This is a lesson I’m learning the hard way, and it’s heartbreaking for me.
In school, we teach our students “the internet is forever.” It’s a cautionary lesson about what you post online. There is a lot of truth to it. You see that side every year when the news stories roll around about people losing jobs or scholarships or even college admissions because things they tried to remove from the Internet were still being shared.
What we don’t teach is the use it or lose it aspect of the Internet.
I’m not living in a fantasy world. I know my success in publishing, like so many other writers, has ebb and flow. There are parts of my career that have been so cross-referenced that they will never disappear. There are parts of my career that are lost forever to time and disinterest.
For example, my work at Man, I Love Films is mostly gone. I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. I kept The Archives feature going for months just based on recovering posts from that site. I wrote reviews for over four years there before the site went belly up. I was single-handily keeping the webpage operational with my weekly Horror Thursday column at the end.
I stopped writing there because I noticed I was the only one creating new content. Emails were no longer being answered. I will not keep someone else’s site going out of a sense of kindness or charity. Man, I Love Films isn’t the only site to go down like that, but it’s the one I’ve been most vocal about my involvement in.
I don’t regret moving all my new content back to Sketching Details. That would be an absurd statement. I regret that the site is no longer up. I did what I could, recreating articles through different online archives, e-mail communications, and scraps I could pull together from the cloud and storage drives; I’m stuck. I have not given up on the other 100+ reviews lost somewhere in that defunct website, but it will take a lot of work I’m not as skilled in to recover.
That’s not even getting into other websites that got wiped out of existence after corporate takeovers. That’s really not getting into websites I had falling outs with that nuked me from existence even when that content was evergreen (in October: horror criticism, remember?) and earned us both AdSense pennies. And I’m not even touching websites that just took my name off of things and continue to gaslight their readers on the real creators of some of their most popular recurring features.
I’m taking a more proactive approach to preserving my content from now on. I’m not quite ready to share all these methods, but you’ll know soon enough. I am backing up Sketching Details to platforms like Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to preserve digital records of the posts. I’d also like to point out I have at least some representation of articles I’ve written going back to 2008 when I did my first major rebranding.
What caused the rebranding and the loss of four years of professional content? Cyberbullying and other crimes committed against me. You ever have thousands of dollars stolen from you because someone wasn’t happy with a review you wrote on the Internet? I have. And no, Paypal and the police did nothing to help me because “the Internet isn’t real” was the prevailing mindset in 2007 when the attacks peaked.
Even then, many of those articles feature broken links because those other sites no longer exist. Graphics disappeared because certain platforms I used to use don’t archive images. Formatting can get a bit weird for the same reason.
All of this comes down to a piece of advice: archive your content. You never know when or why it could disappear. Do not let your voice disappear because you trusted the Internet to remember who you are.
