the Internet doesn’t feel like a single place in our lives.

[bitheerani319]

The idea of having a designated space in your home where you engage with the digital world is old-fashioned. “I miss the computer room,” culture writer Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick eulogized earlier this year in a cool short essay in their newsletter, The Trend Report. Many of us do our day jobs on laptops, are programmed to repeatedly check the notifications on our “phones”—which we primarily use to connect to Internet-enabled services rather than actually phone anyone—and if not that, we’re on our iPads or glancing at our smart watches. By referring to an era of the Internet when it was accessible only through designated corners of our physical lives, I’m showing my age—and also drawing attention to how quickly digital culture evolves as the technology fueling it changes.

Early GIFs off GeoCities websites are really only accessible thanks to the color correction of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the GifCities search engine that the Archive launched in 2016 in commemoration of its 20th anniversary. That, to me, underscores a fact about the modern Internet that we take for granted: with 5G common, including in many subway tunnels, and Wi-Fi in some jurisdictions a publicly funded utility freely accessible in certain cities’ streets, the Internet can seem like the air around us.

But the Internet isn’t invisible. It’s a very physical thing encompassing mind-boggling maps of wires and undersea cables, and networks including countless privately owned and operated data centers—and in this current era of the web, where so-called “artificial intelligence” is causing an up-tick in the environmental and human impacts of this technological infrastructure, it’s good to be reminded of the physicality of the digital world.

When somebody flips off the servers, as GeoCities did when it shuttered in the late 2000s, the world risks losing all artifacts of that culture if they’re not preserved. GIFs that seemed like they’d dance forever simply disappear—for example, if the only copy of the file existed on a floppy disk that was, say, burned in 1999.

This is, after all, the ephemeral truth of the Internet: if you don’t save it, even if it seems like it’s everywhere momentarily, it will just as quickly disappear.

When we preserve digital culture that would otherwise vanish, we don’t necessarily gain the keys to a richer creative future. Again, the web has largely moved on from early GIFs. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t become more virtuous by being enthusiasts of outdated image types (in the same way that listening to music on vinyl records doesn’t necessarily make you cooler or a more conscious listener).


But when we preserve and revisit the remnants of digital culture’s recent history, it behooves us to remember that this networked realm, as imperfect and as frustrating as it can feel sometimes, is what we make it. And maybe if we realize that, we can start to again play a more active role in shaping a better collective future that many of us want. In the meantime, the GifCities database of millions of GIFs provides plenty of entertaining throwback material for your browsing pleasure. Heck, maybe it’ll even inspire your own GifCities-themed website, as it did with my recent website update. (I spoke to Chris Freeland, the Director of the Internet Archive’s Library Services, about it earlier this year. Yeah, it obviously features the bubble-gum blowing Furby.)