Haunting the Internet

Abandoned websites, anonymous posters, and e-friends that are silent for too long ...

Before I made the short film “Internet Story,” I was very interested in abandoned websites. This was mostly due to a friend of mine, Shaun, who prided himself on “collecting” them.

At the time, Shaun lived in the U.S., and we kept in touch via email. About once a week, he’d send me a link to an abandoned website – these weird ugly pages, often hosted on things like Angelfire and Geocities, that hadn’t been updated for years.

They could be about anything. A lot of them were just personal blogs, but some promoted a business, short story, or conspiracy theory. You’d get these really detailed lists of chess moves or train maps – with promises of “more updates soon!” A lot were just random collections – sites where you thought, “Why did someone make this?” and, perhaps more importantly, “Why would anyone read this?” Some were just pages of animated GIFs.

We both got this weird thrill from finding them. Shaun said it best:

They’re just so … haunting, don’t you think? It’s like this person has put a piece of themselves out there – has left their voice just repeating over and over for anyone who’ll happen to find it. The voice won’t say anything new – it’s been saying the same things for years – but when you read it … you can’t tell. It just sounds like they’re alive right there in front of you … until you look at the dates.

And this was pretty universal across all of them. Even the pages with absolutely no point to them would speak as if an audience was reading them right that second. They’d always be halfway through something, but promise excitedly to put up new pictures and items soon. But they never did.

“The mark of a real deadsite,” said Shaun, “is that it never disappears. Against all odds, it’s just sitting there and will never go away. That’s why I check up on them every now and then and keep the list. I hate it when one of them can’t be found again.”

I wondered: If Shaun hated the sites disappearing, how did he feel when a site actually updated after a year or two of silence? I’d seen it a few times myself – there’d be this big gap in updates and then a new one saying something like, “STILL ALIVE!”

When I asked Shaun about his feelings on this, he said: “I don’t know … it doesn’t happen very often. And when it does, I’m skeptical … I’m not always sure it’s definitely the original guy. Like it feels like it might be someone else. Or not anyone at all. I mean, how would you tell?”

At the time, I’d never thought of it like that. But since the proliferation of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, instances of pseudonyms, impersonations, and multiple identities have become fairly commonplace.

Some of us have had the uncomfortable experience of following a favourite celebrity on Twitter, only to find out months later that it was some PR office intern. When we were reading the tweets, they “sounded” like things the celebrity would say, and they “felt” intimately like them. But who was actually speaking to us? The office intern? The celebrity? Or something else?

“I mean,” continued Shaun, “you could be dead for all I know! Just like these sites. We only [keep in touch] via email – it’s just text. I haven’t heard your real voice for years.”

It was a funny idea. I told him that this was “very cute, very meta.”

“I’m serious. Prove to me that you’re still really there. It’s hard, isnt it?”

I suggested Skype, which he said he couldn’t do. My Facebook profile didn’t convince him. I wasn’t really sure whether this was a thought experiment or a running joke, but his responses were getting increasingly short. Eventually, I landed on a solution:

“Here you go, here’s a photo of me holding today’s paper :D.”

To which he replied: “That’s not funny. Why did you make that? That’s not today’s date.”

I sent him a few emails after that. I changed the subject – clearly the joke wasn’t funny any more. But we’ve drifted apart since then. I’ll send an email every year or so, keep him updated, but he’s never gotten back to me.

The internet is weird and kinda sad sometimes.

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