Two problems – how to solve them within distributed frameworks?
First – ephemerality and loss of history. Sites come and go. Sometimes entire hosting platforms, such as YahooGroups, go kaput and delete 20 years worth of content. Internet archival is spotty or non-existent (archive.org generally doesn’t have much, even less so with contemporary social technologies). Google Groups (Usenet) search is broken and they don’t really care, plus the archives are again incomplete. And 2000’s era stuff is just completely gone.
As such, communities are constantly unaware of their own histories. Discussion never really takes off because there’s a constant starting from zero. Terminologies get reinvented but sometimes in reductive ways. Sometimes communities merge, and what had been defined before now needs to be reworked from scratch. Will this reworking be as careful as what went before?
Terminology – language itself – whether in words or images, whatever repeats or persists – is probably the most effective encoding of ‘history’ that actually survives, since the discussion that gave birth to this language has disappeared. But terminology can be unstable. Suddenly several people start using a new term, as if it had always been there. You can pretty much figure it out from context but then there’s a game of tracking down the tumblr post in which it was first defined. But it’s not always on tumblr, not always easily found…
Despite semi-consistent terminology, then, there’s a constant and pervading sense of amnesia.
This leads to the second problem – unboundedness, the sense that all the real discussion is taking place ‘elsewhere’, that one has missed what is most essential.
After all, what is ‘the community’? Certainly not a specific site or a technology.
In most cases we’re talking something with a long history, albeit unrecorded – a loose aggregation of private, in-person groups, snail-mail, mail-art, zines (1980’s), listservs, Usenet (1990’s), forums, LiveJournal (2000’s), Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, Discord, Telegram (2010’s). Plus in-person or online conventions; local meetups/Zooms.
Perhaps that’s the real ‘distributed web’, something that’s distributed across sites, platforms and even media – and only loosely connected, either across these media or across time. Perhaps this is the true meaning of ‘virtuality’ – not merely (or even) that something is in digital form.
Unboundedness is a strength because if one site or technology or medium disappears or becomes unusable people will flock to another. It’s also a strength because we can each define our own relations with respect to ‘the community’ – they’re not mediated by some central authority.
The problem with unboundedness is the sense one is always missing ‘the conversation’. The sense of missing out is particularly acute in the case of ‘drama’. Cryptic messages appear on a few main sites, only indicating that there is conflict between two parties without any indication of the issue – and also that some major event is now in jeopardy. There’s always a sense that some really meaningful discussion happened on one of the Discords that you didn’t bother to join – or perhaps on one of the private and unlisted ones. And that it was a painful discussion and thus it’s not appropriate to do more than accept the cryptic message at face value, without really understanding it, let alone being able to help.
Hence, ‘the conversation’ itself is always obscure. It’s esoteric but not for the right reasons. Everyone thinks simply that it happened elsewhere, when in reality nothing took place. Such obscurity feeds drama and power games. Which leads again to ephemerality and erasure of history – also more unboundedness, more proliferation of sites.
