Your childhood is fading away, and only fragments of it will survive. The adage that “nothing is ever truly deleted on the internet” is not a guarantee. Peculiarly, one of the things that seem to be missing, en masse, are large national and global media releases through the years. Part of that loss comes from plenty of that media never arriving online, but even things that were posted to the internet at one point are now missing.

Lost media is definitely an intergenerational struggle due to the sometimes fleeting access to various productions and the natural decay of past generations of media especially. While this extends eternally into the past, we have a clearer record of what things existed in the past hundred years than we do of missing data in older history.

The things we once found banal and even obnoxious can become compelling and comforting, years later. I’ve spent hours consuming ads from my childhood, or even absorbing media of a style I would’ve probably never found compelling in my youth (old shows, bumpers, styles of music, etc.) Sometimes the desire to find media has to do with seeking closure or marvelling at the peculiarity of something, such as my years of curiosity over one strange ad...

From my searching in the past, I learned the details of a peculiar advert from my teenage years. It is a US car advert, likely for the Subaru Forester, between 2003 and 2006, but no later. An old, defunct (ironically, now also missing) forum mentioned it in 2006, so it can’t be dated later than that. The reason I want to find the ad in question is because of its peculiar phrasing I found so comical as a kid. I vividly remember the ad referring to a range of “sophisticated monochromatic colours”, which just sounds so corporate “gourmet”, wordy-yet-hollow commercial jargon. I want to find it to share it with others. I’ve searched YouTube for ads for vehicles from that era, but to no avail.

This, however, is but one tiny berry in an enormous cornucopia of missing footage, art and advertising that lies somewhere between gone forever and freely accessible. Some of these things will live on for decades as mere memories, while others may be discovered. Sadly, as is true with the rest of life, not everything will survive and even the things we do have are not guaranteed to last forever.

Hard-working people have archived thousands of film reels from generations ago, and unfortunately, some of those reels come with a curse: much of the oldest known video footage was made with nitrocellulose film, a highly flammable resource. This means that they can occasionally erupt and – even within vaults of preservation – such tragedies can and have happened. Modern vaults have unique fire suppression systems for celluloid film storage, but it still puts the original media at permanent risk of disappearing forever.

Sometimes moments of historical context have lost us important media. For example, we do not have the original transmitted source footage of the moon landing. Magnetic video used to be highly limited and expensive, and would often be taped over to get additional use from the physical part of the resource. During a historically unfortunate moment, NASA staff taped over the footage, meaning the secondary broadcast tapes are the only record we have left.

Films, television shows, adverts and bumpers make up a massive chunk of what we usually discuss in lost media, but it isn’t limited to this. Music, speech and audio sources have missing fragments too. I, personally, would love to find Chase Holfelder’s duets he once posted to Myspace in the late 2000s, but there are millions of other lost audio samples. Local or vintage ads, live show recordings, small bands’ submissions to local radio stations, the list goes on.

Sometimes things are found, and then re-lost because of copyright claims (which I feel are, in this type of case, hardly in the spirit of copyright–alas, another story for another time), account closures or other misfortunes. Even when media is located it might still be ephemeral, especially if it is a particularly niche subject.

There’s a concept in Japan that really lines up well with this topic: mono no aware (物の哀れ), meaning – more or less – a solemn appreciation of the fleeting. It is a concept to which I have wanted to draw connections for a while, but never had a proper jumping off point. It fits well with this, though: perhaps some level of acceptance must be made that media, like everything else, has a lifespan. For plenty of things that lifespan is longer than the lives of those who made it. For others, it may vanish within years, months, days or even moments due to a forgotten save or a power outage.

However, I do not wish to see more media go missing than can be helped, I want a healthy archive of media, big and small. Nothing is too trivial – those lost ads you found annoying might have been a key memory of another’s childhood – a drawing you find subpar at best could be an important image in another’s life. Anything, from a popular but forgotten advert to a drawing you passed around between friends in high school, it can all mean something special to someone.

I urge two things from this perspective of vanishing history: firstly, create – no matter how little talent you feel you have. We leave a mark on this planet by doing something, and whether that mark is indelible or not, passivity arguably nullifies one’s very existence. Secondly, preserve and share what you have. No matter how banal you feel your history and the artefacts that comprise it may be, it could mean a great deal to someone else. It would be a shame to be lost to time.

‍Tails_155 is a writer, visual artist, signalwave producer and project coordinator for musical collaborations. He is an avid fan of a great
 deal of media and internet culture. He has written for Private Suite Magazine, Visual Signals and is working on completing a microvignette compilation book.

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