One downside to digital innovation: as formats die, we lose our past

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/05/digital-innovation-flash-homestar-runner

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If you wanted to pinpoint people of my exact age and level of youthful internet engagement, you might call us the Homestar Runner Generation. Like Millennials, we’ve led rich digital lives since we were teens; like Gen Xers, we’re too old to go to a party at 10pm on a weeknight. In any event, though, we know all the words to “Trogdor the Burninator.”

In its heyday, homestarrunner.com got several million visitors a month – not so much if you’re BuzzFeed in 2015, but a lot for an absurdist, nerdy, G-rated cartoon site in 2003. Homestar Runner’s flash videos, particularly the section Strong Bad Emails, kicked off dozens of loopy memes (and the attendant T-shirts) almost before memes were even a thing. So a whole lot of people my age were psyched to see a new Homestar Runner cartoon on Monday – and then immediately a little bummed out, as it became clear that the cartoon deals with the imminent death of Flash and, by extension, the Homestar Runner site itself.

Flash, a proprietary animation software made by Adobe, used to be a leading platform for multimedia (video, browser games, fancy interactive webpages). But it’s fallen out of favor due to security vulnerabilities and lack of compatibility with mobile. Popular browser Firefox has now blocked all versions of the software, Apple has refused to allow it on devices, and Facebook’s chief security officer wants it killed for good. That’s probably good news for security, but it also means that some of our earliest internet enthusiasms could eventually be rendered not only obsolete but irretrievable. Unless they’re converted, the death of Flash will destroy Flash videos and games. If that makes you feel like an antique, you’re not alone.

The internet is old enough to have been through shifts in conventions and aesthetics, both in front of and behind the scenes. But now, increasingly, it’s also old enough for these format changes to mean something’s lost in the changeover. That’s not an inevitable factor of age – books, an unusually obsolescence-resistant format, have remained accessible for hundreds of years. But for many other technologies, continued survival means shedding the past; the Homestar Runner Generation is old enough to be staring down a kind of technological dementia, as some of our memories become inaccessible.

This has happened in audio, and in video. When VHS emerged victorious from the format wars of the 1970s and early 1980s, Betamax movies became almost instantly difficult to acquire and, soon enough, nearly impossible to view. VHS lost ground to DVD in the same way in the 2000s, though the attrition rate was perhaps a bit less steep. For a while, movie collections contained both tapes and discs, but as DVD continued to dominate, fewer and fewer households replaced their VHS players. Even if they experience a nostalgia-driven resurgence like vinyl records, access to obsolete video formats will always be constrained by the fact that they require an older, tricky-to-source piece of hardware.

The internet is starting down the same path. For now, a great deal of our digital youth is preserved, in all its embarrassing retro glory; even many GeoCities pages survived the platform’s death, thanks to the efforts of sites like the Internet Archive. But as early users move into middle age and beyond, we can’t expect our youth – digital or otherwise – to be accessible forever. We’re aging, but the internet’s aging too.

Our experience of the internet today is different in many ways from how it was at Homestar Runner’s peak. For the most part, we now fall in love with things not where they are – on homestarrunner.com, for example – but where we are, on social media networks where friends and celebrities lay new items of interest across our paths. Even if Flash weren’t dying, Homestar Runner and its ilk might have to migrate to YouTube anyway, as they’re doing now – it’s more shareable, more compatible with the internet of the modern era. But changes in look and outlook don’t erase the past; it remains as a monument to an obsolete age. Changes in technology sometimes do.

The Homestar Runner cartoon represents the demise of Flash as an apocalypse, and for the site’s characters, it is. For the audience, it’s a coming-of-age story for the people who lived in the earliest days of the popular internet. Our tech has aged with us, and like us, it’s losing its memory.