Last week I wrote a follow-up to a much older post I did here; today I want to do another followup that moves in the footsteps of a bunch of other great posts on this site recently, that offers possibilities for consideration rather than seeking to nail down any specific answers. Basically, considering links, I expanded on an earlier theoretical approach toward abandonment and ruin in both digital and physical “spaces”, and I concluded that:

[W]e can understand the appearance of abandoned digital space as past-oriented atemporal. But the fact that there exists a literal process of rot means that the properties of a webpage are future-oriented atemporal – to the extent that we notice at all, it invites us to imagine the dissolution of our webbed pathways, the vanishing of entire sites, or at least their relocation. When a site goes offline, we might notice it when we can’t get to it anymore, provided we go there regularly – or if it’s a large, frequently used site like Facebook or Twitter – but otherwise, like those species of insect in the rainforests that no one ever discovers before they go extinct, websites probably disappear every day without anyone really noticing. Until you click on a link and nothing is waiting for you at the other end.

I think that lack of anything waiting for you at the other end needs more attention, as do other things. I spent a little time on web archives like Archive.org and the newer Memento Project, which – I argued – salvage abandoned websites but, because of broken image links and other lost elements, lock them into a static state of ruin. So now I think there are some points that need clarification and further exploration.

• We need clear differentiations between abandonment and ruin. Abandonment – given how certain kinds of abandoned digital space can work – does not necessarily imply ruin but simply that no one is doing anything to it anymore. Abandoned digital space can be in a state of ruin but is not always. Whereas abandoned physical spaces are pretty much in a state of ruin by definition, unless they are extremely recently abandoned. However, physical spaces in a state of ruin are not always abandoned. Many physical ruins are the precise opposite of abandoned: people flock to see them, they become tremendous tourist attractions and local treasures, they’re put into museums, they’re sites for all kinds of ongoing activity. Physical spaces are also ruined via a process that can take years, whereas the ruin of digital space can be nearly instantaneous. So we’re dealing with much greater complexity – and therefore much greater diversity of experience of a space-time – than simple ruin and abandonment.
• As Atomic Geography pointed out in a great comment that also got me thinking about the above, everything we experience is both spatial and temporal, and the physical and the digital share these properties, though not in the same ways. In fact, no two spaces are an identical spatial-temporal experience. They are as individual as people. And in this we experience both time-in-space and space-in-time, but also time-of-space and space-of-time. We experience time as a space through which we move in both a linear and a non-linear fashion, but we also experience space as something existing within and defined by time. And this experience is both interior and something that can be imagined to exist apart from ourselves. In another post, Atomic Geography discusses the book Code/Space by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, and notes that they approach space as something continuously constructed through the experience of relationships:

[T]his allows one to think of space either as metaphor or container, social or apart from the social, outside of time or fundamentally temporal, always in a state of becoming.  Reformulating this a bit, we can think of each set of these binaries as parallel lines, as local functionalities that apparently never intersect but in fact do.

This would basically mean that, like abandonment and ruin, there’s a much greater complexity to how we need to think about space and time as co-constructive, and our relationship to them.

• What do we do about abandoned digital spaces that, as a feature of their abandonment, simply no longer exist? How do we conceptually approach the construction of a definition of something that’s absent? It strikes me as a little like the difficulties that we run into whenever we try to talk about any kind of non-existence. As I said in my previous post, we’re only aware of the absence of these spaces when we go looking for them; otherwise of course we don’t see what isn’t there. So this presents an entirely new problem.

That’s all I’ve got for now, but I’m obviously going to continue working through some of these implications, and I’d love additional input.

Sarah is neither abandoned nor ruined on Twitter, though sometimes they are absent – @dynamicsymmetry