The social network MySpace, which we had not heard much about for a long time, lost many files last week. With them, part of the memory of networks is erased.
As MySpace was a fundamental chapter in online music and one of the Internet’s first social networks, this loss of files means that part of recent cultural history has been deleted.
Last week, a brief announcement on its website stated that, because of a problem during a server migration, anything archived there more than three years earlier might no longer be available. It concluded: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Well, this is much more than an inconvenience. It is worth remembering that MySpace received more visits than Google in the United States in 2006! Today’s major entertainment and pop music figures began their careers there, including idols such as Justin Bieber and singers Adele and Lily Allen.
The loss matters for more than just the early histories of these artists. Practically everything uploaded and stored on those servers between 2003 and 2015—some fifty million audio files, as well as videos and photos—was lost.
Memories and market niches
Exactly ten years ago, we witnessed the end of the free hosting service GeoCities. Founded in 1995, when the web was ceasing to be an exclusively academic domain and beginning to be made by its users, it quickly became one of the Internet’s most popular and populated places.
Bought by Yahoo! in 1999 at the height of dot-com mania, it was discontinued in April 2009, burying the memory of the Internet of the 1990s. It inspired one of the most extraordinary net artworks ever made, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, an online archive of those pages maintained by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied.
It contains not only the memory of how the Internet was used before social networks and blogs, but also all the graphic diversity that was, to some extent, lost with the standardization of Web 2.0.
Cases like these show that cultural memory today is also an economic matter and a service. It should therefore require some kind of ethical code. After all, personal and collective, public and private memories are increasingly mediated by corporations.
Imagine what would happen if, because of a server migration problem or because we ceased to be an attractive market niche, our images, documents, and personal and institutional correspondence simply disappeared from the clouds and social networks where we are depositing so much of our cultural and emotional lives.
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