Doing research on the contemporary digital environment has always seemed to me to be a lot like this:

At the same time as you’re trying to write something coherent about what’s just finished happening on the Internet, you have to be copying and saving everything you’re referencing. By the time you’re finished your paper, you may be the only person in the world who actually has a copy of your research object. If you can remember to copy it, and if you grab it in time, before it’s sealed off from you forever.

Another way to think about it: imagine a library burning down at the same time that you’re trying to conduct research in it. Meanwhile, at the farthest edges of the still-smoking stacks, someone else is busily constructing new shelves and adding books to them, even as the old ones collapse into cinders.

This week, I’m revising two papers from the Digital Comic Book Scanning project for their upcoming publication. Every time I look at this research, I’m reminded that the things that we’re studying have been produced by people who are, at best, reluctant to have their activities discussed. In addition to their own efforts to hide their activities, though, the entertainment industry is making serious, ongoing attempts to erase all traces of file-trading and peer-to-peer circulation from search results. Google might not be eradicating such results completely, but they’re definitely making them harder to find. After the MegaUpload raid, many sites have changed domains, instructed search robots to stop indexing their contents, or disappeared completely. If we hadn’t spent half a year making local copies of the Torrent index files at the heart of our research, our project would be dead in its tracks.

This sort of ephemerality might seem extreme, but it’s characteristic of the Web in general. Estimates about the average lifespan of a web page range from a few hours for malware sites to about three months on the high end.

Digital media is profoundly space-biased in the sense that Harold Innis uses the term: it facilitates the rapid and promiscuous propagation of content across networks, usually in the interest of some form of organized force, but it’s notoriously unreliable for actually saving anything. The notion of a “digital archive” may itself be an oxymoron, requiring us to consider the relative merits of a model of knowledge propagation based on dissemination (and the attendant risk of loss) rather than preservation. We are surrounded by people doing interesting things with space-biased media because they’ve figured out ways to flow with it rather than fight against it, and I want to know more about how that works.