Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and 
Technologists Built the Web a Memory, Ian Milligan, Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 2024. 208p. Hardcover, $49.95. 
9781421450148

On September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked the United States, an event that 
proved to be a watershed moment for the country. Much has been writ-
ten and discussed about the impact of that day. Many of the smaller, more 
intimate details that we know about that event are still freely available on 
the internet due to the tireless efforts of various “memory institutions” that 
took action to preserve every moment possible, providing historians with a 
deeper insight into a singular event than had previously been thought pos-
sible. This was also confirmation of a five-year-long ongoing concern that 
information on the internet might be lost forever. Online data, once thought 
to be ephemeral, could in fact survive a great length of time with careful 

husbandry. Averting the Digital Dark Age presents a detailed analysis of the internet’s history, 
particularly in context of the challenges presented by attempts to preserve the huge amount 
of information contained on the web. By the dawn of the 1990’s, concerns began to rise as to 
how online information would be curated and preserved for posterity, and the concept of the 
“digital dark age” began to take hold in the minds of many librarians and archivists. The first 
major attempt to address this concern would become known as the Internet Archive, created in 
1996. Taking a lesson from the Library of Alexandria’s ultimate destruction and the historical 
knowledge lost therein, the Internet Archive prioritized the broad distribution of its data as a 
safeguard against a repeat of such a calamity.

Milligan chose to focus on the earlier phase of data archiving and breaks down his argu-
ment into five chapters, roughly correlating with the five years between 1996 and 2001 where 
the identification of a very real potential threat of massive data loss gave way to several initial 
attempts to address the issue and finally peaking with the 9/11 crisis. The loss of data was 
averted, and multiple entities undertook the task of data preservation and archiving. This book 
does not seek to contribute new information to the field of media history, instead opting to 
clarify how previous works on the subject paint a picture of the daunting early years of digital 
media preservation. It examines how people and organizations around the world addressed 
the challenges of preservation. In the 1990’s, the internet was still a relatively small part of 
the greater world, but the intervening quarter of a century has since seen the internet take on 
a vastly greater role in society. The internet has arguably become the backbone of the social 
sphere in many nations and countries, thus the concept of preserving data has increased in 
importance. Throughout the text, the author uses previously established studies and publica-
tions to guide the reader through the fits and starts of the early, heady years of digital archiving 
to the successful implementation of various “memory institutions” that make the concept of 
the “digital dark age” largely a thing of the past (barring a major catastrophic event). Librar-
ies and archives may have spearheaded the early attempts, but other entities outside of aca-
demia began to step up to tackle the problem, namely the Internet Archive and the Wayback 
Machine. Along with the referenced sources, Milligan creates a vivid historical text of one of 

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the greater challenges in recent history and, in a rather inspirational twist, reveals that it was 
the work of many different entities, both public and private, that made it possible to avoid a 
potential data vacuum in our social history. Averting the Digital Dark Age serves as a wealth 
of information for historians, particularly media scholars. It also provides a comprehensive 
look into one of the pressing issues of modern history and how a potential crisis was identi-
fied and avoided. Milligan states that the book is a study of historical scholarship, providing 
context for the role of media in the broader social world. Despite its subject matter, it doesn’t 
concern itself too much with technology, but rather how technology, specifically the internet, 
affects society and its ability to harness its information, both past and present (11). As such, 
this volume would be an excellent addition to any academic library or archives that supports 
internet historians, providing fascinating insight into an otherwise overlooked era in media 
history. Should researchers wish to delve deeper into the subject matter, there is an excellent 
bibliography section as reference for further reading. —Dale E. Autry, University of Southern 
Mississippi

After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, Trevor Owens, University of Michigan Press, 
2024. 224p. Hardcover, $80.00. 9780472076673

In After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, Trevor Owens aims to 
dismantle the rhetoric of disruption and datafication that has perme-
ated many aspects of our lives in the digital age by building towards a 
sustainable future outside of this problematic framework. The digital 
age has brought on what is widely known as a “period of disruption”—
disruption being a keyword favored by tech moguls and Silicon Valley 
that characterizes rapid shifts in technology and digital media as well 
as its consequences on everything from the workforce to politics to our 
social lives (22). Memory work and cultural institutions have not been 
immune to this: the digital age has “played a role in changing how we 
collectively conceptualize memory itself” (1). Datafication has impacted 
how memory is processed, flattening and simplifying inherently dynamic 

and humanistic work. Owens demands that, as memory workers, we imagine a future beyond 
the rhetoric of disruption and invest in sustainable practices of care both in our professional 
work and workplace policies.

Owens argues that disruption has led to the devaluation of cultural memory institutions’ 
more meaningful work in favor of infinite growth metrics, forcing organizations to push their 
workers to “do more and more with less … [instead of] focus on what work really needs to 
be prioritized” (106). Owens additionally frames memory institutions’ entrenched colonial 
practices in memory work within the ideological climate of the digital age; he calls for workers 
in the field to recognize how digitization can further entrench these problematic practices and 
to work towards a future that seeks to tap into previously underutilized diverse perspectives 
and enact justice. Our understanding of and ability to preserve our past depends on our ability 
to overcome this overreliance on metrics in favor of diverse frameworks of data measurement; 
meaningful, qualitative goals and initiatives; and building institutions of care, maintenance, 
and repair where we continually seek to understand the past more meaningfully.

Owens splits his argument into two parts: Part One, “Three Bankrupt Ideas,” traces the 
ideology of disruption from its conception in the 1990’s into the digital age, where its impact