tarknassus

Sherry Turkle’s book “Life on the Screen” was an amazing read back in 1997

The blurb:

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity—as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.

A good look at the sociology and psychology of the early internet and how it has potential to impact in both positive and negative ways.

The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.

There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.

It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.

Check out personalsit.es too - a wonderful collection of small, independent websites curated under the banner of personal websites. A lot of tech people there, but some other little nuggets too.

There’s also the indieweb webring which is a great old-school way to discover more sites on the indie web.

If this were really true, why is there the existence of link rot and a large volume of online lost media?

I think the proper way to say this is that “if you post it on the internet, you should consider it being there forever”.

For example - a personal one. I did a short ambient music podcast series highlighting artists who release music via Creative Commons (a new thing at the time). It was only 5 episodes, and I have the first one archived. The other four are now completely lost to time, despite being put out on the internet back then. It’s not there forever.

In terms of social media, it’s harder to not be forever, but even that’s down to the same issues - has someone else archived it, screenshotted, especially in the case of a site ceasing to function? Internet Archive doesn’t preserve everything either. Plenty of archived pages missing images or files that enable true functionality to view everything as it was.

Because we know what would happen - O.I.:

Barry has a unique problem. He came up with a truly original idea. And sharing it has consequences.

Fair warning though, it is a short horror film though, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.