Razing GeoCities, Combing the Ashes
Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by Dale Eisinger in Arts and Culture, Business and Economics, Jeremy Caplan
In an apparent attempt to trim its fat, Yahoo media is closing down GeoCities for good on October 26, reports CNET and International Business Times. The announcement was made a healthy six months ago, but critics say it still hasn’t been enough time to archive all its web treasures. As this Google search reveals, there are nearly 7.5 million sites hosted on GeoCities, a hefty number that came at a hefty sum: 2.8 billion dollars back in 1999. Some analysts are condemning the move, saying:
“… cutting off your toes as part of an extreme weight loss plan is not the right answer.”
GeoCities dissolves into the digital aether October 26.
Of course Yahoo is giving GeoCities users the option of hosting their sites on a premium (read: “not free”) service. But the question still remains: What will happen to all the data on GeoCities pages not preserved? Will its relics of the Web 1.0 era simply disappear?
Google “caches” pages, but its purpose is to enhance searching. Textfiles is archiving ASCII art from 1980-1995, and not anything more. The Internet Archive is aimed at giving users a chance to surf the web “in the past.” But these efforts aren’t enough for a 23-year-old Jackson Heights resident. Ryder Ripps is the creator and curator of a website called Internet Archaeology, doing his best to help conserve cultural Internet artifacts of the GeoCities era. I talked to Ripps for sometime about GeoCities closing, his project, and the convergence of the two. Ripps runs Internet Archaeology “pretty much by himself,” combing GeoCities sites in particular for visual cultural artifacts of the basic web and cataloging them on his site. He thinks the shutdown is a bad move by Yahoo, not because of lackluster business practices, but because of the cultural impetus GeoCities had in the early personalized web era. He said that GeoCities was like the Facebook of that era of the web, but without the rigid categorization that social networks of today employ.
“If you wanted to make a website, you had to think about what you wanted to make a website about. Then you would have to get graphics, learn some HTML, be proactive about it. What’s beautiful about that is you see more of a reflection of someone’s personality, and in the end, things like the boxes on Facebook are being sold to market research.” – Ryder Ripps
While the website does encourage users to upload their own discoveries, Ripps scours pages for graphics that many viewers today would deem “bad,” noting the intellectual and emotional effort that went in to graphics such as these:
Images courtesy Internet Archaeology
By today’s standards, these are assaults on the eyes. But to Ripps, they are important relics of a different time, when aesthetic values were not so elite on the web and more people were represented for their creativity, rather than their favorite movies and TV shows. Ripps says the content on the web used to be valued more than the new, and in today’s culture the exact opposite seems truer: what’s new is more important than good content.
“The Internet allowed people to put mental value on artistic artifacts without much credence.” – Ryder Ripps
So Ripps himself is not trying to pass judgment about what he includes on the site; the fact that he is able to include the art is enough for him. But he does have motivation for the site beyond just a collection – he hopes for active viewership on the page.
“The whole thing is not merely an archive or a database, that would be as if the MET were just a storage facility. I’m trying to encourage viewership and participation. I think so much of art and art movements, things happen in cycles – this is inevitable.” – Ryder Ripps
It’s a shame that beginning October 26 he’ll have to start building his collection from elsewhere.
