I had, in my bookmark list, a bookmark for the Dead Media Project, a web site dedicated to preserving past forms of media. The Dead Media Project was inspired by a speech and a manifesto by writer Bruce Sterling. Here's Sterling:
What about those little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft sticks? To be carried by foot-messenger to the bamboo-shrouded estate of some lucky admirer after a night's erotic tryst? That was a medium.
Uh, yeah.
Or on a more mundane level, there are all those tape and disk formats that nobody can read anymore. We abandon formats and don't think about the fact that we are abandoning a lot of content committed to those formats. In the case of the millions of multimedia CD-ROMs that will soon be obsolete, that may be a small loss, but how about the early e-mail messages from the founders of the Internet?
Thus, the Dead Media Project. The site has a Dead Media Collector's List for those buying or selling old media, and a link to Bruce Sterling's manifesto and related links. When I tried it yesterday, the link (http://griffin.multimedia .edu/~deadmedia/dedmedia.htm) was dead. After a little exploration, I found the site again. It featured the following message:
This page is Netscape enhanced and best viewed with both Netscape 2.0 and Shockwave. If you do not have either of these applications, please download them here...
Am I the only one who sees three or four overlapping ironies here? The Dead Media Project, if by the time you read this it hasn't moved or disappeared or been converted to a version of HTML (or Shockwave or XML) that your browser doesn't support, is at http:// griffin.multimedia.edu/~deadmedia/.
-- M.S.
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