"As we invest more of our lives into the electronic realm, corporate decisions to shut down online services without recourse are beginning to resemble digital acts of Nero burning Rome—cultural history and entire communities are trashed in the process."
The OA was aged 11 to 18 while using Prodigy. Recent work on memory tends to suggest that particular age range, perhaps up to early 20s, leaves very strong memories - many things are new &c. So this aspect of OAs life has a lot of importance to the OA.
In the area I live in, we have, in the last 30 years or so, demolished huge factories and whole vertically integrated industries have vanished or moved south to lower wage countries. Foundaries, lock factories, tool making, car making. Those factories were the site of communities - you spend half your waking lives at work - but they were demolished as quick as anything. Some history survives but not the detail/experience.
If anything, digital communities are easier to preserve in the sense that the whole corpus can be captured. Please note I said easier, not easy!
Good point on that last part. It's amazing that EzBoards exist in this day in age, in any form, but we've yet to figure out an easy way to gobble things up; I can get my own wikipedia site started in under 10 minutes but I can't get an easy way to archive a bunch of stuff online? It'd be a service for sure, but storage is cheap these days.
The OA was aged 11 to 18 while using Prodigy. Recent work on memory tends to suggest that particular age range, perhaps up to early 20s, leaves very strong memories - many things are new &c. So this aspect of OAs life has a lot of importance to the OA.
In the area I live in, we have, in the last 30 years or so, demolished huge factories and whole vertically integrated industries have vanished or moved south to lower wage countries. Foundaries, lock factories, tool making, car making. Those factories were the site of communities - you spend half your waking lives at work - but they were demolished as quick as anything. Some history survives but not the detail/experience.
If anything, digital communities are easier to preserve in the sense that the whole corpus can be captured. Please note I said easier, not easy!