Lost Media: Part Of The Internet Culture

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Have you ever remembered a TV show, a book, a commercial, or a song that you listen to when you were a child or when you were younger and gone to look it up only to find that it seems like you’re the only one that remembers that media?

That is what is known as lost media. It’s a piece of media that has been lost to time, whether that’s because of natural disaster, not enough people watching it to record it and preserve it, human error when deleting it, and many more possibilities.

To prevent those pieces of media from being lost, there is an entire community surrounding the preservation of media from all times. This can include video games, YouTube videos, TV shows, TV commercials, or even the media that is played before amusement rides.

The entire point is to preserve the past of the digital age. Because of everything being on servers, and being out online, there’s a lot of history that is being made every day that has the potential to be lost forever just because nobody recorded it.

It isn’t a unique interest either. There are entire subreddits and discord servers dedicated to identifying even the smallest piece of recovered media. This can be a three second sound clip, going all the way up to a TV show that the world almost completely forgot about if not for these groups.

Think of it like a modern digital museum curator. It’s a team of people making sure they’re able to preserve these pieces of work so that future generations know what happened on the Internet before them. Like a time capsule back to the early 2000s and the early Internet.

Not only is this kind of like a nostalgia trip for those people that are preserving this media, it’s as if they’re preserving the lives of people that may not even remember it. Events or experiences that if not for these preservation efforts, would have been lost to time and never heard from or seen again.

Some of the websites that people use, especially the most prominent one, would be the wayback machine. It’s a website where other websites can be archived or saved for specific snapshots to see how a website looked at any given time, day, or year.

So the next time you clean out your garage, and find a dusty box filled with old VHS tapes, instead of just throwing it away or donating it right away, take a look inside and see what you may have because you never know, you might have something that someone else somewhere else in the world is looking for.