About Internet Archaeologist 33

Why I call myself an Internet Archaeologist

This is a techy kind of topic, and I know there will be loads of techy people, archivists and real archaeologists out there who know more than me, so I feel the need to explain my qualifications as an Internet Archaeologist.

I've been digging into the Web for decades - see some of my private collection of web analytics screenshots dating back to 2009.

I was in love with the internet before I even saw it.

In 1994, I was temping at a Eurostar train depot in London. I was sitting at my desk reading an article from the previous weekend's Guardian newspaper when I was as electrified as the catenary I could see from my window.

There was a whole paradise out there, I read, called the internet. Offering shared experiences on the computer somehow: art, music, fashion, holidays and games, a healthy-sounding dose of sex and shady, too... and wow, I needed to get myself a piece of it.

Surrounded as I was by some of the most competent railway engineers on the planet, I went round the eight or so desks, asking each if they knew what the internet was - and they all looked puzzled and said no.

But from that moment, I was thirsting to drink from that cup.

Over the next couple of years, I would get glimpses of the net: friends got connected, there was the library, a cybercafe, I had temping assignments in universities - all that. But, like most, I was unable to afford a computer and get a connection at home, so my desires remained largely unfulfilled. Until around 1998, after I'd trained post-grad as a teacher and moved into education.

I ended up having whole networked internet learning centres at my disposal. All day, every day. Which looked something like this, blue floppy disks and all:

I remember another formative moment. It's 1998. I'm standing in the office for my new job. My heart rate is elevated because I know that finally, for the next few hours, I will be able to sit down and freely surf the internet. And as I surfed, it was BAM! I was looking at the collective consciousness of humanity.

Obviously, I was not - but that's how it appeared. Because it was so, so much better back then! I was hooked. And have never looked back.

You see, for many of us, the internet offered things we'd never seen up close before. Like in the learning centre when lots of aurora borealis photos arrived in some Yahoo! newsgroup. For the first time, you could sit and see the Northern Lights in all their swirls and colours alive on your desktop. There were even sounds. I remember feeling hushed awe listening to their crackling (probably .midi files in RealPlayer) through college headphones.

There was no YouTube back then, remember. We got our videos from Blockbuster. Renting a video with a bag of Malteasers was a Saturday night treat.

Our centre offered two standalone PCs with dial-up for private research, and I remember people's faces (including mine) lighting up and heads turning the moment they heard those beeps. The sound of our modem was like Pavlov's dogs' bell.

I remember Google arriving, too. I wasn't impressed - I loved Excite. But at the time, we all thought the name was so cute: as a hybrid of gurgle and coo, the marketing was brilliant.

Unfortunately, I can also remember standing in a learning centre on September 11th, 2001. I was running an Introductory Internet class. Everyone was quietly surfing Yahoo! when I noticed that the dominant news pages were displaying the smoking, collapsing Twin Towers.

All of us that day were surrounded by those images in the centre - 30 or so screens of the Twin Towers toppling around us.

I'll spare you the details but, basically, the internet turned me into a conspiracy theorist. Which, as conspiracy theory can, came to dominate my life from then on.

A quarter of a century later, I am no longer a conspiracy theorist - there is no need to be. I'm digging back into the old Web instead.

I mention the conspiracy stuff for the sole reason that it supports my claim to Internet Archaeology. Not only did scandals like Pizzagate (2016) hone, for many of us, digging and preserving skills, but the internet even afforded me, as a non-academic, the opportunity to publish peer-reviewed research, identifying a new internet movement that I had spotted... on the internet, of course.

My article was published in 2011 and referenced 90 websites - which is a lot. The next year, I presented as an independent researcher at a British Sociological Association conference.

Fast forward to 2020, during lockdown, Klaus Schwab issued warnings that massive cyberattacks were on the way. I panicked and, in an effort to preserve material from the past, started collecting and curating news links from 2000.

600 pages later, my book That Was the Web That Was is now available for everyone to download on my Free Stuff page. Each link has been carefully curated and archived at archive.is. Help yourself!

There is lots of other evidence I could offer to support my claim to the title Internet Archaeologist 33, including the fact that I was once had no choice but to become a social media troll - unpaid. Which taught me even more.

Anyway, that's it. Welcome to my home page.

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