Art Culture Opinion

Mourning LikeALittle

“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” –Susan Sontag

LikeALittle is gone. That fact in itself doesn’t evoke much sorrow. Since when have most start-ups not been end-ups? Is it so odd that the antidote to College ACB would go the way of that fetid web forum? No, not odd at all.

Let me start again.

A record of hundreds of small flirtations, apologies, and anonymous compliments has just been erased from the web. About a year’s worth of observations, proposals, and jests by and between America’s college students is no more.

Granted, I am sentimental by nature–and I have the fortune cookie slips in my Guess clutch to prove it. However, I can’t help but ask why the founders of the site saw no need to preserve its contents. Perhaps, from the beginning, they never considered it content–but I did.

Each of the schools with pages on LikeALittle have lost a valid historical record. A deeply personal, but also a public one. There was so much to learn and study in those posts if you cared to (and around finals I did, I really did) that shouldn’t just be shrugged off as a shallow footprint in a digital peat bog.

If we believe that the internet is a part of our culture then we have to treat it with the same regard and good stewardship as we would a library, stadium, or concert hall.

We get upset when people burn books, why no mourning for the disappearance of LikeALittle? If we can’t have college forever, at least leave us our sonnets.