Death - The Web Difference

When my grandpa died two years ago it seemed that things were very simple: he washere one day, he was gone the next. We knew he was dying, as did he, and thoughevents transpired to bring a sense of shock rather than inevitability, everything seemedroughly in order. My grandpa was a communicator in the old fashioned sense; he hadsome experience of computers in their early days when he worked as a lecturer inengineering at Bath, but the internet largely passed him by. He had an email addresswhich I had set up for him that was never used, his only contact with the web was whensomeone else was showing him something. He was not a man for small talk andgenerally shunned the phone, but he was a brilliant letter writer and as a lecturer hetouched many student

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s lives. I know the former because he sent me many letters Inow treasure, I know the latter because of the letters that started to arrive with mygrandma soon after his death. Had my grandpa been born 60 years later I feel certainhe would have embraced the web; he would have been writing a blog and conversingwith countless students, past and present, by email. He would have had a Facebookpage, though I wonder whether he would have used it all that much. He would haveused online banking and paid subscriptions to countless online content providers (hesubscribed to easily twenty magazines and newspapers). As a man who valued hisprivacy, and with a cryptic mind, his passwords would have been impossible to guess.How big a difference would the web have made? I think quite a big one. I want toexplore what this difference is and the possibilities and problems it presents.

What is different?

When we think about what makes the web different we think in terms of communication,it is based on a network after all, and therefore we think of people. Whether staring inwonder at what Wikipedia has managed to create, or the politics of the Dean, Obama orRon Paul campaigns, there is a vibrancy seemingly inherent in cyberspace that leadsone to think it might have a life of its own. But there is also a tinge of decay on the web,of sites abandoned to obscurity, of blogs left without an update in years. Projects likethe Internet Archive are testament to the notion that life on the web means growth andchange; there is something nostalgic about browsing back in time to Google

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s earliestincarnation that you remember.

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Yet the Internet Archive not only documents livinghistory, it also documents the dead ends, the stuff that really is part of history not just onthe web, but of the web. If we talk of a history of the web, of web sites as artifact, wemust remember that it is a human history. Each website tells a story about its creatorand to differing degrees it tells a story about the people who accessed it. When we finda “dead” site we presume that whoever was behind it, whether they were an anonymouscorporation, a volunteer group or a named person, has moved on to somewhere else.Unless we find the one last update that tells us what became of the site and its ownerwe barely even deign to conjure a story of its life and its decline in the way we mightwith an antique diary or a faded photograph. One day we might. With the growth offree hosting providers, and the cost of storing and serving a website ever decreasing,

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See the Internet Archivehttp://www.archive.org/ (last accessed 10 May 2008).

there seems little reason to delete a site. If this is the case then we may want to thinkabout the death of websites, rather than the death of people; but the point for this paperis that while the comparison between dead and alive websites is different to thecomparison between dead and alive people (thank goodness), the former may beaffecting the later in strange and fascinating new ways.When we die even the most committed atheist will probably allow that we live on inpeople

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s memories and to a certain extent in the artifacts we created when we werealive. Photographs, journals, DIY projects gone astray, all these things act as conduitsfor the memories of the person that created them. They are precious to some, thoughmaybe not to others. Where do the artifacts that we create on the web lie in relation tothese objects? What of the meticulously crafted Facebook profile, the Last.fmscrobbles, the Flickr site?

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Are these not similarly important? Perhaps we might like toargue that they are more important. We could think of the life we created for ourselvesonline as just an artifact of the real person, but we could also think of it in terms of ouronline persona. The curious thing about an online persona is that it is created to bereceived, to be transmitted, and parts of it can still do this by virtue of the network, andthe machines that store the artifacts, long after we die. To take an example from thesites mentioned above: every time I listen to a song on iTunes or on my iPod the nameof the song and who created it is recorded by the software and via an add-on to iTunesuploaded to Last.fm, I then go to Last.fm and listen to tracks that other people like who

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Seehttp://www.facebook.com,http://www.last.fm, andhttp://www.flikr.com(all last accessed 10 May 2008).