Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
Remember how I made that post a week or so about getting to visit the Millennium Dome? I mentioned how there was a children’s TV show to go with one attraction, but it was mostly lost. Well, I found the first three episodes!
Presenting The Timekeepers of the Millennium! It used a combination of live-action, puppetry and CGI to take kids on a irreverent ride through British history. Well, sort of. Kids of the time probably wouldn’t have actually learned a damn thing from it, I know I didn’t, but who cares! They built a park inside a doooooome!
Well, regardless of the quality of the actual Dome, this show isn’t all that bad. The two main muppets are charming enough and all the actors playing historical figures seem to be having fun at least. Also let’s face it, the demographic for this was definitely “tweenagers who would pester their parents into taking them to the Dome so they could meet the characters” and no-one else. There was indeed a Cogs and Sprinx running round the Millennium Dome back in the day!
(no using that image please.)
RIP Timekeepers! I found out recently that their ball-pit-like Dome attraction was about the only one in the building not sponsored by some evil mega-corporation so they got that going for them too.
My overly devoted archiving has now spread to YouTube. I’m gradually working my way through a LOT of VHS tapes recorded by either me or my parents from the late 80s to the early 00s and putting everything interesting I see on its own YouTube channel.
Recently I was made aware of the existence of Friedrich Kellner. He was a man living in Nazi Germany who wrote an opposition to Mein Kampf, in secret for obvious reasons, and detailed the Nazi crimes he witnessed so that people would know about them in the future.
What Kellner did was to take extracts from the press, stick them in his book and comment on them at length from his own point of view.
Which is what the whole world does now on Twitter and on blogs. I guess Kellner was ahead of his time in more than one way.
There’s surprisingly little written about him considering how remarkable his story is. He very much put himself in the firing line.
In 1925, according to a biographical essay written by his grandson, Kellner received a copy of Adolf Hitler’s newly published Mein Kampf, along with the encouragement to “take a stand against its author.” Speaking at rallies, Kellner would hold up the copy of Hitler’s book and declare, “Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book!” His public criticism of Nazism earned him unfriendly attention from the SA, but having lived through the trenches, he was accustomed to violence and not easily intimidated. – source
Eventually he was told he and his wife Paulina (who completely stood by him) would be sent to a concentration camp if they continued to criticize the Nazi regime. That didn’t stop Kellner though, he just continued to do it in secret. He wrote in his book,
“I could not fight the Nazis in the present, as they had the power to still my voice, so I decided to fight them in the future. I would give the coming generations a weapon against any resurgence of such evil.”
My list of Historical Figures Who Should Get Movies is incredibly long, but Kellner is very close to the top because his story has a LOT of reasonance today. And not just because he was basically a blogger.
I wish I could have met Friedrich Kellner. I think we would have gotten along.
This story has been bouncing around the internet for the past couple days. I’ve heard people saying “She must have had OCD!” but so what if she had? She did something truly impressive here. She might have preserved old TV shows that would’ve otherwise been lost. (Doctor Who fans will recognise the pain of that.) This story has also served to remind me I need to really work on digitizing me and my mother’s three or so boxes worth of VHS tapes from the ’90s before they’re lost forever.
So from one Overly Devoted Archivist to another, thank you, Marion Stokes.
