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The arrival of the Internet in the 1990s pushed us into the “information age,” in which it was expected that information would be available to all, for free, and, perhaps most significantly, for all time. In many ways, these developments have come to pass. But, in other ways, it has become increasingly easy to obscure information through access, or lack thereof, to aspects of information online.

This reality, is, of course, nothing new. Wikipedia pages are updated frequently through “crowd sourcing,” sometimes to the great enhancement of human knowledge and sometimes to its detriment. Facebook and other social media posts for organizations can be scheduled ahead of time or adjusted to reflect a past time simply by a few clicks. WordPress blogs and websites like this one can be altered by setting different “publish on” dates for posts and pages, potentially portraying a date or time when something was posted to a website that is a week, a month, or even years before or after it was really created. And any organization is only a few clicks away from removing from its website historical or other information that it might not deem appropriate. Sometimes this may be because of a genuine update in the purpose of an organization or its services; other times it may be because it is seeking to hide something or, at least, it wishes to make it more difficult to garner certain information.

It is the nature of the medium to be both instantaneous and ephemeral.

This presents unique challenges to organizations that must necessarily be concerned about their digital legacy – everything from the implications of older or outdated information on their websites, or the ways in which old social media posts may reflect anything from previous iterations of their mission to the personal perspectives of former leadership.

As Perisphere Media strives to help small businesses, nonprofit organizations and others develop long-term strategies and vision for their various way of being present online, we strive to communicate to them the importance of maintaining their online history. We work with them to develop strategic practices to audit, preserve and/or archive existing online content. Perhaps there need to be policies regarding the editing of websites or social media profiles. It may be that organizations should approach their websites with the intentionality of preserving their existence in some way, even when a new website is created. While there are different specific solutions for each organization’s need, we believe that it is crucial for organizations to understand clearly the implications of, and approaches to, their digital legacy.

The newly designed Ecumenical Advocacy Days website, with “Past Gatherings” archive drop down in the upper left.

A recent example of this effort can be seen in our work with Ecumenical Advocacy Days for Global Peace with Justice (EAD), a faith-based non-profit focused on political advocacy from a Christian perspective. Each year, EAD hosts a National Gathering in Washington, D.C., for education and advocacy. In the process of developing its new website (right), which was launched late last year, we spent a great deal of time in conversation with its leadership and those tasked with developing the new website discussing how to maintain an existing archive of over 10 years of previous gatherings, and establish an information architecture to allow for easy archival of future gatherings as well. The result was the creation of a “Past Gatherings” drop-down menu that allows for easy access to previous annual events dating back to 2005 (with more to be added) and the ability to add current and future years to this archive, creating a space within its site to house older information for both promotional and historical purposes.

This example is a small one, and while it does not have the significance of a papal Twitter archive, it, like the archiving and scrubbing of @Pontifex, is worth noting because of the way it encourages more attention be given to organizational digital legacy and its preservation.

Marc DelMonico
Senior Digital Producer

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This dual reality was perhaps manifested most immediately in Benedict’s Twitter account, “@Pontifex.” It was only this past December that the former Pope established the first ever Twitter account for the papacy in an effort to make his teachings more accessible to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and, of course, to anyone else who wanted to “follow” him. In the short period of two months, Benedict garnered 1.6 million followers on Twitter, even though he sent a mere 38 tweets. But these messages are historic in that they brought the papacy into the age of instant communication as never before.

The papal Twitter account, scrubbed clean and awaiting the new Pontiff.

However, when Benedict stepped down as Pope on February 28, @Pontifex ceasesd to be his. Instead, the images and tweets of Benedict on his Twitter page were replaced by the coat of arms of the Vatican State that is used when there is an interregnum – a period between the death or resignation of the previous pope and the election of a new one. Benedict’s name was removed from the account, and it is now called “Sede Vacante” (literally “Empty Chair,” referring to the papal office – see image above). It will remain in this state, presumably, until the election of the new Pope. Additionally, all of Benedict’s tweets were scrubbed from Twitter.

This entire transformation took place in less than two hours.

It is true that these historic tweets are not lost to the ages. The Vatican News Service (VNS) has archived all of Benedict’s tweets on their own website for posterity, but the fact is that these tweets are no longer accessible from within Twitter itself in any way. They can no longer be searched there nor identified with the originating account. Furthermore, there is really no way to know how long they will be accessible on the VNS website.

One presumes that the VNS will maintain them in perpetuity, but they, like every other website page and every bit of information on the Internet, are stored on a server somewhere. In the event of failure, there is likely a backup server that can restore that page, but can it be guaranteed that 10, 50, 100, or 1,000 years from now that those 38 historic tweets from Benedict will be available to be seen by researchers, historians, scholars, and simply the curious? It is true that organizations exist to archive websites (e.g. the Library of Congress has such a project) for the public record, but even they can’t archive the entire Internet on a yearly basis, much less day-to-day.

The point of this story is not to judge the choice of the scrubbing of @Pontifex in anticipation of the next pontificate. Presumably, those who did so wanted to accurately portray the state of the papacy and make sure the new pope was not associated with the tweets of the previous one. The goal here is to demonstrate the inherent tenuous nature of the digital medium and the advantages and disadvantages it can present to organizations and their digital legacy.

Marc DelMonico
Senior Digital Producer

Tomorrow, in Part II, I will discuss how Perisphere Media is helping one of its clients preserve its digital legacy.

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