The history
of digital media (mind you not digitised media like e-books) has been the
subject of many a posting on this blog. There are several posting complaining about
the lack of heritage of digital content and installations. Hardware is being
saved on a regular basis, but not so with content related artefacts such as
e-mail correspondence, databases, sites and these days blogs, Facebook messages
and tweets. This week I saw support from an unexpected source.
My dear
friend Andy Carvin (see photograph) drew my attention with a Facebook message to a study of Hany
SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia,
who checked to see how much of the material of the Arab spring was still alive
and quantified the material or what was left of it. And the result was
startling. In fact they demonstrated that history is vanishing from the web,
especially as recorded by social media such as Twitter. The statement is proven
by a study on the Egyptian uprising and other world events. The researchers
claim that 30 per cent of the recorded history shared over social media has
disappeared. The study was highlighted in a recent post by the Physics
arXiv blog.
The
uprising in Egypt started on 25 January 2011 that eventually led to the
overthrow of the country’s president and the first free elections. In this
uprising social media were paramount in organising protests and spreading news.
By now
curators have finally started to store the calls for protest and news items. Not
surprisingly, a significant proportion of the websites that this social media
points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally
significant events, such as the swine flu virus outbreak, Michael Jackson's
death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, history, as recorded by social
media, is slowly leaking away.
SalahEldeen
and Nelson looked at six significant world events between June 2009 and March
2012. They checked the tweets about the events and looked for URLs they pointed
to, to see whether the content was still available on the web in its original
form or in an archived form.
And yes, they
found an almost linear relationship between time and the percentage lost. No less than 11 per cent of the social media
content had disappeared within a year and 27 per cent within 2 years. Projecting
these results to important daily social events, SalahEldeen and Nelson say the
world loses 0.02 per cent of social media material every day. You can wave this percentage away and point at the many irrelevant gs, messages, tweets and retweets, but it also means 0,02 per cent of the relevant social material. These can total up to 30 per cent of the recorded history shared over social media
It’s not
clear from the research why the missing information disappeared, but it’s
likely that in many cases blogs have simply shut down or moved, or news stories
have been archived by providers who charge for access (something that many
newspapers and other media outlets do to generate revenue).
Although
the Virginia researchers didn’t deal with the cause of disappearance as part of
their study, a related problem is that much of the content that gets
distributed through Twitter—not just websites that are linked to in Twitter
posts, but the content of the posts themselves—is difficult and/or expensive to
get to. Twitter’s search is notoriously unreliable for anything older than
about a week, and access to the complete archive of your tweets is provided
only to those who can make a special case for needing it, such as my friend Andy
Carvin of National Public Radio (who is writing a book about the way he
chronicled the Arab Spring revolutions). Recently an external service called Gnip
provides access to the full archive of Twitter
content, which it provides to
companies for a fee. And Twitter-based search-and-discovery engine Topsy also
has an archive. But neither can be easily linked to for research or historical
archiving purposes. The Library of Congress also has an archive of Twitter’s
content, but it isn’t easily accessible, and it’s not clear whether new content
is being added.
Besides not
carefully curating digital content in practice, digital media producers and
consumers show any interest in saving digital artefacts. Recently my business partner
Hans Sleurink pointed me to an analysis of Neil Postman in his book Technopoly. He is convinced that
technology has served human values throughout several historical development
stages. But in the 20e century technology has become so dominant that a
reversal has taken place. Technology increasingly determines what human values
are instead of supporting. In other words: the printing press brought
democracy; internet brings ubiquity, but per se not respect, as signs and bracelets
bearing the message of respect spring up all over.