I would say there are several classifications of things worth saving through a broad net:
- kindling sources, like a LiveJournal post that inspired Lin Manuel to write Hamilton (for a fake example)
- early work of a future star, like imagine Lorde posted early songs to MySpace. This is already a clear issue as many posted songs have been deleted or lost for various reasons.
- valuable things on shaky ground. Yahoo Groups, for the latest example. But I just saw on Reddit someone was looking for a deleted scene from Blair Witch Project that was supposedly the first video ever published on Amazon Prime Video... and now it has nearly vanished. That seems crazy to me from so many directions.
- the value of the ephemeral. Gold and jewelry from old civilizations is nice but we know so much of how people actually lived by examining their garbage, scrap notes, broken bowls, etc.
- the myth of permanence. We feel like 10 million people see a video, it is probably preserved. But there are no master tapes of any of this and so much of everything is interlinked and hard to piece together after the fact. What were people's tech stack when they were making MySpace? How big were people's hard drives? Did rhey share sonngs theough Kazaa or play them on MySpace directly? What was the state of Javascript then, what were the security issues or underground trends? How did songs propogate, where were they shared? Were people sending links in email or AIM, were people sharing links on Digg? This is stuff from like a decade or two and already you need to think like an archaeologist to have any sense of how the culture really existed because there were so many moving parts from year to year.
- the value of datasets. Imagine putting some thought against the Geocities archive to see how HTML blink tags grew then fell in popularity over time. Or how a meme propagated, or analyze the link structure between groups of people or by topic or any make any number of interesting inquiries about how humans operate culturally in digital space and how interact socially through certain set of tools and limitations. There are very interesting possibilities here for understanding ourselves better as a species.
- kindling sources, like a LiveJournal post that inspired Lin Manuel to write Hamilton (for a fake example)
- early work of a future star, like imagine Lorde posted early songs to MySpace. This is already a clear issue as many posted songs have been deleted or lost for various reasons.
- valuable things on shaky ground. Yahoo Groups, for the latest example. But I just saw on Reddit someone was looking for a deleted scene from Blair Witch Project that was supposedly the first video ever published on Amazon Prime Video... and now it has nearly vanished. That seems crazy to me from so many directions.
- the value of the ephemeral. Gold and jewelry from old civilizations is nice but we know so much of how people actually lived by examining their garbage, scrap notes, broken bowls, etc.
- the myth of permanence. We feel like 10 million people see a video, it is probably preserved. But there are no master tapes of any of this and so much of everything is interlinked and hard to piece together after the fact. What were people's tech stack when they were making MySpace? How big were people's hard drives? Did rhey share sonngs theough Kazaa or play them on MySpace directly? What was the state of Javascript then, what were the security issues or underground trends? How did songs propogate, where were they shared? Were people sending links in email or AIM, were people sharing links on Digg? This is stuff from like a decade or two and already you need to think like an archaeologist to have any sense of how the culture really existed because there were so many moving parts from year to year.
- the value of datasets. Imagine putting some thought against the Geocities archive to see how HTML blink tags grew then fell in popularity over time. Or how a meme propagated, or analyze the link structure between groups of people or by topic or any make any number of interesting inquiries about how humans operate culturally in digital space and how interact socially through certain set of tools and limitations. There are very interesting possibilities here for understanding ourselves better as a species.