Why is there so little pre-internet media available out there?

yeah, I guess it's quite an obvious answer. But it still bugs me. very often when I'm looking for things, music, videos, images and so forth - there has been so little effort made to capture anything that came before Tim Berners-Lee had ​that idea. 

It seems like we're swamped and drowning in the here and now but the past seems so quickly forgotten. This isn't the internet we were promised.

</ old man rant>

You mean like books?

No, I mean like everything. Especially images of places and times.

huh ?

So little available ... on the internet? There is plenty in books, as doublename said.

Yeah, there is stuff in books.

what's the question? 

there is a lot of pre-internet media available out there dude. 

Any pre-internet publication (magazines, newspapers) probably has an enormous archive available online too. See if your public/uni library will let you access them for free?

1915

1926

1910

1961

I think a big part of it boils down to some facts that

- most pre-internet media was not digital (print, tape, celluloid, etc)

- it takes time and money to capture/digitize things, esp. a/v media which can only be done in real time

- people usually only invest time and money to digitize something if there's a compelling reason to do so

Still a little confused but check these out:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland

https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary

https://www.flickr.com/search/people/?username=%5Clibrary

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/

Yeah libraries lol

so little? lol, you can literally get lost in this stuff online

fucking drown in it

Yes so confusing, libraries, books, no videos or even gifs! Wtf

I can I can't

http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/

I can I can't

Gotta love'em old soviet TV ads in youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIEDS7FyJSM

  On 11/28/2016 at 10:20 PM, Bob Dobalina said:

I think a big part of it boils down to some facts that

 

- most pre-internet media was not digital (print, tape, celluloid, etc)

- it takes time and money to capture/digitize things, esp. a/v media which can only be done in real time

- people usually only invest time and money to digitize something if there's a compelling reason to do so

there's also this - 90% of the world's data has been made in the last two years (as of 2013)

there are probably more meme gifs and youtube poop videos than hi-res digital copies of every existing book and manuscript created before the printing press. people archive and mirror unremarkable art and music all the time while in the 20th century the BBC and NASA literally destroyed invaluable archives of things like Dr. Who seasons and the Moon Landing to reuse tapes.

I struggle with this often, in fact personally I am sitting on a lot of cassette tapes I've collected over the years that are not available digitally - self-released stuff, curious mixtapes, foreign language pop music, weird spoken word stuff, etc. I've put it off because of work and family and stuff but even when I did have time to work on it the fact is it was really overwhelming to work on. There's no way to do all of it. So I have to prioritize what to choose and how to share it. I could easily waste time tediously adding even only the quasi-obscure stuff I have to discogs, let alone digitizing the really obscure stuff and throwing it up on mediafire and a blog link. Then I ask myself - if someone of this stuff is at least known to someone else but isn't (I'll find some on say ebay for example) then why should I bother digitizing it if someone else didn't. Maybe it's languishing for a reason. Then I think of all the music and art and books and library media and stock footage and ads and other "throwaway" media that could now shed light on our past that has simply been destroyed in some way or another. It's incredible to think about.

  On 11/28/2016 at 10:32 PM, hello spiral said:

so little? lol, you can literally get lost in this stuff online

 

fucking drown in it

  On 11/28/2016 at 10:41 PM, MDM Chaos said:

Yes so confusing, libraries, books, no videos or even gifs! Wtf

 

I can I can't

that's not the point of the thread, he's talking about pre-internet media 

  On 11/28/2016 at 10:48 PM, mokz said:

Gotta love'em old soviet TV ads in youtube.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIEDS7FyJSM

OMG I HAVEN'T SEEN THIS IN YEARS

Ifuckingloveyou

One more thing - there's a huge inclination for people to share the same "obscure" stuff online to the point where it's no longer obscure or a pure novelty. Represses of overlooked hidden gems are trendy and get more coverage than a lot of original new music. I literally see some of the same footage from the internet archive in fan made music videos often. In genres like vaporwave or more broadly in turntablism or jungle people re-use the same once obscure samples over and over again instead of crate-digging further. It can be a tiring thing to try to share something when it's easier to re-hash trendier stuff for attention. People do it on reddit all the time for example. Sites like buzzfeed perpetuate it too.

  On 11/28/2016 at 11:02 PM, Blank said:

fucking. incredible.