As China’s internet disappears, ‘we lose parts of our collective memory’
As China’s internet disappears, ‘we lose parts of our collective memory’
The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.
The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.
Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.
They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.
Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.
A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.
“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.
Welcome to the Great Leap Forward 2.0
This is a drop in the ocean compared to the centuries of lost physical artefacts and writings.
I guess it depends on what you consider artifacts. 7% of every human who has ever lived is alive today. You can say many of the things people have owned are lost and some might be valuable to someone in the future. So much of our lives are online. I wonder how much of it will survive 100 years.
Hopefully not a lot. My guess is that onlyfans/pornhub and other assorted porn sites have been backup multiple times by multiple people. The rest of the internet is in the hands of the internet archive.
I'm pretty sure this is happening in the US because of those pages no longer being profitable to run.
There's a big difference between that and losing chunks of the internet because of rampant censorship, something we aren't experiencing in the West/US.
Yeah, and there's people trying to save as much as possible. Unfortunately attrition of history is nothing new.
I've got dead links/ bookmarks to pages from the hill, Wall Street journal, the guardian, and several other still functioning websites where information has been selectively censored or removed. And is not specifically an age thing, I have some bookmarks that are older than the dead links that are still functional on those same websites
Some Chinese 80's and 90's kids are going to be ecstatic to find this out
Reddit's really no different in that regard.
Thank Dog for the Lemmyverse.
This is just... A poorly researched article. China's GDP per capita in 1995 was $609. The shittiest computer of that era would've been around $1000, and most of the parts would've been imported from the US (which, at the time, was obscenely far ahead in the semiconductor game). On a somewhat related note, China joined the WTO in 2001.
The NYT assumes that everywhere around the world had a computing renaissance in the late 90s... But not everywhere is as wealthy as the US. By the start of 1995, there were only 3000 Internet users in China. So... No shit, there's not much available from 1995?
Of course, by the end of 2005, China has 111 million users, but most of them were still consolidated on the main platforms (NetEase, Tencent's QQ, Alibaba, Baidu, etc.). I did a cursory check of them, and there's a ton of content from the 1995-2005 era up on them. Check for yourself.
One important note: Baidu is a really terrible search engine. It doesn't index everything, and even when it has something indexed sometimes it just won't serve it because (presumably) it looks up in a cache of popular sites rather than doing a comprehensive lookup. In fact, Baidu's shiftiness is a well-known joke in the Chinese internet community.
why expect anything more from nyt
NYT is shit the minute they step outside of domestic affairs. It's unfortunate, really.
They don't have Google in China at all?
No, nor anything from Zukerbook. They don't even have TikTok, they have their own versions.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.
I also searched for Liu Chuanzhi, known as the godfather of Chinese entrepreneurs: He made headlines when his company, Lenovo, acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005.
Internet publishers, especially news portals and social media platforms, have faced heightened pressure to censor as the country has made an authoritarian and nationalistic turn under Mr. Xi’s leadership.
“Even though we tend to think of the internet as somewhat superficial,” said Ian Johnson, a longtime China correspondent and author, “without many of these sites and things, we lose parts of our collective memory.”
In “Sparks,” a book by Mr. Johnson about brave historians in China who work underground, he cited the Internet Archive for Chinese online sources in the endnotes because, he said, he knew they would all eventually disappear.
Mr. Johnson founded the China Unofficial Archives website, which seeks to preserve blogs, movies and documents outside the Chinese internet.
The original article contains 1,267 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I would argue that the internet is probably the least permanent form of media as anything can instantly disappear at any time. Its interesting to see people suddenly realize the impermanence of the internet and I think it highlights why projects like the internet archive are so important.
Well now we know who is ddosing Internet archive
This is a global issue. Not a China issue. If anything, China has every page cached and stored if they ever wanted to restore access. The US does too, but only secretly.