When history is preserved, archived, shared, etc., there always comes the debate between saving just the content and also saving the context. Imagine you are at, say, a museum. This particular museum preserves railway history. It's house in a clean, modern building with fancily lit displays and exhibits. All of the old steam locomotives have gleaming paint, their headlights are on, a couple mannequins are displayed in the cabs as the engine crew, etc. Everything looks perfect. But they just sit there. The paint is shinier than it was when these engines were brand-new. The content has been preserved, but most of the context has been lost.
On the other hand, consider a heritage railway operation. This outfit has several miles of historic railway, which allows them to give train rides to the public behind antique steam locomotives. There is the locomotive shop, filled with antique lathes, drill presses, forges, and other machinery for maintaining the locomotives. One locomotive is disassembled in the back of the shop for rebuilding. Out front, another locomotive is getting ready for the day's work. There is dirt, grease, oil, grime, soot, and smoke everywhere. The locomotive sounds like it is breathing as the steam pressure builds. The scene is alive with energy. I
In this scenario, the context of the historic locomotives has been preserved. You can't take the railroad out of the locomotive, but is taking the locomotive out of the railroad (to be preserved elsewhere) always the best idea? What is lost in terms of context when the locomotive is “stuffed and mounted”? How much of the story do we lose?
This same argument pertains to Foot's article. If we are to preserve the content, we also need to preserve the context. If we are to preserve a chunk(s) of Web 2.0 for the future, we need to preserve it in situ. Yes, we can (and likely should) apply preservation measures to the world of online social networking. But we can't just save individual texts, tweets, or posts. We also need the comments associated with those posts. We need the meme someone shared as a response. We need the ads on the sidebar to let us know what world these folks were operating in. It is pointless to preserve posts if we aren't also preserving the whole conversation, the whole story. The graphic design of the website being operated in has just as much to do with experience as the content posted on the site. Merely using an SNS feed would leave the content “stuffed and mounted”, divorced from all sense of context.
As for how things have evolved since Foot's “Table 1” in “Web Sphere Analysis”, I think there's a good chance that news media sites and personal sites (I'll include company-owned “personal” sites here, like Facebook) is where most of the online discussion takes place. Topic oriented forums (V-Bulletin, anyone?) would also make a large chunk of discussion concerning the 2013 bombing. In 2011, many different types of websites owned by various organizations set forth their views on the 9/11 tragedy, and many allowed some sort of user/viewer response. I think that more and more “viewer participation” is limited to the comments sections of media-sharing sites, be they the New York Times website, Youtube, etc., along with your own Facebook wall or that forum that you're a member of. Perhaps this is because of the problem of flame wars requiring a large task force to keep under control. No comments section on your website? No maintenance-intensive flame wars. Problem solved.
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