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Digital Archaeology - Day four
As the browsers were closed and the monitors dimmed for the final time, Digital Archaeology came to an end at Internet Week New York. The exhibit, which resurrected dozens of iconic websites on the hardware and software of their time, ran for four days this week, giving the thousands of attendees a glimpse into our not-so-distant digital past.
The exhibit attracted attendees of all ages – those whose earliest memories of the internet was on a tangerine iMac G3, to those who remembered how drastically their business changed when the World Wide Web connected them with the world.
From one of the earliest eCards in Cyber Orchids (one of my favourites), to an Arcade Fire music video that integrates video of your neighborhood via Google Maps in The Wilderness Downtown, Digital Archaeology exhibited sites that truly changed the landscape of not only web design, but also how brands could engage their audiences.
The online leaderboard saw a fantastic race to the finish. K10K, the surprise contender with a late surge of votes, couldn’t top the mid-race leader, Antirom, nearly the oldest website in the exhibit, which garnered over 70 votes for the win. It was certainly interesting to see how the earliest sites unearthed nostalgia for our oldest digital memories.
While not seen on any signage or site description, what Digital Archaeology accomplished was encouraging attendees to contemplate what the future holds for the Internet as they examined how quickly it changed in just two decades since Tim Berners-Lee introduced us to the World Wide Web.
This was a nice takeaway from Nick Burd who writes for Yahoo! Scene: “The primary strength of the exhibit is that it doesn’t try to make any predictions about the future of the web. Instead, it allows the viewer to make their own theories by highlighting significant advancements and touchstones.”
Whether you believe that websites are going to be a staple of our society well into the century or will be extinct within a few years, there’s little argument of how imperative it is to archive our digital history.
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