Internet Archeology

Some people say that the Internet never forgets. The things you do will be preserved forever in this vast sea of eyes that peer through the wires, and furiously record your achievements and missteps on stone.

But that cannot be farther from the truth. The Internet does forget. And at a very alarming rate, matching the exponential advancement predicted by Moore's Law. Hard drives, the bread & butter of storage devices, are complicated machines that run at 7200RPM, a gyroscopic mechanical wonder of engineering that you can bet will topple within a few years of use.

Thus, backups are paramount to the preservation of history. There is no excuse, it takes minimal effort and resources. Archival media is getting cheaper, faster, and larger all the time, from DVDs to Blu-rays, or even 6.25TB LTO Tape drives. Tools already exist to slurp down websites, as shown by the valiant efforts of the Archive Team.

But what if we haven't made backups? Either because we couldn't, or because we didn't know?

Internet Archeology

When we have absolutely nothing else, when there is no solid archive, there is only one thing we can rely on. Archeology. To sift through surviving piles of tossed images, of meager Wayback Machine snapshots, or possibly even Digital Palimpsests from device caches: Essentially, the ruins of long-gone websites. And then to weave some kind of narrative history off of it, something that can give us a look into the lives of our predecessors, and the lessons they can teach us.

Archaeology is, quite literally, the science of making judgements off of ruins... off of trash. "They probably did this," "They probably did that". It brings us further to the truth; but there is a massive margin of error, not just with dates, but with conclusions as well.

That's just how it is. Without a written primary source from the era, the best we would be able to do is guess.

"One day an interstellar archeologist enters the Earth long after civilization has ended. He X-rays New York City, and all that is left are traces of massive, and almost perfectly straight tunnels."
"He instantly makes a hypothesis that the civilization built these tunnels as procession chambers for a king's religious festival."

As such, doing archeology the right way is absolutely essential.

Find Solid Sources

Without evidence, a hypothesis is nothing more than a guess. To formulate theories, facts that are self-evident beyond a reasonable doubt must be used to support the idea.

Look for subtle timestamps

What if an artifact had it's original timestamp stripped or overwritten?

In the physical world, people can rely on astronomical events, especially comets or eclipses to make accurate dates of ancient recorded history.

For Internet History, the news, catchphrases, and common experience of the physical world is, itself, our equivalent of solid anchors for dating. Since time always moves forward, if someone mentions the correct result of the 2014 World Cup, (e.g. Br7s1l), or a hot topic on the news, you can date the artifact close to or after the event. Eventually, with enough anchors, you can triangulate the date of an event within a good margin of error.

Human Memory

Most of the time, the people who were there, who witnessed an event... are actually still alive. 5-10 years is an entire new age on the Internet, but just a phase of life for modern man.

And thus, a unique option for Internet Anthropologists is to ask the person himself (well, if you can still find them). They keep alive an "oral" history

But even then, when you ask a person about an event years after the fact: human memory will be distorted. It's either biased by perspective, tinted by rose colored glasses, or it's evolved into something else entirely. The fact is, our brain "saves space" by reconstructing memories every time we think back to them, recording only the exposition, climax, and denouement, and then filling in the blanks each time.

Memory is a crippling problem in witness testimonies and jury decisions, which may convict an innocent man, simply because their memories are tainted to stuff him in the narrative.

And most of all, even if a person may have the same name, the same resources, the same mementos: in a practical sense, that person is no longer the same man he was years ago. Ideas have changed in response to new information or experiences. Thought processes have either reformed, or fallen into disarray. Mementos, critical to jogging the memory of past experiences, may no longer be extant.

As such, records of events made long after the fact have to be analyzed with a grain of salt, and heavily sourced with solid, prerecorded facts. The mind is designed to weave a gripping story. But problems occur when the embellished narrative... becomes a reality for the storyteller.