Cat Memories Forever?  

ED: We’re going to turn now to a much more modern artifact, the internet. Every day, people leave digital footprints of their lives when they send e-mails and text, tweet and post articles and upload photos. So while 19th-century Americans such as William Plumer and John Fanning Watson went out of their way to collect personal information, has the internet solved the problem of historical preservation? We called Jason Scott, an internet archivist, to find out.

JASON SCOTT: Parts of the internet will, by some people’s vision, last forever. And we’ll never get rid of it, and it will be all of our old dog photos, and it’ll be every terrible thing we ever said to somebody. Turns out it’s just not that.

JOANNE: Scott says some digital content does vanish, and we’re not just talking about old dog photos. When the Rocky Mountain News folded in 2009, its Pulitzer-Prize-nominated digital series disappeared from the web. Scott says this sort of thing happens pretty often.

JASON SCOTT: As time goes on, people take down websites. Services go down. People change things. Newspapers change things. The front page of a newspaper web site will change constantly all day. And, of course, we will see all of these cases where people want to take things down, either because they’re trying to change their message– you’ll have a business that supports a candidate, and then the candidate does something awful, and then, surprise, there’s no record of that anymore. Good luck–

JOANNE: It’s deliberately gone, right.

JASON SCOTT: Right

ED: Scott works for a nonprofit called the Internet Archive. It rescues websites and other digital content from the internet before it gets deleted. He also runs an online volunteer group that saves web pages that might otherwise vanish. The Archive maintains an enormous stash of music, books, movies, and software. It also has nearly 300 billion searchable sites in what it calls the Wayback Machine, a fond tribute to Mr. Peabody and Sherman from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

JOANNE: On this wayback machine, you can visit Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign site or click around CNN’s old OJ Simpson trial page. Scott says maintaining these old web sites is important because unlike old newspapers, these kinds of materials are not sitting around in someone’s attic.

JASON SCOTT: One of the interesting paradoxes with digital information is how it is so easy to make a copy, but it is also so easy to destroy and lose something forever. If you defund the library, and you take the books and you shove them into a shipping container on someone’s backyard, and you go back later, there might be some mold. But you’ll probably be able to look through most of the books and be pretty happy. But if a company goes under and they were the catmemories.com, and you go in there and you go like, well, how are my cat memories now, the answer is, oh, those hard drives are off. We sold them. They’re gone. There’s no record of this anymore.

JOANNE: Wow.

JASON SCOTT: And that’s just a different world.

JOANNE: When did you realize that the internet, or that technology, wouldn’t be permanent?

JASON SCOTT: I was doing this sort of thing when I was 11, back in 1981. The reason why was my parents got divorced. And I learned very quickly, hey, maybe you can’t depend on everything you see existing after you take your eyes off it. So I was printing out things from computer bulletin board systems and early online services, and kind of storing them away on floppy disks.

JOANNE: Wow

JASON SCOTT: And, when the internet came along, I was kind of, I bet I could look up all the information on those old places I used to call when I was young. And there was none, so I put up a website where I put up everything I had. And, in doing so, I stumbled backwards into becoming a librarian and historian related to online world. And the work I do with volunteers– a lot of them internalize that message. So, the minute we see a company has bought another company, suddenly there’s this rush of trying to copy everything about the soon disappearing entity–

JOANNE: Wow.

JASON SCOTT: –before all the other people come along and say, well, we don’t need to keep this up, and we don’t need this old message. And, of course, the Internet Archive is doing this very interesting crawl through all of the world of everything all the time, because you can’t know, truly, what’s going to be important. And so they’re watching for anytime someone tweets about a YouTube video, or when there’s news articles being published that are changed, and they’ll try to track those. And it’s just random.

JOANNE: So the randomness is, on the one hand, bad because important things inevitably slip away. But it’s also kind of wonderful because you get the texture of things in a way that you probably couldn’t do on purpose. Or, if you did, you’d have to make that your life project.

JASON SCOTT: Right.

JOANNE: I shall collect the texture of life in the late 20th or early 21st century.

JASON SCOTT: Right. And people are going to be like, they really thought they were important, didn’t they?

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: Yeah, true.

JASON SCOTT: We try not to curate too hard. And does it mean that we’re drowning in a Citizen-Kane-like warehouse? The answer is, probably. Probably pretty crazy in there.

It’s incredibly fun to go to a place like the International Museum of Axe Handles, which I’ve just made up, and have this canonical collection of axe handles that has been carefully curated. It’s another thing to go to a museum of every kind of tool. And they don’t quite know what everything is in there, and you don’t even know what half these tools are. And some of them are from dentists, and some of them are from landscapers. We are really in a good world for serendipitous exploration.

JOANNE: Is there something that you saved that had particular meaning for you, that you thought, oh, thank heavens that this was saved?

JASON SCOTT: In very early internet, we’re talking pre-web, there was something called the Internet Underground Music Archive. And this was three guys from Santa Cruz who were musicians, who were making their music available online in the form of downloadable audio files. And they turned it into a website when the website came to be. And throughout the ’90s, they were kind of a mainstay of music, especially unsigned bands. And then the dot-com boom happened. They were purchased. And then that company just slowly murdered the web site over the course of the next eight years and closed it down in 2009.

I was given tapes of that web site. And we put it all back up, 450,000 tracks of music from 35,000 bands or something. So it lives again. That’s great.

JOANNE: Wow. So it’s alive again. Yeah. So you’re doing all of this work, preserving all of this stuff, on some kind of technology. So the question is, how do you know that at some point in the future people will be able to read your technology?

JASON SCOTT: Oh, we super don’t. We absolutely don’t. We are absolutely doing a huge bet. We’re hoping that technology, and interest, and long-term storage, and everything will conflate into a functional, retrievable library. This is a huge bet.

When I summarize history and historians and saving archives, I’m like, you’re going, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun so that, in 1,000 years, they’ll go, dun-dun! And you have no idea if that’s going to happen at all. But by making everything we’re gathering available back as soon as possible, as widely as possible, we’re hedging against that bet. And we’re providing value to the world, regardless.

JOANNE: So in a way what you’re saying is, in the same way that you’re showing how the past matters by collecting it, and you’re saving it for the future– but that the present matters, too.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Jason Scott is an archivist and software curator at the Internet Archive.

NATHAN: That’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going with us online. Let us know what you thought of the episode. And we’re still collecting enlistment stories from service members and veterans, so tell us why you enlisted. Just go to BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. And if you like the show, and we know you do, feel free to review us at the iTunes store. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joy [? Thompson ?] is our researcher. Additional help came from [? Sequoyah ?] [? Kirylo, ?] Emma Gregg, Aidan Lee, [? Courtney ?] [? Hispania, ?] [? Robin ?] [? Blue, ?] and [? Elizabeth ?] [? Spade. ?] Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music on our show came from Podington Bear, Ketsa, and Jahzzar. Special thanks to Zak Shelby-Szyszko at Resonance Records, Emily Yankowitz at Yale University, and to Johns Hopkins University Studio in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. In.