IST 605: Popular Media and Fan-Cultures

It's a common misconception that once something is on the Internet, it's there forever.

This may not always be the case with popular media, and a variety of reasons may prevent one from accessing something, such as, but not limited to:

• A work's creators or publishers may pull it off the market or off of streaming services.
• Some older works may have only been released on physical media which may be rare, and therefore difficult or expensive to purchase.
  • Many formats such as cassettes, VHS tapes, and even rarer ones like Betamax tapes or LaserDiscs, are no longer widely used or sold, so dedicated player/reader devices, and potentially even older TVs and computers, may need to be purchased to access those works even once you've found and purchased them.
• Sometimes the title of "Popular Media" may be inaccurate. Popular, or mass media, is simply media that is released for mass consumption. Oftentimes, media can fail to reach its intended audience and fall into obscurity, making it difficult to find in the current day.      

This can also be the case with fan-media, perhaps even more so than with official media. Reasons for this include, but are not limited to:

• Fan-creators deleting their posts or their social media accounts.
• Older websites failing due to lack of maintenance or lack of updates/compatibility with current web-programming standards, or websites getting deleted due to the creator no longer paying for it to be hosted online.
• Deletion due to copyright and/or a fan-creator choosing to take down their content due to direct legal action or threat of legal action. 
  • Fan-content technically falls within a grey-area of legality. While it may be considered "fair use", as its a form of "transformative" content, this legal protection is paper thin, and the original creators or copyright holders may still chose to target fan-content in court, claiming that it's "derivative" (The IP Press, 2024). Many creators chose to allow fan-content to be made from their works, as it serves as free advertising and also serves to strengthen their fan communities, but this is not always the case.
  • Many companies also use copyright-violation detection-software, which can be oversensitive and may unfairly target legal fan-content. In these cases, the fan-creators may chose to argue their case, or they may simply feel that it's safer to just take down their content, rather than chose to fight with a company that likely has far more legal and financial power than they do.

While it's always best to support official releases if at all possible, some media may simply be no longer supported or deleted, and some perfectly legal fan-content may still have been taken down. This section of the guide is therefore dedicated to teaching you how to access older versions of webpages and certain media.

MAKE SURE TO PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS, AND WHETHER THE SITES YOU ACCESS ARE LEGALLY HOSTING IT.

I will only link legal websites here, and I will note any possible issues wherever they exist, but make sure to use caution and judgement when viewing anything copyrighted, and to make sure that you have permission before downloading such content.

It take take a while for Wayback Machine searches to load, as a truly massive archive has to be searched through, but actual usage is fairly simple:

1. Simply enter in an URL into the search bar.
2. This brings you to a calendar view, which shows every time that page was copied. For popular sites, this might be hundreds or even thousands of times across multiple decades.
3. Click on a date to see the archived version from that time. Some dates may even have multiple copies from different times in the day.

If you can't find what you're looking for, then it may be because a page's URL has changed over time. Try searching for just the website's homepage's URL and navigating to your desired page using various indexes and links. The Wayback Machine cannot replicate site-specific search functionality, so this may take a while. You can also try searching for keywords.

Some things to note:

1. While the creators of the Wayback Machine already work to archive commonly used sites, they do not and cannot simply archive the entirety of the internet. As such, whether certain content exists here depends on if other users made the conscious decision to archive it in the past.
2. Unlike with physical media, digital media evolves and changes rapidly. Multiple versions of a website can be recorded here, but the specific version that you want may not always exist.
3. Sometimes fan-creators delete their content for good reasons, such as over copyright troubles or for privacy purposes. Make sure to stay aware of legal concerns and to respect the decisions of creators.       

The Wayback Machine's parent website, the Internet Archive, also offers many online and digital versions of various books, videos, and software. While much of this content is in the public domain, much of it is still under copyright.

While the Internet Archive itself is considered a reliable website with millions of users, it has still faced legal troubles in the past, such as in 2023 when the US Court of Appeals ruled that it had violated copyright for sharing digitized versions of licensed books during the Pandemic (Knibbs, 2024).

While it's unlikely that you yourself will face any legal trouble simply for using the Internet Archive, I will still warn you to be careful with downloading copyrighted content, as while the Archive has a DMCA exemption (Kaplan, 2006), this only applies to the website itself, and not its users. This allows its users to view, borrow, and even download some copyrighted materials, as if the Archive were a digital library, but just as you cannot legally steal a book from a physical library, you may not be allowed to download and own everything from the Archive. Also note that much of what the Archive catalogs falls within legal grey territory, and as mentioned above, has lead to legal troubles. Certain content on there has entered into the public domain though, so make sure to check legal status before downloading.

Sometimes, you may simply forget the name of the work that you're looking for.

Whether it's a favorite childhood book, a YouTube video from the 2000s, or that video-game that you played over a decade ago, it can be frustrating whenever this happens, especially if that media is particularly obscure.

While us library workers will always do our best to help you find these forgotten works, we may not always be the best resource for doing so, especially if that work falls outside of our areas of expertise.

What follows are some other resources that you might try before speaking to a librarian, or if a librarian is unable to help you in your search.

Reddit in fact has a number of communities dedicated to identification and searching, some filled with dedicated amateurs and professionals, some simply relying upon the sheer number of their members in the hopes that at least one will have some clue about the search topic.

Others include:

• r/FindAReddit
• r/FindAPost
• r/WhatIsThisThing
• r/WhatsThatBook

Among several others. If the community you're in can't help you, try looking up another one or try to see if similar communities are linked in the community wiki.

There's also a relevant Reddit community that serves a similar purpose. Many users of the wiki also congregate here:

• r/LostMedia