The Wayback Machine: notes on a re-enchantment

摘要

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds over 424 billion webpages, making it the largest publicly accessible archive in the world. Thus far, much of the research on the Machine has approached the technology using computational thinking. This type of thinking treats technology operationally, as something that we can use to do jobs for us. This article takes a different approach. It steps back from computational thinking to consider the language we use to apprehend technology. It argues that the metaphors we use actually obfuscate, rather than merely describe, the operations of the Machine. By making explicit the workings of these metaphors, the article draws attention to, and thus counteracts, this obfuscation. In so doing, these notes on the Wayback Machine point more widely towards the usefulness of a language-oriented approach to other technologies.