Beware Hollywood’s digital demolition: it’s as if your favourite films and TV shows never existed | Zach Schonfeld
www.theguardian.com
The amount of media being wiped from the internet is worrying for viewers, and industry workers who need the exposure, says journalist and critic Zach Schonfeld

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

Every Daily Show episode since Jon Stewart took over as host in 1999? Disappeared. The historic remains of The Colbert Report? Disappeared. Presumably, one hopes, those materials remain archived internally somewhere, but for the general masses, they’re kaput. Instead, the links redirect visitors to Paramount+, a streaming service whose offerings pale in comparison. (The service offers recent seasons of the Daily Show to paying subscribers, but only a fraction of the prior archive.)

Such digital demolitions are becoming routine. For fans and scholars of pop culture, 2024 may go down as the year the internet shrank. Despite the immense archiving capabilities of the internet, we’re living through an age of mass deletion, a moment when entertainment and media corporations see themselves not as custodians of valuable cultural history, once freely available, but as ruthless maximisers of profit. Those of us who believe in the historical value of accessing media from the past are paying the price.

  • 4shtonButcherEnglish
    142·
    vor 2 Monaten

    I’m starting to get the data hoarding crowd more and more. We have been taught this dream of “the internet never forgets” but people missed to mention that it’s on the average Janes and Joes to make sure that is the case. Corporations want the internet to forget because it’s better for business.

    • karashta@lemm.eeEnglish
      38·
      vor 2 Monaten

      I’ve become the same. I’m now that person seeking out more obscure and underrated gems from anywhere in the 30s through the 90s. I hate the thought of all this cultural collateral damage disappearing forever.