A chance find online that gets you thinking…

Here it is: the Saturn branch in Göttingen, which closed in 2021. Google Maps shows images from 2017 – almost ten years ago now.

This image, for example, shows the department for recordable optical media – a type of media that has now almost disappeared.

So what?

Local economic history is always part of everyday culture: artefacts need to be acquired, and electronics shops are indispensable in this regard, as they supply the devices necessary for the consumption of media and thus for a significant part of culture. Electronics shops can also be social spaces. One need only think of joint visits to the CD or DVD sections.

If one takes this line of thought to its conclusion, they are not merely points of sale, but also interfaces between global (device and cultural) production and local consumption. Added to this is the shift from brick-and-mortar retail (for both devices and data storage media) to online retail and streaming.

Images such as the one shown above are therefore like a time capsule, or rather: a double ‘lost place’. They are lost in time, from an era when media consumption habits were different, and also spatially, as this store (and many other Saturn branches) no longer exists today.

Save it!

As stated in the Terms of Service, Google generally reserves the right to delete outdated data from Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View. The same applies to the person who uploaded the data. The time capsule could therefore disappear at any time. It would therefore be advisable to back up the data/images before this happens.

Do city archives actually already carry out web archiving? If not, it is high time they did!