Jul. 6th, 2021 04:00 am
Ephemerality in Fandom
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raziaWhen I was a teen, I was always worried about preserving the content I had on my computer, whether it be texts I wrote, or music I downloaded, or a random funny video I found somewhere. Most of my friends didn’t understand this urge; there was this misplaced faith that those things would simply always be there, available at any point in time.
I've done the idiotic thing of deleting files here and there, under the thought of "I can always redownload it later", only to find out in that much anticipated later that those files were nowhere to be found.
Years later, and a lot of those things lost to time and moving and deletion and misplaced floppy disks/cds/pen drives, my interest in preserving things has been reignited.
We're at a point of late stage capitalism where the stuff we buy doesn't really belong to us. Online gaming services like Steam and PSN can take away your games at any moment ; Spotify can pull a song out of its catalog without warning, and Amazon can delete any book you've ever downloaded from its service, right out of your Kindle. Because they're not really yours. You're not paying for the product itself, you're paying for access to it. And that access can be revoked at any time, for any reason, without any warning, and most of the time without any monetary compensation. ("Oh, did you pay for this? Lol, fuck you.")
Some services, like PSN Plus (and most of other subscription services), are especially egregious, since their catalog can only be accessed as long as you keep paying. If you want access until you die, you must pay them until you die.
Fandom is obviously no stranger to losing content without warning. If you’re not incredibly new in fandom (whether in age or in joining), you probably know about purges, and the occasional dead archive because the archive owner stopped paying the server provider.
Archive of Our Own manages to offset some of that damage, thankfully. You only need to look at OTW’s Open Doors project to see how many dead and dying archives they’ve assimilated into AO3. And as long as AO3 survives and keeps its mission intact, we can be reasonably sure all those fics will be there for years and years to come (barring any apocalypses, I guess). It’s interesting to notice, though, that this only goes for written texts. Since images and audio need to be hosted somewhere else, if that somewhere else goes poof, the AO3 page with that work will only serve as a snapshot of when that work existed in its entirety.
(I did try downloading a work that contains fanart, and the fanart is stored into the file, so I guess that’s one way of making sure the art survives, though not the most effective one.)
But still, I wouldn’t advise anyone to rely solely on AO3. You never know when things might go poof on the internet. If you want to keep something, you need to go some extra miles to make sure that thing survives unexpected purges and misplacements.
I’ve seen so many writers and artists scrambling to save their work, and other people’s, whenever a site or archive threatens to do away with said work, and it always makes me think “why haven’t you done that already?” I recently saw an artist I like say their hard drive exploded and they lost three years of work, and my immediate, uncharitable thought was "why the fuck did you not have at least two backups of your work?"
(Listen. It’s one thing to not save your fics or other hobbies. But work? C’mon guys, backup your work.)
But when we talk about links and articles and videos, I too have things that I like and haven’t saved, and if those links ever disappear, there’s no going back... unless some saintly soul saved it in the Wayback Machine or other sites dedicated to archiving the internet. And still, isn’t that ironic? That we rely on sites on the internet to save sites on the internet?
What if those servers ever die?
There’s no easy solution to the problem of archiving as a whole, and that goes for fandom too. Server/cloud space is expensive; personal HDs/SSDs are also expensive; printing everything is not only expensive but requires a lot of physical room.
But there are things that can be done, to a certain point. To use myself as an example: I write everything on gdocs, and from time to time I save the whole writing folder to my computer. After three years of writing, the folder is 78MB, which is a very small number in the grand scheme of things, and fits comfortably inside my SSD, and it will keep fitting for a good while still. It’s also a reasonable number to up into the cloud somewhere. Redundancy is the secret to safety, after all.
I don’t think everyone needs to do this. Some people consider the fact that their things can vanish at any moment part of the fandom experience, and more power to them. But if you want to preserve what you and other fans have created, save your things. Download them, zip them, save them in four different places, physical and in the cloud.
We can’t trust the internet. We can’t trust server services, no matter how robust we think they are (I bet people thought GeoCities was perennial). Hell, we can barely trust our own personal drives; one good thump into an HD and you can say goodbye to most of your data.
