Nobody on the internet could move on
October 29, 2024 1:32 AM   Subscribe

All media becomes lost without intervention. It only stays at our fingertips if it’s archived, often by librarians and historians, but also amateurs. Preservation is connected to curiosity, a deeply human emotion found in everything from Marco Polo traversing the globe to Lostwavers trawling through old radio archives. Lost media movements are a beautiful testament to humanity’s love for details, chasing the unknown, and writing the history of things once deemed throwaways. from Needles in Haystacks: The Lostwave Story

Lostwave, prev iously
posted by chavenet (11 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Mysterious Song is haunting, and in some way I don’t want it ever to be found. I don’t know if it’s a good song, but it definitely has an aura, and I don’t know if that survives becoming merely aural. There will always be a story attached to it, though.
posted by Kattullus at 3:16 AM on October 29 [1 favorite]


Also previously: Duran Duran’s Rio Cover Model Identified 42 Years Later

I took me years of digging through the archives of Metafilter, but I finally found that previously to post here.

(Just kidding.)
posted by AlSweigart at 4:24 AM on October 29 [2 favorites]


One of the joys of the early Internet was to go through my long backlog of vague childhood memories of various bits of media and discover that other people remembered them, too. And then came the joy of the mid-2000s when all this stuff started getting uploaded to YouTube and it suddenly became possible to watch a specific television commercial or an episode from some Saturday morning cartoon series from the late 1980s.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:56 AM on October 29 [8 favorites]


For example, “Everyone Knows That” was associated with a pink boombox


They provide the picture and the caption helpfully identifes the boombox, as if to stop anyone from going down that particular rabbit hole.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:13 AM on October 29 [3 favorites]


Love this stuff. Combines my archival/research training with a hint of the supernatural, almost.
posted by praemunire at 8:03 AM on October 29 [1 favorite]


Lost media movements are a beautiful testament to humanity’s love for details, chasing the unknown, and writing the history of things once deemed throwaways.

This is why it is so hard for me to simply toss the innumerable photos and whatnot I ended-up with from my mother, many of which she, in turn, inherited from her mother. Physical photos just carry a lot more, I dunno, life? reality? gravitas? to them than a scan on a screen.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:38 AM on October 29 [2 favorites]


Thorzdad, we are currently going through all the boxes of photos my mother inherited from both her and my dad's side of the family. We're trying to winnow down to ones we want to have mass digitized. So far we have about 2 large boxes of photos we do not want to discard, but easily 3 times that where we do not really know who they are, cannot place them by context of the photo album, and they may just be friends of family who we never knew. No one else wants these photos, so I don't know what to do with them. They are in boxes in the garage right now.
posted by drossdragon at 9:55 AM on October 29 [1 favorite]


And then came the joy of the mid-2000s when all this stuff started getting uploaded to YouTube

It is interesting to me that there is still so much left unmined despite that trend, at least for those places outside larger population bases like the US. So much of the pre-1984 Canadian media, especially television but some films as well, are still unavailable. Some of it may exist in a vault somewhere but the owners of that media largely don't bother with catalogue due to a perceived lack of interest.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:31 AM on October 29 [2 favorites]


I remember being so surprised and shocked when I stumbled upon an online copy of a framed photo had had been handed down from my great-great-grandfather. It was a company photo of the factory he worked at with all the employees gathered outside. Even though he's like one of a hundred people in that photo, given it's age, obscurity and relative ephemera, it just never occurred to me that anyone else might still have a copy of it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:55 AM on October 29 [1 favorite]


And guess what just popped up on Reddit this morning:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/1gjbrs6/tms_is_found_the_song_is_called_subways_of_your/
posted by splen at 5:19 AM on November 4 [1 favorite]


How wonderful! I hope FEX get lots of publicity out of it. It must be great to find out that a song you recorded 40 years ago has had a second life.
posted by Kattullus at 7:19 AM on November 4


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