We Want Media

Yesterday’s New York Times contained a fascinating article on the preservation and revival of early 1900s pop music, thanks to the wonders of the web. Indeed, with a means of digitally preserving seemingly every medium, the Internet is becoming a veritable history museum for all realms of the twentieth century.

The ironic twist is that the very realm where all this archiving takes place is itself woefully unpreserved, and its intangible nature means that what is disappearing may well be lost for good.

Sure, there’s the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which attempts to create a “digital library of Internet sites.” But its sweeps are often days, if not weeks and months, apart. With sites ever updating, it’s just not comprehensive. Not to mention the vast number of sites that block its methods.

It’s funny. You can find (and buy) the front page of any day’s New York Times since September 1851. But what did the front page of CNN.com look like seven days ago? Where you at now, Google Cache?

If the Internet has a lifespan, we’ve moved out of infancy into toddlerhood (hello, Web 2.0). This is the stage where most parents are running to get the camcorder to capture first steps and first words. If we do not develop comprehensive ways of archiving the Web, we will remember that first step as a stumble.