Anyway, I don’t have any solution to this problem, but I do have questions. Are we lacking in internet education? Do we need to start thinking of actual technology classes for school and college levels? The internet itself isn’t exactly new anymore, but technology has grown so exponentially fast that we only need to look around and see that, socially speaking, we weren’t exactly prepared for it.
I’m only in my early thirties, and I grew up without the internet. That’s how new this global access to it actually is. And I keep thinking that fandom needs to catch up a little more, before we see another Strikethrough or Tumblr Purge getting us unprepared again. (Okay, to be fair, the Tumblr Purge wasn’t exactly unexpected, but we did see people scrambling madly anyway, and some people still lost years of fic and art and meta.)
I’ll end this by linking these two very interesting reads:
The Internet is Rotting, by Jonathan Zittrain
Raiders of the Lost Web, by Adrienne LaFrance
Plus, if you’re looking for a page that’s relatively quick in saving other pages, I suggest Archive Today (it can also bypass paywalls, which is always welcome) (and if you read the first article, yes, the irony of linking these articles is not lost on me 😂 but to my credit, the links go to archives)
I’ll end this post with a quote from Adrienne LaFrance:
“In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.”
I've done the idiotic thing of deleting files here and there, under the thought of "I can always redownload it later", only to find out in that much anticipated later that those files were nowhere to be found.
Years later, and a lot of those things lost to time and moving and deletion and misplaced floppy disks/cds/pen drives, my interest in preserving things has been reignited.
We're at a point of late stage capitalism where the stuff we buy doesn't really belong to us. Online gaming services like Steam and PSN can take away your games at any moment ; Spotify can pull a song out of its catalog without warning, and Amazon can delete any book you've ever downloaded from its service, right out of your Kindle. Because they're not really yours. You're not paying for the product itself, you're paying for access to it. And that access can be revoked at any time, for any reason, without any warning, and most of the time without any monetary compensation. ("Oh, did you pay for this? Lol, fuck you.")
Some services, like PSN Plus (and most of other subscription services), are especially egregious, since their catalog can only be accessed as long as you keep paying. If you want access until you die, you must pay them until you die.
Fandom is obviously no stranger to losing content without warning. If you’re not incredibly new in fandom (whether in age or in joining), you probably know about purges, and the occasional dead archive because the archive owner stopped paying the server provider.
Archive of Our Own manages to offset some of that damage, thankfully. You only need to look at OTW’s Open Doors project to see how many dead and dying archives they’ve assimilated into AO3. And as long as AO3 survives and keeps its mission intact, we can be reasonably sure all those fics will be there for years and years to come (barring any apocalypses, I guess). It’s interesting to notice, though, that this only goes for written texts. Since images and audio need to be hosted somewhere else, if that somewhere else goes poof, the AO3 page with that work will only serve as a snapshot of when that work existed in its entirety.
(I did try downloading a work that contains fanart, and the fanart is stored into the file, so I guess that’s one way of making sure the art survives, though not the most effective one.)
But still, I wouldn’t advise anyone to rely solely on AO3. You never know when things might go poof on the internet. If you want to keep something, you need to go some extra miles to make sure that thing survives unexpected purges and misplacements.
I’ve seen so many writers and artists scrambling to save their work, and other people’s, whenever a site or archive threatens to do away with said work, and it always makes me think “why haven’t you done that already?” I recently saw an artist I like say their hard drive exploded and they lost three years of work, and my immediate, uncharitable thought was "why the fuck did you not have at least two backups of your work?"
(Listen. It’s one thing to not save your fics or other hobbies. But work? C’mon guys, backup your work.)
But when we talk about links and articles and videos, I too have things that I like and haven’t saved, and if those links ever disappear, there’s no going back... unless some saintly soul saved it in the Wayback Machine or other sites dedicated to archiving the internet. And still, isn’t that ironic? That we rely on sites on the internet to save sites on the internet?
What if those servers ever die?
There’s no easy solution to the problem of archiving as a whole, and that goes for fandom too. Server/cloud space is expensive; personal HDs/SSDs are also expensive; printing everything is not only expensive but requires a lot of physical room.
