
I actually know for sure that there are scenes on the internet that nobody knows about and nobody cares about, and within those milieus, very specialized sensibilities are evolving.
An excerpt from “The Joy of Handles or EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ME (but have no right to ask)” by Mahatma Kane Jeeves and David Lescohier, Mar 1992:
Andy Warhol said that “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The computer nets, more than any other medium, lend credibility to this prediction. A network conference may span the globe more completely than even satellite TV, yet be open to anyone who can afford the simplest computer and modem. Through our participation in conferencing—often without realizing it, and without any contemplation of the implications and possible consequences.
Of course, ordinary participants in network conferencing may never attract quite the attention that other types of celebrities attract. But consider the following, rather less apocalyptic scenarios:
- On Friday night you post a message to a public conference defending an unpopular or controversial viewpoint. On Monday morning your biggest client cancels a major contract. Or you are kept up all night by repeated telephone calls from someone demanding that you “stop killing babies”!
- You buy your teenage son or daughter a computer and modem. Sometime later you find your lawn littered with beer bottles and dug up with tire marks, or your home vandalized or burglarized.
- One day you are nominated to the Supreme Court. Who are all these strange people on TV claiming to be your friends? How did that fellow know your [political] positions? Your taste in GIFs?
Celebrities and other professional media personalities accept the risks and sacrifices of notoriety, along with the benefits, as part of their chosen careers. Should computer conference participants be expected to do the same? And who should be making these decisions?
PlaceWorld (1997–2000). An environment for other electronic art installations to exist inside.
PlaceWorld has three goals: first, to act as a coherent metaphor for browsing and experiencing disparate electronic art installations and virtual artifacts; second to be an evolving social environment in its own right; and third to provide a persistent software architecture in which non-trivial virtual artifacts may be dynamically created and integrated.
Data visualization elements were present as well:
The PlaceWorld environment gradually evolves a structure based on its usage by its inhabitants. Artifacts and areas of interest slowly become larger, drawing attention to their popularity. Users each leave behind glowing translucent trails as they pass through the environment.
The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world. The challenge is to make that world look real, act real, sound real, feel real.
foone
Look if there’s one thing, just one thing, that I wish everyone understood about archiving, it’s this:
Like, if we archive a website that’s full of THE WORST STUFF, like it turns out it’s borderline illegal bot-made spam art, we can delete it. Gone.
We can also chose not to curate. You can make a list of the 100 Best Fanfic and just quietly not link to or mention the 20,000 RPFs of bigoted youtubers eating each other. No problem!
We can also make things not publicly available. This happens surprisingly often: like, sometimes there’ll be a YouTube channel of alt-right bigotry that gets taken down by YouTube, but someone gives a copy to the internet archive, and they don’t make it publicly available. Because it might be useful for researchers, and eventually historians, it’s kept. But putting it online for everyone to see? That’s just be propaganda for their bigotry. So it’s hidden, for now. You can ask to see it, but you need a reason.
And we can say all these things, we can chose to delete it later, we can not curate it, we can hide it from public view… But we only have these options BECAUSE we archived it.
If we didn’t archive it, we have no options. It is gone. I’m focusing on the negative here, but think about the positive side:
What if it turns out something we thought was junk turns out to be amazing new art?
What if something we thought of as pointless and not worth curating turns out to be influential?
What if something turns out to be of vital historical importance, the key that is used to solve a great mystery, the Rosetta stone for an era?
All of those things are great… If we archived it when we could.
Because this is an asymmetric problem:
If we archived it and it turns out it’s not useful, we can delete.
If we didn’t archive it and it turns out it is useful, OOPS!
You can’t unlose something that’s been lost. It’s gone. This is a one way trip, it’s already fallen off the cliff. Your only hope is that you’re wrong about it being lost, and there is actually still a copy somewhere. If it’s truly lost, your only option is to build a time machine.
And this has happened! There are things lost, so many of them that we know of, and many more we don’t know of. There are BOOKS OF THE BIBLE referenced in the canon that simply do not exist anymore. Like, Paul says to go read his letter to the Laodiceans, and what did that letter say? We don’t know. It’s gone.
The most celebrated playwright in the English tradition has plays that are just gone. You want to perform or watch Love’s Labours Won? TOO FUCKING BAD.
Want to watch Lon Cheyney’s London After Midnight, a mystery-horror silent film from 1927? TOO BAD. The MGM vault burnt down in 1965 and the last known copy went up in smoke.
If something still exists, if it still is kept somewhere, there is always an opportunity to decide if it’s worthy of being remembered. It can still be recognized for its merits, for its impact, for its importance, or just what it says about the time and culture and people who made it, and what they believed and thought and did. It can still be a useful part of history, even if we decide it’s a horrible thing, a bigoted mess, a terrible piece of art. We have the opportunity to do all that.
If it’s lost… We are out of options. All we can do is research it from how it affected other things. There’s a lot of great books and plays and films and shows that we only know of because other contemporary sources talked about them so much. We’re trying to figure out what it was and what it did, from tracing the shadow it cast on the rest of culture.
This is why archivists get anxious whenever people say “this thing is bad and should not be preserved”. Because, yeah, maybe they’re right. Maybe we’ll look back and decide “yeah, that is worthless and we shouldn’t waste the hard drive or warehouse space on it”.
But if they’re wrong, and we listen to them, and don’t archive… We don’t get a second chance at this. And archivists have been bitten too many times by talk of “we don’t need copies, the original studio has the masters!” (it burnt down), or “this isn’t worth preserving, it’s just some damn silly fad” (the fad turned out to be the first steps of a cultural revolution), or “this media is degenerate/illegal/immoral” (it turns out those saying that were bigots and history doesn’t agree with their assessment).
So we archive what we can. We can always decide later if it doesn’t need preserving. And being a responsible archivist often means preserving things but not making them publicly available, or being selective in what you archive (I back up a lot of old computer hard drives. Often they have personal photos and emails and banking information! That doesn’t get saved).
But it’s not really a good idea to be making quality or moral judgements of what you archive. Because maybe you’re right, maybe a decade or two later you’ll decide this didn’t need to be saved. And you’ll have the freedom to make that choice. But if you didn’t archive it, and decide a decade later you were wrong… It’s just gone now. You failed.
Because at the end of the day I’d rather look at an archive and see it includes 10,000 things I think are worthless trash, than look at an archive of on the “best things” and know that there are some things that simply cannot be included. Maybe they were better, but can’t be considered as one of the best… Because they’re just gone. No one has read them, no one has been able to read them.
We have a long history of losing things. The least we can do going forward is to try and avoid losing more. And leave it up to history to decide if what we saved was worth it.
My dream is for a future where critics can look at stuff made in the present and go “all of this was shit. Useless, badly made, bigoted, horrible. Don’t waste your time on it!”
Because that’s infinitely better than the future where all they can do is go “we don’t know of this was any good… It was probably important? We just don’t know. It’s gone. And it’s never coming back”
