/Interview/ The brains behind: Internet Archaeology
08/12/2009 | Filed under Discover > Interview
GeoCities may be dead and gone, but Ryder Ripps, director and founder of the Internet Archaeology project, explains how he’s keeping the memories alive
.net: How did you come up with the idea for the Internet Archaeology project?
RR: In early June 2009 I heard about GeoCities closing. This left quite an impression on me. I started using the internet at the height of GeoCities’ popularity, and ever since, the internet has become an ever more integral part of my life. At the time, there was very little news or concern about the closing; an event which I saw as a major milestone in the internet’s history. I was deeply irked by this, and took it upon myself to do something about it. Coming from an artistic background, I created Internet Archaeology with the belief that the preservation of digital artifacts is not only important to historians, but also artists, designers and their enthusiasts. If you look at the history of art and design you’ll notice that movements and styles speak to and are inspired by the past. This is one of the main reasons why museums are vital institutions to society; they offer a glimpse into our past and in return, they inspire. In today’s Web 2.0 era, digital information moves at warp speed around the world, with an emphasis on what’s most current or new. This characteristic is what makes a blog post from just a month ago passé. I wanted to make a space that lives within the current Web 2.0 model while presenting artifacts found within earlier internet culture. The internet changes every second, and its quickly become the most pervasive media; at the pith of Internet Archaeology’s mission is the idea that digital content has value and should be saved, shared and presented.
.net: How is it different from the Internet Archive?
RR: The Internet Archive is a wonderful institution that’s gone through great efforts to save and archive digital content for over a decade. It has an extensive GeoCities collection amassed, which can be accessed using its Wayback Machine. The problem with the Wayback Machine is that you need to know the URL of the page you would like to view, and realistically, who can remember a GeoCities URL? Internet Archive can be thought of as a storage facility that saves as much of the internet as possible, while Internet Archaeology can be viewed more as a museum, which, along with preserving and saving content, also seeks to curate and showcase it in a comprehensive manner.
.net: What kind of ‘graphic artifacts’ are you aiming to archive and showcase specifically?
RR: We archive as much as we can, but showcase artifacts that we find culturally significant, graphically unique or humorous.
.net: How fast is the site growing? How many images have been archived already?
RR: There are over 5,000 images showcased on the site at present. Everyday images are posted to the blog by its contributors from around the world. The Netscraps section allows anyone to post images to be considered as additions to the collection; this section grows everyday as well.
.net: What have been some of your favourite finds so far?
RR: Some of my favourite finds have been the early Flash content from GeoCities between 1999 and 2004. I think this stuff very illuminating, fun and telling of the times. It’s also a somewhat overlooked period within the medium, as not much attention has been brought to the era when ‘multimedia’ and ‘interactivity’ were the buzzwords on the tip of every web designer’s tongue.
.net: How many GeoCities sites did you manage to archive before Yahoo turned the switch off?
RR: I managed to download about 260GB, and let’s say the average GeoCities site is about 5MB, so that would make roughly 53,000 sites. Note that the bulk of these sites were not downloaded blindly. The downloads were aggregated from specific targeted searches and areas of interest within GeoCities. As opposed to other archivists, who went after anything and everything.
.net: What’s the feedback from the public been like?
RR: The response seems to be very good. It’s great because so far the most enthusiastic audience has been a younger one. I think for many, the aesthetics and attitudes of the internet in the late 90s are now kitsch and cool because it’s only with the passing of time that one can appreciate things for their true value.
.net: What do you miss most about early internet culture and why?
RR: What I miss most about early internet culture is personality. It used to be that if you wanted your own little nook on the internet, you’d have had to learn a bit of HTML, get a bit of graphics software and figure out what you wanted to make your website about. You also had to create it against all odds: slow dial-up connections, slow computers, blue screens of death and far less accessible content. Today, if you want your own spot on the net, the most common choice is to make a Facebook page, and all you have to do is just plug in your favourite music, movies and activities. In many ways the preformatted structure and ease with which you can make blogs and social networking pages has taken away a lot of the personality and quirkiness found within an earlier internet.
.net: What have you learned from the project?
RR: If you want to follow your dreams, go on food stamps first. But all jokes aside, you’ll learn quite a bit spending eight-plus hours a day sifting through the internet’s past. I suppose one of the greatest lessons is that even if you have a wildly popular brand on the internet, as Yahoo had with GeoCities, you can still fall victim to irrelevancy. Learning how to stay relevant on the net is best done by studying the themes that have worked time and time again, namely; cats, sex, celebrities and self.
.net: What’s planned next for Internet Archaeology? Where will you turn to now that Geocities is no more?
RR: Internet Archaeology will continue digging through the GeoCities archive and adding to the collection. Other areas we’ll soon venture into include: artifacts from the defunct, bankrupt and forgotten startups of the Nasdaq 5000 era; graphics found within early internet pornography websites; and of course, it wouldn’t be right to dig through GeoCities without also digging through Angelfire and Tripod, both of which are still up! Other plans for Internet Archaeology include a book and an exhibition – just looking for the right space, please contact if you think you can help!
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Comments
Anna Green / 09/12/2009 / 09:19 / http://www.crearedesign.co.uk
I think about this topic a lot, it is am important part of design to be able to track the progress of design and trends through history, and it bothers me that websites only ever have a certain shelf life before they are lost for ever, deleted. There should be some kind of on line or digital museum for websites so that there history is not lost for ever.
