Abandoned Websites and Entropy on the Internet

废弃网站和互联网上的熵

• 批准号: 2749408
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Queen Mary University of London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2749408
• 关键词: Abandoned; Websites; Entropy; Internet

The internet is collapsing. A 2013 study by Jason Hennessey and Steven Xijin Ge found only 62% of URLs were still available, and a URL's median lifetime was 9.3 years. Contemporary discussion of internet entropy has generally focused on preservation, for example the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine, and permalinks. Even archives prove unstable, however: technological and legal challenges undermine the supposed safety and permanence of such backups.My thesis aims to be a pioneering cultural history of 'internet entropy', the condition by which the internet fails. This failure isn't a single event but an assemblage of dead websites, broken links, and bad data. My research looks beyond conscious preservation to examine what sort of internet survives when no one looks after it.My research questions are:- How do we understand ongoing processes of internet entropy, not as engineers but as social inhabitants of the World Wide Web, and artefacts of this entropy?- How has internet entropy influenced our experience of online and offline worlds? What social assemblages, psychological processes and artworks have arisen from this ruination?- How should we deal with internet entropy beyond the flawed archival instinct? What choices might we be forced to make?To answer these, my thesis considers five areas in separate chapters:1) 'Abandoned websites' which remain online in varying levels of intactness. These include those for the Bob Dole 1996 Presidential Campaign, the Space Jam film, and the Heaven's Gate UFO cult. 2) 'Memorialised' social media profiles. 3) Abandonment in online games . This includes virtual worlds which remain online, such as Active Worlds; 'server migration', where players are forced to move servers because of merges and closures; and data mining in Minecraft to retrieve 'lost' structures and signage.4) Malware and viruses. 5) The physical means by which the internet originates in and interacts with the 'real' world - server rooms, hardware, the internet of things. My thesis synthesises and dissects established methodologies, utilising frameworks from cultural history, aesthetics, anthropology and technology. It combines the historical and theoretical analysis of media archaeologists including Parikka with the emancipatory use of glitch in writers such as Legacy Russell. A vital component will be close readings of cultural artefacts and their degradations, situated in (and against) cultural and technological history. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is a key reference for this strategy: for instance, she uses historical accounts of John von Neumann's work on stored-memory computer architecture and close readings of Goethe's Faust to uncover how 'software hardened into something that allegedly guarantees heredity, and permanence', the archival impulse from which my thesis launches. With these methodologies, I aim to analyse internet entropy as inhering in discrete cultural artefacts and as a historically-contingent process in its own right, happening and yet to happen.Above all, I address the ongoing dominance of the metaphor of 'website as manuscript', the ideal of preserving every iteration. My thesis proposes instead a return to 'cyberspace' as a framing metaphor: website as environment. 'Cyberspace' highlights complex interactions between social and material constructions of the internet and vulnerability to abandonment and ruin. Originally, this metaphor was developed in the romanticised 'Wild West' of early internet use - but Facebook's recent announcement of the 'Metaverse', a virtual reality designed for work and recreation, demonstrates how cyberspace is already returning to popular consciousness, inflected with contemporary dangers of privacy breaching and government interference. I use cyberspace to subvert these dominant ahistorical-commercial perspectives with a more nuanced view of historical and social forces surrounding internet entropy.

互联网正在崩溃。Jason Hennessey和Steven Xijin Ge 2013年的一项研究发现，只有62%的URL仍然可用，URL的平均寿命为9.3年。当代对互联网熵的讨论通常集中在保存上，例如互联网档案馆的WayBackMachine和永久链接。然而，即使是档案也被证明是不稳定的：技术和法律的挑战破坏了这种备份的安全性和持久性。我的论文旨在成为“互联网熵”的先驱文化史，互联网的失败是由这种条件造成的。这种失败不是一个单一事件，而是死亡网站、损坏的链接和不良数据的集合。我的研究超越了有意识的保护，以研究什么样的互联网生存时，没有人照顾它。我的研究问题是：-我们如何理解互联网熵的持续过程，而不是作为工程师，而是作为万维网的社会居民，以及这种熵的人工制品？-互联网熵是如何影响我们对在线和离线世界的体验的？从这场毁灭中产生了什么样的社会集会、心理过程和艺术品？我们应该如何处理互联网熵超越有缺陷的档案本能？我们可能被迫做出哪些选择？为了回答这些问题，我的论文在不同的章节中考虑了五个方面：1）“废弃的网站”，它们以不同的完整程度保留在网上。其中包括鲍勃多尔1996年总统竞选，太空果酱电影，和天堂之门不明飞行物邪教。2)“纪念性”社交媒体资料。3)沉迷于网络游戏。这包括保持在线的虚拟世界，如Active Worlds;“服务器迁移”，玩家因合并和关闭而被迫移动服务器;以及在Minecraft中进行数据挖掘以检索“丢失”的结构和签名。4）恶意软件和病毒。5)互联网起源于“真实的”世界并与之交互的物理手段-服务器机房、硬件、物联网。我的论文综合和剖析建立的方法，利用框架，从文化史，美学，人类学和技术。它结合了媒体考古学家的历史和理论分析，包括Parikka和Legacy Russell等作家对故障的解放性使用。一个重要的组成部分将是近距离阅读文物及其退化，位于（和反对）文化和技术历史。Wendy Hui Kyong Chun是这一策略的关键参考：例如，她使用了John von Neumann在存储内存计算机架构方面的工作的历史记录，并仔细阅读了歌德的浮士德，以揭示“软件如何硬化成据称可以保证遗传和永久性的东西”，这是我论文开始的档案冲动。有了这些方法，我的目标是分析互联网熵作为固有的离散的文化文物，并作为一个历史偶然的过程，在其本身的权利，发生和尚未happened.Above所有的，我解决了持续的主导地位的隐喻“网站作为手稿”，保存每一个迭代的理想。相反，我的论文提出了一个返回到“网络空间”作为一个框架隐喻：网站作为环境。“网络空间”强调了互联网的社会和物质结构之间的复杂相互作用，以及被遗弃和毁灭的脆弱性。最初，这个比喻是在早期互联网使用的浪漫化“狂野西部”中发展起来的-但Facebook最近宣布的“Metaverse”，一种为工作和娱乐设计的虚拟现实，表明网络空间已经回归大众意识，受到当代隐私侵犯和政府干预的影响。我利用网络空间颠覆这些占主导地位的非历史商业观点，对互联网熵的历史和社会力量有更细致的看法。