There are "classic" films and "classic" books but what about the Internet classics? Why don't we talk about and pass down the quintessential tweets, Reddit posts, YouTube videos, GIFs, and blog posts like we do with more traditional mediums? And what even are the Interent classics that every enterprising young person should know about as they come of age?

Actually, I'm not so interested in what they are as much as why we don't appreciate "classics" on the Internet like we do with books, TV, and films?

I think it's a reflection of our incessant obsession with the "new" — something @Ev hopes to tackle with Medium — as well as an opportunity, of some sort, for an entrepreneur or archivist out there... though I'm curious what you think?

Definitely agree about the Internet's obsession with the "new". But I think the reasons are less normative, and are more about the economics of content distribution.

The Internet has millions of publishers. There's a much greater variety of smaller communities, so it's harder to have universally recognized classics. It's also much cheaper to consume content. The real cost of reading or watching something on the Internet is your time, not money.

Books and film are not like this. There's a handful of publishers, and therefore, a lot less variety. And you've got to pay for each book or movie, so you're more likely to spend time reading professional critics. It's really that small group that decide what the classics are.

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I think it's possible that there be "Internet classics," but to your point about speed: what were the classic movies circa 1910? The classic novels in 1740?

It's a stretch to say that the Internet, in the sense of "a platform that allows for creation of stuff that can be enjoyed by people who have no interest in making an effort to access that stuff" has existed for twenty years.

Then when you factor in that the internet isn't really a particular medium [or, perhaps, that it's unclear what that medium is so early in its existence -- text? yes! image? yes! video? yes! other? yes! hmmm...) I'm more inclined to enjoy what we've got than to worry about what might be considered "classic" eventually.

Also: wikipedia John Banvard. Probably the first celebrity artist, a millionaire for creating a new sort of multimedia experience, completely forgotten even before his death.

The definition of "a classic" changes to a pretty incredible degree over time once you start digging into it.

I think the tech has changed about five times over, and so rather than classics you have exemplary content per wave. For example, I will occasionally go back to Roy Orbison in Clingfilm.

michaelkelly.artofeurope.com

Which is classic early web. Then again it could have been classic Usenet (per talk.bizarre).

But the thing for me is that the great art of the web is not in the content itself, but in the crafting of the boxes where people put things. So when I look for interesting work, I look for people who made a thing, then did something with it. Metafilter is a "classic" community. It's not individual posts that make it classic. It's the software plus the people plus the adaptability of the design, plus mods.

One of web content's unique features is that it's not only cheap to produce & distribute (leading to Sajid's point about increasing content variety), but it's cheap to consume.

To read a Tweet, look at an Instagram photo, or watch a YouTube video requires minimal thought. Instead of eating full memorable content meals (as with old media - like books, stage productions, and feature length movies), we snack.

When content consumption requires a significant investment of time, we naturally are more attached to it. We develop opinions about it. Whether good or bad, we want to remember it. In some way, it becomes a part of who we are.

The internet still has its classics, but they're often less emotionally charged than their predecessors.

I think that the "classics" of the internet will be less the content itself (gifs, tweets, pins) and more so the platforms that content is created and distributed from. For example, the "classic" could be Instagram or Twitter and just as The Godfather had its dead horse scene, they have their own memorable moments like a Cole Rise landscape or @shitmydadsays.

To me "classic" is timelessness, and for the most part the internet is still too young for most products to have really stood the test of time. If a classic film is a movie I still would watch and appreciate despite its obsolescence than the closest thing to a classic platform that comes to my mind is Craigslist.