THIS PAGE WILL ALWAYS BE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Tomorrow's deletion of GeoCities from the Internet means that future generations of digital historians will lose unmediated access to another grossly coded, crudely animated, and provocatively pointless early online environ.  Back in 1990s, the internet was not yet the Internet, i.e. a land of constantly updated sites dominated by an online encyclopedia: it was a slapdash city populated by websites that were perpetually "under construction," the implication being that they would one day be completed.  The idea behind GeoCities in particular, with all its imagery that came straight from the mind of a square city planner, was that everyone who crapped out viable HTML was erecting something permanent, an edifice of human knowledge that ranged from Star Wars trivia to guitar tabs for 2112.  But people quickly saw the potential of a page that could be updated (if not always accessed) at will and started affixing to the bottom of their pages one or another of the aforelinked animations, thereby informing the world that although it might seem as if the comprehensive Shadowrun fan site would never (on account of its comprehensiveness) need an update, it was still "under construction." 

As I learned this morning, GeoCities still hosts a site I built—a site that, until it goes dark tomorrow, I'm ostensibly still building.  I'm not.  But now the world will never know the real truth behind the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 because that intensive bit of textual exegesis (and many others like it) will soon be wiped from the annals of what would become the Internet.  In forsaking both what it was and the metaphors that once governed how its users thought about it, the Internet furthers its ascent into the place of perpetual presentness it now is by denying it was ever anything else.  Which is fine.  But there is something stolid and quaint about the thought of being done with something, which I reckon is what those scholars and authors who think in books think about people like us.

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Don't you suppose there are features of this page (including this, my comment) that ten years hence will look like Not Really The Real Internet Yet?

[Ahistoricality]

Vance: Yes.

Scott: Given that the vast majority of geocities pages have been static for some time now, I suspect that the Wayback Machine probably has a pretty definitive archive, entirely capable of allowing future historians access to that trove of ..... well, I have no idea what they'll be looking for, because I'm not an historian of the future (as evidenced by my existence in the present, and confirmed by my insistence on "an").

[Martin Wisse]

It has been news for a couple of months in the geekosphere, this shutdown, usually with sneering about the worthlessness of Geocities and how much of a less to humankind this treasure trove of Shadowrun fanfiction would be. Few of those sneering have thought about what will happen when their blogspot, typepad, greymatter hosted sites will inevitably be shut down ten, twenty years from now....

[SEK]

Don't you suppose there are features of this page (including this, my comment) that ten years hence will look like Not Really The Real Internet Yet?

Absolutely, which is why I was mourning the passing of GeoCities a bit.

I suspect that the Wayback Machine probably has a pretty definitive archive

Actually, I don't think it does. Most sites were set to avoid spiders, so unless a person was HTML-savvy (and most GeoCities users weren't), their site's likely down the memory hole.

Few of those sneering have thought about what will happen when their blogspot, typepad, greymatter hosted sites will inevitably be shut down ten, twenty years from now...

Blasphemer!

[Mark G]

Incidentally, just a couple weeks ago a fascinating and pertinent bit of internet history surfaced on Metafilter: the origin story of the "Under Construction" animation.

[Ahistoricality]

Apparently there's an active archive project.

Unless Yahoo deletes its files -- which seems stupid, with memory as cheap as it is and these early webpages so efficient -- it's entirely possible that historians might have access to it again sometime.

[SEK]

Mark G, that's incredible. I'm surprised there's not a definitive social history of the internet yet, but I suppose what Ahistoricality links to might be of use to whatever poor soul's brave enough to try and write one.

[human]

Plus you can't search the Wayback machine.

Ouch.