The Vastness of the Internet
In my Multimedia Thinking class for RU-C's Digital Studies major, we were instructed to come up with a theme to surround our projects for the semester. For these projects, I created a "comic", an art piece, a soundscape, and a video essay.
The concept I am choosing to explore is the fact that the internet, while it is an incredible tool for preserving history, can be incredibly vast and swallow up information, occasionally having the opposite effect. The internet is used all around the world at all hours of the day, and as such a lot of content is being created on it, and this has led to an effect where information tends to get lost in a sea of content and subsequently forgotten about. Similarly, information can literally get lost due to servers going down, or websites changing and thus being harder or not possible to find anymore.
It is estimated that over 7 million pages worth of information get published to the internet every day. In every kind of media, including academic papers, many references to internet content are lost or inaccessible after a certain time due to the dynamic nature of the internet. This can cause inaccuracies media created from references to internet content, and sometimes make it harder for us to communicate through the internet.
Another more common example of the vastness and unreliability of the internet would be internet memes, especially those with short lifespans. As more and more content is posted on the internet by a growing number of users, the lifespan of things like memes decreases, likely due to an oversaturation of the content. Back in the early 2000’s, and even before, memes would have typically very long lifespans, and would see a larger variety of edits, remixes, etc. before they would finally die off. Today, memes have a significantly shorter lifespan, almost to the point of only lasting a few weeks before they are replaced by the next iteration. The lifespan of memes has become so short, that people occasionally put together “meme of the month” calendars at the end of the year that highlight the biggest meme during the month.
These two ideas, to me, really highlight the concept of just how vast and deep the internet can be. We use the internet for so much every day, and as such we create a lot of content which ends up being lost to time.
The Comic
The idea behind this piece was to portray all the different aspects of the internet, and how they will all most likely end up in this "black hole", somewhere where no human really needs to or cares to go. It may be archived for later use, but that archive may never benefit us. I call this a "comic" because it doesn't really follow a linear story; it is more so one large idea separated by these panels.