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[Culture] Literature Destroyed by the Digital TsunamiAuthor: JEFFI CHAO HUI WU Time: Thursday, July 3, 2025, 3:20 PM ········································ [Culture] Literature Destroyed by the Digital Tsunami In the early days of the internet, like countless literature enthusiasts, I published my deepest emotions and truest thoughts on various literary forums and blog sites. At that time, we believed that "uploading means eternal existence," convinced that as long as it was published online, our words would be remembered by the world, preserved by the system, and etched in time. Little did we expect that just over a decade later, a global, unanticipated "digital tsunami" would quietly swallow our creations, written with our very lives, page by page, without a sound. Looking back today, those platforms that once carried the literary dreams of millions—Rongshuxia, Hongxiu Tianxiang, NetEase Blogs, Sina Tribes, China.com Forums, Sohu Space, Tianya Literature, Blog Bus… have either shut down or completely transformed. Those once bustling, talented posts, serials, poems, and comments have all been cleared, deleted, and obliterated, as if they had never existed. Ironically, many creators themselves did not keep backups, and when the platforms disappeared overnight, they could no longer find those words, nor could they ever retrieve the selves they once were. Digital civilization should be the most advanced storage tool, yet in an era of information chaos, it has become the most fragile container of memory. A server crash, a company transformation, a capital acquisition can wipe out an entire literary community. With a single click, countless works can be shut down, without notice or farewell. This is not a "data failure"; it is a large-scale cultural amnesia, a systematic erasure of a generation's literary life, where both words and authors evaporate in the digital world. I am extremely grateful that I did not entrust all my writings to a platform back then, but instead personally founded my own independent forum, website, and database. Since 2004, I have consistently published articles and preserved materials on the Australian Longwind Information Network and the Australian Rainbow Parrot Writers' Association website, while also backing up everything on my local hard drive. Even the earliest content has been retained in its original documents, and I have never relied on third-party storage. This is not due to any remarkable foresight, but rather an instinctive alertness: true culture should not be determined by commercial platforms. Today, the two Chinese literary ecology websites I founded have been officially included as permanent resources in the literature database of the National Library of Australia, with every detail accounted for—from page code to article content, from activity records to author profiles. In other words, even decades later, scholars researching Australian Chinese culture, Chinese literature, and the history of folk writing will certainly find traces left by the "Australian Rainbow Parrot International Writers' Association" when they access the National Library's data. This is not only my personal archive but also the official positioning of the entire Chinese writing community overseas. At the same time, I have helped countless netizens recover their supposedly "lost" works. Some were posts rescued just before the forum crashed, some were original manuscripts restored from hard drive fragments, and others were submissions they sent me years ago, which I saved without a single word deleted. Even before certain platforms shut down, I once paid out of my own pocket to purchase server space to create a complete mirrored backup of the forum content, just to let their words live a few more years. But more people ultimately couldn't hold on. Many writers can no longer retrieve the hundreds of thousands of words they once wrote, the essays they serialized halfway, the poems that received enthusiastic comments, and those moments of deep conversation with their own souls in the quiet of the night. What they lost is not just words, but the sum of a segment of life memories. Today we must clearly see that literature is not declining because no one is writing, but because the digital world too easily destroys the connection between writers and their works. The disappearance of a website or the closure of a domain is like an entire library being set ablaze in the dead of night, unnoticed and unreported. When a physical library catches fire, the media reports it across the internet; but when ten thousand blogs are wiped clean, it’s just a case of “database maintenance.” We have been taught how to write, but no one has taught us how to preserve. Empowered by technology, we are also abandoned by it. What’s even more tragic is that most people are completely unaware of this. What I want to say is— not all works can be retrieved; not all voices have the chance to leave a mark; not all platforms will take on the responsibility of recording civilization. If one day you find that everything you have written is gone, do not be surprised; that is the truth of digital civilization. For this reason, we must establish a structural backup mechanism for truly valuable texts, and we must promote the national level to genuinely accept "digital literary archives" as part of public cultural heritage. Literary heritage should not rely solely on paper, but should also include those verses, paragraphs, articles, and memories that shine between zero and one. Otherwise, one day we will face such an absurd ending: having written for an entire generation, yet leaving a "blank" in the world. And I am willing to be the one who does not let the blank expand. Do you remember what you once wrote? If you forget, I will keep it for you. In the websites and archives we have preserved to this day. Right at that place you thought had "already disappeared." In the era mark that we write together and protect together. Source: http://www.australianwinner.com/AuWinner/viewtopic.php?t=696655 |
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