An social-archivist centric reason to put things on the Web

You should put the things you care about on the Web for the world to see. There are many reasons you should do this, and you probably have your own. But today I'd like to share a reason that came to me while working for a previous employer.

Some years back, I worked for the Bodleian Libraries - the academic libraries of the University of Oxford. (I worked in this building, and tourists would ask me to take their photo in front of it because it's got this fabulous neo-classical design: little did they know it was a nightmare to work in - too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and with stone walls so thick that neither cellular nor WiFi signals went very far!)

By the early 1600s the Bodleian had effectively became the UK's first Copyright Library, entitled to a copy of every book that was printed in the UK. Many members of the Stationers' Company - the "guild" of printing presses - were incensed at having to give away "free" copies of books they printed, and decided to attempt to sabotage the process by swamping the library with a free copy of everything they printed: advertisements, restaurant menus, flyers, greetings cards, theatre programmes, sheet music, ticket rolls... their hope was that they could make the concept of a Copyright Library unsustainable.

But they hadn't reckoned on the stubbornness of librarians and archivists. The Bodleian started collecting and cataloguing all of this trash. Nowadays, this is the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, and it's a goldmine for sociological research. If you want to learn about the lives and experiences of everyday people in 17th and 18th century England, it's a treasure trove: you can work out which years the prices of pork went up and down, or how anti-bicycling campaigners pushed back against this new addition to their streets, or how electoral candidates satirised one another in cartoons, or track how gin's popularity rose and spread and fell from London outwards... these kinds of things could never be answered so-well with the "conventional" literary research sources. It's pretty magical.

Ephemera today lives on the Web. Services like archive.org have already shown how valuable this ephemera can be, by retaining for example a copy of politicians' Twitter timelines so their promises can be later fact-checked by journalists. And it only gets more-valuable with time. Imagine how researchers a century or two from now might look back at this time and marvel at their ability to poke into the daily lives of people today! Historians love it when they find a prolific diarist who experienced some important historic event... but they really love it when they can double-check that experience against primary sources from the public ephemera.

When you treat the Web as a read-write medium, not just a read-only one, you become part of that story. That shitty blog post you write might mean nothing to anybody but you and a half-dozen readers today, but who knows how it'll fit into the historical narrative. Much of the "stuff" we talk about today - politics, AI (sigh), climate, technology, culture, media... - we may not know the significance of until later, but our words can outlast us and become part of something greater.

The Web is the ultimate playing-field leveller for democratising publishing. So long as our species avoids a dark age, we can all contribute to the ephemera that'll form the historical corpus of the future! (Even this thread!)