I think a few people may have commented last week, after reviewing “Saving the Sierra” that it seemed such a shame that the project was no longer active. As Jesikah herself noted in the interview with Helen, the only reason that this site was even still up was that her and her project partner were paying for it. I too have a defunct project, though it wasn’t a digital participatory project, I do still keep the website live for many reasons. I want it there as a archive of the project that can easily be viewed by anyone, as inspiration for others that might want to do something similar, a place where artwork that is no longer in existence can still live on, as a showcase of my capabilities and proof of accomplishment.
After reviewing the Hurricane Archive: Digital Memory Bank, The Good Life and Post Secret I’m thinking even more deeply about the durability of communications created on online. Some will be ephemeral and some will be enduring. Some will go without a flicker of a thought while others will take tremendous work to stay. On the one hand, there is so much useless content out there that isn’t any more important than what color socks you wearing in bed, so good riddens to it. On the other, there are so many wonderful creative and rich projects, stories, ideas, conversations and communication innovations that are happening right before our eyes. It seems a shame for them to slip away into a digital morgue and forgotten about.
Sometimes it’s hard to think about the future; what things that we let go now might be important to us later. What might we regret looking back at web 2.0 without intentional archival? One thing on web 2.0 that is guaranteed is that it will continuously be changing. Will we regret the lost creations?
Have you ever seen the website the wayback machine (http://archive.org/web/)? It’s basically an online archive that archives websites. I thought of this site, when you asked the question about regretting our lost creations. I guess as long as sites like the wayback machine, we won’t really loose our creations. They may become inactive, but we’ll always have an opportunity to go back and sneak a peek.
I love your use of the term “digital morgue”. I have been very intrigued with this concept as well. Is it more valuable to keep our projects online as an inspiration and showcase of information and accomplishments, as you noted with your projects, or to keep it out of the muddle of all of the useless information on the internet? Sometimes I wish there was a way to reset and erase all of this useless jumble of lolcatz and other things so that we could get back to the online form of information sharing and archiving.