As a “subsidiary of one of the tech giants,” IMDb (Amazon) remains indispensable. An early nerd site for movie and TV fans, it now sometimes heats up my computer as it furiously attempts to interest me in new stuff. But it has everything you’d ever want: complete lists of everyone who ever worked on a production, reviews by “Critics” (meaning anyone with linkable posts, even me), and “User” reviews, and those honest if repetitive comments by actual viewers. Can’t do without it. And while there are “community” alternatives (TheMovieDB), they’re ghost towns by comparison.
I love archive.org and I really like your division of rich and poor internet. You are right, archive.org really has everything and I wonder why it does not get more visibility! But thank God for the free web of knowledge. Wisdom? That’s the human transaction of how knowledge is processed and I hope more and more people use knowledge for good!
I love the way you make me think about history, Sam. This post took me back to the earliest days of the web, when I used DOS-based email and free services like Juno and split my time between engines like Ask Jeeves and Dogpile. It was a relief to think of Google as the one-stop shop for searches after all of that stumbling around, but it's now well documented that search results are getting worse. Everyone's trying to game SEO, and even lower budget sites are trying to mimic the algorithm domination of the big sites.
I had a depressing conversation recently with a friend and fellow writing coach who explained why he'd left a fairly prominent coaching firm. Part of his job (and he held a senior position) was churning out daily content on the site's blog, to boost their ranking in Google searches (since Google rewards sites that constantly update their content). That was an unsustainable task, so he had to fall back on AI to produce the daily grist, but he admits that it was basically shit content -- it didn't offer anything of value in writing instruction, even though it was featured on a site expressly devoted to that purpose. Its only function was SEO. I think we're all weary of that Internet. I don't want to have to wade through a dozen sponsored results to get to what I was looking for. And as someone with a professional website I don't want to play an algorithm game to be discoverable.
At the risk of growing too windy, I'll indulge a final thought. The underlying premise of the poor Internet is similar to the foundational ideology of higher ed, in that its primary function was not to generate revenue so much as to share knowledge. When budget management took over as the foundational ideology, it meant that libraries started falling back on things like interlibrary loan, rather than ordering their own copies of books. That has had ripple effects on university presses, who could once count on libraries for a critical mass of purchases for new releases, but who can't do so any longer. And this then trickles back to academic authors, who never made any money on their books, but who are now given fewer opportunities to create knowledge, since university press catalogs are shrinking.
So I think the old model was that everyone paid enough into the pot to make sharing knowledge possible, and this allowed knowledge to be the focus. Now that budgets are the focus, we are much poorer in the quality of book offerings. This makes archive.org more than a repository of older texts -- it is also a kind of archeological site for a lapsed ideology, which once served us better.
Among the many things this brought to mind was Hito Steyerl’s prescient essay, In Defense of the Poor Image: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
As a “subsidiary of one of the tech giants,” IMDb (Amazon) remains indispensable. An early nerd site for movie and TV fans, it now sometimes heats up my computer as it furiously attempts to interest me in new stuff. But it has everything you’d ever want: complete lists of everyone who ever worked on a production, reviews by “Critics” (meaning anyone with linkable posts, even me), and “User” reviews, and those honest if repetitive comments by actual viewers. Can’t do without it. And while there are “community” alternatives (TheMovieDB), they’re ghost towns by comparison.
I love archive.org and I really like your division of rich and poor internet. You are right, archive.org really has everything and I wonder why it does not get more visibility! But thank God for the free web of knowledge. Wisdom? That’s the human transaction of how knowledge is processed and I hope more and more people use knowledge for good!
I love the way you make me think about history, Sam. This post took me back to the earliest days of the web, when I used DOS-based email and free services like Juno and split my time between engines like Ask Jeeves and Dogpile. It was a relief to think of Google as the one-stop shop for searches after all of that stumbling around, but it's now well documented that search results are getting worse. Everyone's trying to game SEO, and even lower budget sites are trying to mimic the algorithm domination of the big sites.
I had a depressing conversation recently with a friend and fellow writing coach who explained why he'd left a fairly prominent coaching firm. Part of his job (and he held a senior position) was churning out daily content on the site's blog, to boost their ranking in Google searches (since Google rewards sites that constantly update their content). That was an unsustainable task, so he had to fall back on AI to produce the daily grist, but he admits that it was basically shit content -- it didn't offer anything of value in writing instruction, even though it was featured on a site expressly devoted to that purpose. Its only function was SEO. I think we're all weary of that Internet. I don't want to have to wade through a dozen sponsored results to get to what I was looking for. And as someone with a professional website I don't want to play an algorithm game to be discoverable.
At the risk of growing too windy, I'll indulge a final thought. The underlying premise of the poor Internet is similar to the foundational ideology of higher ed, in that its primary function was not to generate revenue so much as to share knowledge. When budget management took over as the foundational ideology, it meant that libraries started falling back on things like interlibrary loan, rather than ordering their own copies of books. That has had ripple effects on university presses, who could once count on libraries for a critical mass of purchases for new releases, but who can't do so any longer. And this then trickles back to academic authors, who never made any money on their books, but who are now given fewer opportunities to create knowledge, since university press catalogs are shrinking.
So I think the old model was that everyone paid enough into the pot to make sharing knowledge possible, and this allowed knowledge to be the focus. Now that budgets are the focus, we are much poorer in the quality of book offerings. This makes archive.org more than a repository of older texts -- it is also a kind of archeological site for a lapsed ideology, which once served us better.