In The Social Network (2010), David Fincher’s film about the rise of Facebook (the same Fincher behind Fight Club), the fictional character Erica Albright – a wholly invented ex-girlfriend presumably added just to make Mark Zuckerberg seem marginally less android-like – delivers one of the film’s most quoted lines: “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.”
The implication of this zinger (I use the term “zinger” loosely) being that the Internet never forgets. Digital memory is permanent. But for historians of technology, the opposite is often true: the Internet forgets constantly. Websites are deleted, domains expire, servers go offline. What survives of web and digital memory does so only because someone – including professional archivists, digital antiquarians and niche hobbyists – actively preserved it. Since 1996, the Internet Archive has been capturing snapshots of web pages – some long vanished from the live web. Researchers, journalists, and curious individuals use it to explore how people once wrote, designed, organised, and imagined the online world. But the historical record of the web is fragile. The Archive has gone offline, suffered cyberattacks, and been embroiled in legal battles.
As a researcher, I use the Internet Archive often to access early web materials, and to help situate historical sources in context. There are obviously alternatives available (including physical archives), but no archive besides the Internet Archive has captured as much of the broader, “born-digital” public web. It’s not much of an exaggeration to describe it as a “single point of failure”.
Professor Niels Brügger of Aarhus University has written extensively about the challenges of preserving digital memory (including the challenge of emulating older web experiences on today’s browsers). As he writes:
“Apparently, although there may be little if any incentive to lose digital memory, the web tends to forget all by itself. Thus, the scholar who sets out to write web history based on web material from the past has to rely on someone having taken the initiative to collect and preserve the web and to make it available for research purposes. If this has not happened, the material is likely to have disappeared.”
When I think about the “flattening” of the information discourse since the 1970s, I also think about how fragile digital memory is. Part of the role of historians of digital technology, I think, is to resist the flattening and homogenisation of complex narratives into simple linear histories, to recapture the disunity, contingency and variety of earlier conceptualisations of digital technology.
As Europe watches events unfold in the United States, we should remember that the Internet – and especially the World Wide Web, which was first proposed at CERN in Geneva in 1989 – is a global project. Europe’s digital memory is also archived on American servers, protected by the American legal and political system. If that memory is not sufficiently protected, we risk losing part of our shared past.