Sitting pretty at 1.8M followers, the Internet Hall Of Fame is undoubtedly quite popular with people who want to stay on top of Internet lore and history. As internet usage becomes ubiquitous, the sheer amount of content continues to grow and grow making it literally impossible for one person to consume it all.
For example, just Youtube, not counting any other video hosting sites and platforms, has approximately 800 million videos, with an average video being about 11.7 minutes in length. Some enthusiasts did the math, which amounts to roughly 17,810 years of consecutive watching to just finish youtube.
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that there is a lot more than just Youtube out there. The result is that taking a break from social media usage can feel disorienting when one returns. New events, memes, heroes and villains are being discussed, sometimes with vocabulary and jokes that are already unfamiliar. The internet has its own form of FOMO, where missing a specific story feels downright bad.
This is why pages like “the internet hall of fame” exist, not so much as to preserve, as a Twitter account preserving Twitter content is a bit redundant, but as a way to filter important or particularly popular posts away from the ocean of mundane, everyday content. Gone are the days when something viral meant that everyone could see it, now hugely popular media can be simultaneously unknown to significant segments of the population.
While the account is more tongue-in-cheek, as the content is mostly humorous, with a few profound and unhinged moments, it does, perhaps accidentally, raise an important question regarding preservation. While Twitter is and is likely to remain a predominant social media platform, it’s entirely possible that massive amounts of content, posts, jokes, and art could all disappear should someone trip over the wrong wire.
When people think of preserving digital content, the focus tends to be on art, or at least endeavors that are more similar to the media normally digitized, like old films and books. But why not take a conscious effort to preserve content like this beyond the servers of one company? As silly and unserious as most of it is, future linguists and anthropologists would no doubt love to see the direct text from people of the past.
While that might seem far-fetched, there is already a lot of popular internet content around the idea of what people of the past thought and wrote. Take a complaint from ancient Babylonian bureaucrats. “I am not getting water for my sesame field. The sesame will die. Don’t tell me later, ‘You did not write to me.’ The sesame is visibly dying. Ibbi-Ilabrat saw it. That sesame will die, and I have warned you.” Thousands of years later, it is just as relatable to anyone having to deal with stubborn managers.
