The March 2008 Cocktail Talk discussed
the long, if not eternal, life of things posted on the internet. It
also mentioned Emily Sander.
Emily Sander was an 18 year old community college
student in Kansas working as internet porn star Zoey Zane. Emily
Sander was murdered in 2007 yet porn sites of her as Zoey Zane
still remained. There may be fewer porn sites hosting pictures of
her today, I don't know.
What I do know is that Wikipedia has this to say
about all that:
"The Zoey Zane porn site featured a statement
criticizing the media, saying they had blown Sander's porn career
out of proportion. The statement reported that it was a shame that
the site drew more viewers after the death of Emily than it had
drawn previously. The Zoey Zane site is currently redirected
to an online memorial for Emily Sander, and does not contain any
photos from the original Zoey Zane website. However, an archived
copy of the text is available for viewing via the Internet
Archive."
Archived copy, Internet Archive? Could this be the
end of the internet, the elephant's graveyard, where the
"digitally born" go to die?
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital
library that offers permanent storage of and free public
access to collections of digitized materials, including websites,
music, moving images, and nearly four million public-domain
books.
It has an annual budget of $10 million, over
200 employees, data centers in San Francisco, Redwood City,
and Mountain View. Its collection is mirrored for stability and
endurance at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
The Internet Archive has many wondrous things.
You can watch the actual television broadcast of All
My Children from November 22nd 1963. The one interrupted by news of
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
You can watch Gumbasia. Art Clokey's first animated
film, shot on his father's ping-pong table in the family garage.
The film that got him hired to create and animate Gumby and Pokey.
You can read from a selection of almost 4 million
books. Even books that have been banned by the government like
Uncle Remus.
You can use the Wayback Machine to see what a
website looked like weeks, years, or decades ago.
You can contribute content to the Internet Archive.
Your home movies, books you've written, the story of your life. The
Internet Archive lets everyone upload content from the comfort of
their own homes.
Thanks to my brother Barry (not his real name) our
family history in America dating back to before the revolution has
been recorded in words and pictures*. Thanks to the Internet
Archive his digitally born work will be preserved and available to
everyone, including his children, and his children's children's
children, in near perpetuity.
Maybe, someday, instead of epitaphs, tombstones will
have search-words, enabling us to find pictures, video, and
writings of those gone before us. Maybe the Internet Archive
isn't the end of the Internet, maybe it's the after-life of the
Internet.
You can find the Internet Archive at www.archive.org,
or not, but that's your call, and that's Cocktail Talk.
