From the sublime to the ridiculous, the internet will reveal a lot about the way we live today
DO YOU know what Nyan cat is? Have you seen Pepper Spray Guy? Have you indulged in planking? Depending on your relationship to internet culture, that list either sounds like a new year’s trivia quiz, or a “when did you last see your father”-style interrogation. The terms are all from internet hits that spread through the medium, as did the dancing babies and lolling cats of yesteryear.
Nyan cat was a ridiculous but catchy Youtube animation. Planking was a schoolyard stunt of lying very very flat in very, very unusual locations, photographed by thousands of bored world citizens. Pepper Spray Guy was the police officer in Davis, California, whose casual approach to wielding a pain-inflicting aerosol earned him a place in dozens of Photoshopped montages.
What they all have in common is their creation and spread through the net. And, while I picked deliberately trivial examples, they are also all examples of works that were created onthe net. In fact, despite being picked up by bottom-feeding TV shows, I am not entirely sure they are truly enjoyable outside of the net. The ridiculousness of Nyan cat only really hits in its third minute, a point at which no television show editor could bear to last without cutting to another scene. Planking is only fascinating by the endless repetition of increasingly bizarre settings. And Pepper Spray Guy would be nothing more than tasteless, if there was no sense that yet another parody, from another stranger, would be appearing at any second.
Such trends, or memes, are what is often described as internet culture, which at times I think is a little unfair on the internet. Despite appearances, it’s done more in the last decade than distribute mashups and funny cat videos. There’s more to that culture than simply this.
On the other hand, these memes are the culture’s best ephemera. Like street-seller calls and pamphlets, playground chants and radio jingles, their infectiousness and timeliness come from being embedded in a wider world that can create them so quickly.
But unlike a previous generation’s cast-off creations, these will not be so hard to track. Almost everything that we struggle to find in an earlier age are now some of the best documented items on Earth. Nyan cat’s entry in Wikipedia sits as permanently as Beethoven’s. Hundreds of thousands of planking photographs are distributed over the net in a pattern that would defy widespread deletion.
That idea fills many people with horror. It is almost the perfect triumph of the lowbrow, that black-and-white film classics might rot offline while one-joke novelties live forever. It’s certainly a strange place we find ourselves in. Companies keep single copies of their incredibly expensive intellectual property off the net or locked in DRM for fear of it being illicitly pirated. Meanwhile, anyone in the world can upload to the largest library in history, and the more contagious your trivial conceit, the further it will spread.
It may not truly play out this way. Many of the digital memes of previous computer systems, as the archivist Jason Scott of textfiles.com has noted, did not survive the rise of the internet. Scott has had to scramble to uncover and preserve the chain mails and essays of the bulletin board systems that preceded the net. Together with the non-profit the Internet Archive, he has also worked to collect the earlier memes of the internet age.
But if it does, it does not just mean that the archaeologists of the future will have to plough through as much hilarious, distracting trivia online as we do today.
One of the reasons why the great documents and creations of the past stand so alone is that so much of what surrounded them did not survive. We learn a great deal from what is left: but we do not know all of the culture that its creators immersed themselves in. In some ways, we get a filtered selection of the past; stuff that passed muster from an academic or an archivist. With a bit of luck, we might be able to be a bit more catholic with our tastes. Tech companies and the Internet Archive, in seeking to save everything, might manage to save more than just their favourites.
If you do not find that a particularly compelling reason to preserve Nyan cat, think of the other items that are being frozen in the internet’s aspic. Not just the videos that were shown on television from the Arab Spring, or the Occupy movement, or the Japanese tsunami: but every other video photographed, uploaded or saved. And not just the protest movements that succeeded, or the theories of the news that proved correct or gained popularity, but the minority views, and the voices of the ignorant or the ignored.
I cannot tell what will be preserved from our generation when our web passes into obscurity. I hope it is more, not less, than the archives through which we peer at our own past. But if it really is an archive where internet memes and public mistakes last as long as politicians’ speeches and the academy’s pontifications, my guess is it will tell a far richer story of our age.
