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rfmcdonaldAt The Globe and Mail, Ivor Tossell considers in his article "On the Web, forever has a due date" the ephemeral nature of the Internet's sites, even the most popular ones. GeoCities, you may or may not have heard, is about to close down.
This disturbs me: I'm the sort of person who has archived computer files dating back to the mid-1990s, and was terribly concerned when it looked like my first few years of university notes were inaccessible. My online past really matters to me, was crucial in forming my personality and determining, well, everything about me. (That's another story.) The idea that all sorts of information can be lost as sites become more complex and more full of information--Tossell uses the example of photo captions and comments--really upsets me.
At the end of October, Yahoo will pull the plug on GeoCities, the service that more than 1 million people used to set up web pages. On Oct. 27, the whole thing will simply cease to exist. It will, as we say in the industry, go poof.
This poofing business does not bode well. Lately, there's been so much discussion about the permanence of information – especially the embarrassing kind – that we have overlooked the fact that it can also disappear. At a time when we're throwing all kinds of data and memories onto free websites, it's a blunt reminder that the future can bring unwelcome surprises.
Ten years ago, you could have called GeoCities the garish, beating heart of the Web. It was one of the first sites that threw its doors open to users and invited them to populate its pages according to their own creativity. At a time when the Web was still daunting, it encouraged laypeople to set up their own homepages free of charge.
And that's exactly what laypeople did. GeoCities exploded, turning into a gaudy carnival of websites devoted to everything from Civil War history to ichthyology, from quilting to Quaaludes. The place was designed around an urban metaphor, divided into cutely named “neighbourhoods” according to content. Nobody seemed to police what went where, which meant you could explore without knowing what you were looking for, or what you might stumble over next.
[. . .]
Alas, the site never excelled at the money-making thing and its ham-fisted attempts to turn a buck drove users away. In 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities for $3.57-billion in stock, which turned out to be $3.57-billion too much. The world moved on, and GeoCities faded into a ghost town.
And now, it's curtains. GeoCities won't disappear entirely. The Internet Archive – a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco dedicated to backing up the Web for posterity's sake – is trying to salvage as much as it can before the deadline hits. At least one other independent group is trying to do the same. But this complicates things, because it puts GeoCities users' data into the hands of an unaccountable third party.
This disturbs me: I'm the sort of person who has archived computer files dating back to the mid-1990s, and was terribly concerned when it looked like my first few years of university notes were inaccessible. My online past really matters to me, was crucial in forming my personality and determining, well, everything about me. (That's another story.) The idea that all sorts of information can be lost as sites become more complex and more full of information--Tossell uses the example of photo captions and comments--really upsets me.
