Hiya, kids! Ready for everything to be lost one day?
The thought came to me yesterday that everything we consume online will some day be lost. Every TikTok I’ve liked that I haven’t saved will go away, and every photo I have saved in iCloud will vanish and everything I’ve backed up to a hard drive in my own home will rot away and so on and so forth. Cheery line of thinking, right? How much of what we enjoy today is designed to be lost?
Well, how much has always been designed that way? There’s a decent chance I’ll end up doing a career in packaging design, and food packaging is destined for the recyclers the moment it leaves the factory. Something like a cereal box will only be survived by images and shots in adverts and maybe, maybe the occasional preserved example in an art museum or something like that.
Things like this are called ephemera, items that are meant to be used once and then thrown away. The wrapper for a stick of gum is ephemera, so is an instruction manual for a lego set. Saving it goes against its intended purpose of giving all of its usefulness and then being disposed. Ephemera can serve a more active role, though, a lot of 1950’s American civil defense materials were considered ephemeral, you’d absorb the information inside and chuck it, but those leaflets and books provide a great insight into the 50’s paranoia of atomic holocaust.
Ephemera is not bad or less worthy of preservation by nature, time and talent goes into designing even the lowly cereal box or instant noodle packaging. But those things are meant to be disposed because they serve a purpose and then have no more purpose to give. But come on, who cares about a cereal box? There will be new cereal boxes. Ephemeral content, as I’m referring to it, is short-form video, television shows and movies, music and books and culture that are designed to be consumed once and thrown out, never to be seen again. This kind of content isn’t designed to be lost by nature, but if the platform it’s being hosted on goes down or decides it doesn’t want to pay to maintain expensive data centers then it vanishes. Only what is saved is remembered, but usually only what is important is saved.
We cannot save every cooking video on TikTok just like we can’t save every local TV station cooking show that aired in the 20th century. We save the ones with some cultural impact, but that’s all. Everything will become lost media one day by nature of not being saved, but not everything that is lost is worth saving. Archaeologists wish they could have every artifact from a roman city but they probably wouldn’t need all of them to put together an accurate portrayal of life in that time. Plus, ancient romans were more than happy to make record of what their lives were like!
Video essays are the purest form of this, I think. Someone makes a video using the known knowledge about a subject, plus whatever knowledge they may bring to the table. Easy example, Cybershells video on CircleMaster’s grinding to level 99 in the first reactor in Final Fantasy 7. That’s an easy video to make but him being there in the forums talking about the saga gives the video this amazing archival element, every aspect is recorded from start to end with enough ephemeral material (i.e) forum posts mentioned to make the work definitive in its niche field. If everyone talks about things they’re passionate about in this way then we’ll have a pretty good record of modern life, ephemera saved.
My canned coffee omnibus is another example, not to toot my own horn. It’s preserving those drinks in a way that future generations can look back at and think ‘wow, she drank a lot of coffee for that. Cool.’ On an unrelated note, the worry of 'every discord message I ever sent can be lost if discord goes down' struck me, and its concerning but discord is a form of communication and historically, communication is not permanent! We can't all walk around with tape recorders saying everything we ever think and then send it off to a salt mine to be preserved, paper letters rot the same way online messaging services do, you know? Not everything has to be saved.
In summary, not everything will be saved but not everything has to be. We, as a culture, do a pretty good job of recording the important stuff whether we intend to or not. And don’t worry about the great loss of all digital creations, just save what you like.