But there are things that can be done, to a certain point. To use myself as an example: I write everything on gdocs, and from time to time I save the whole writing folder to my computer. After three years of writing, the folder is 78MB, which is a very small number in the grand scheme of things, and fits comfortably inside my SSD, and it will keep fitting for a good while still. It’s also a reasonable number to up into the cloud somewhere. Redundancy is the secret to safety, after all.
I don’t think everyone needs to do this. Some people consider the fact that their things can vanish at any moment part of the fandom experience, and more power to them. But if you want to preserve what you and other fans have created, save your things. Download them, zip them, save them in four different places, physical and in the cloud.
We can’t trust the internet. We can’t trust server services, no matter how robust we think they are (I bet people thought GeoCities was perennial). Hell, we can barely trust our own personal drives; one good thump into an HD and you can say goodbye to most of your data.
Anyway, I don’t have any solution to this problem, but I do have questions. Are we lacking in internet education? Do we need to start thinking of actual technology classes for school and college levels? The internet itself isn’t exactly new anymore, but technology has grown so exponentially fast that we only need to look around and see that, socially speaking, we weren’t exactly prepared for it.
I’m only in my early thirties, and I grew up without the internet. That’s how new this global access to it actually is. And I keep thinking that fandom needs to catch up a little more, before we see another Strikethrough or Tumblr Purge getting us unprepared again. (Okay, to be fair, the Tumblr Purge wasn’t exactly unexpected, but we did see people scrambling madly anyway, and some people still lost years of fic and art and meta.)
I’ll end this by linking these two very interesting reads:
The Internet is Rotting, by Jonathan Zittrain
Raiders of the Lost Web, by Adrienne LaFrance
Plus, if you’re looking for a page that’s relatively quick in saving other pages, I suggest Archive Today (it can also bypass paywalls, which is always welcome) (and if you read the first article, yes, the irony of linking these articles is not lost on me 😂 but to my credit, the links go to archives)
I’ll end this post with a quote from Adrienne LaFrance:
“In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.”
no subject
Storing is one thing, organising is another... A friend found an old hard drive recently and started talking to me about all the old SGA fanvids she rediscovered. For my stuff, I definitely don't want to lose anything I made, but for things I like... maybe it's okay if some stories and memories disappear? But I'm not good at re-reading, people who do more of that might make a different decision. Saving what you personally care about definitely makes sense.
no subject
I think there's a healthy mindset in accepting that not everything can be saved, and some things will be lost (the second article talks about this); but here I'm mostly talking about things that matter to us. I've lost things that I wish I hadn't, because I was careless or too confident on being able to find them or download them again. (Also, storage is expensive, and I don't have enough drives to keep everything I wish to keep)
But talking about fandom specifically, I've seen people genuinely lose the only copy of their own work because they relied on a random site on the internet to keep it, which is incredibly naive (and yet we all do it all the time, mostly because it's ingrained in us as a culture by now). Some people are less precious with what they create, and that's fine, but I genuinely think fandom could be a little more internet and tech savvy, for our own good.
And as for other people's works, it depends on how much you love it. Less than a year ago a very famous story in the Voltron fandom simply disappeared, along with most of the author's works. Some people who had access to the author said they were going to trad publish things, so they had to take it down, which is a legitimate thing (even though I personally think it's dumb for the publishers to do that), but I saw a mini chaos happen in the server I was in because people loved the story and never saved it. Thankfully I had a copy on my computer, so I could pass it around to anyone who wanted (my paranoia paid off 😂).
As for myself, there are definitely fics and art and original work I wanna keep forever. I have this very old habit of saving every goddamn picture I like, and my picture folder is 62GB haha. This habit started when I didn't have reliable internet connection, so I had to save everything I wanted to consume to be able to do it when I wanted, but now it's come in handy, seeing as we can lose anything at any moment.
I just gotta build that habit for fic now too xD
no subject
Do you have a good organisational system? I use to save every lovely fanart I came across but I realised I never looked at them again and it was all kind of a big mess, so I stopped. I still save a few but only when they stir writerly inspiration in me, haha. It's difficult to find a good balance.
no subject
And I know most artists hate pinterest, but I find it incredibly practical for inspiration and refs.