I recently wrote a post about the “Dead Internet” theory……it may be better if you read that before venturing on to today’s post.
Dead Internet Theory
Now with that done we can tackle the question posed in the title of this post.
It appears that on-line content is disappearing…..
Well, so long and thanks for all the fish. A study from the Pew Research Center entitled “When Online Content Disappears” indicates that our beloved internet may well be disappearing beneath our fingers—with a quarter of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 found to be no longer accessible.
Contrary to the popular perception that everything committed to the interwebs is destined to exist forever, the study revealed that 38% of pages that existed in 2013 alone have now been lost (via The Independent). It doesn’t appear to be an age-related phenomenon, either.
Even newer pages appear to be performing vanishing acts—eight percent of pages that existed in 2023 were found to be unavailable, too.
The study made use of Common Crawl, an open repository of web crawl data that archives billions of webpages and provides archives and datasets for public use. The researchers took random samples of over a million webpages, before checking the links to see which were still active, and which had gone to the great lost information archive in the sky.
The results showed 23% of news pages and 21% of government websites studied were found to include at least one broken link, while a staggering 54% of Wikipedia pages included a reference link that no longer exists. That’s a lot of facts that can no longer be reasonably checked.
Given the internet’s integral role in modern society (for better or worse) in terms of verifying information, these results are troubling. What with the increasing proliferation of misleading AI content, losing valuable sources of information pre AI-era can’t possibly help.
Compounding this slide into a murky world where verifiable information is increasingly harder to find, a recent study found that 46.9% of all internet traffic could be attributed to bots—many of which may be contributing all sorts of made-up information to further muddy the waters.
I know that I have seen more and more blogs that are inactive…..
But what do you think?
Is the internet disappearing as according to the article?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I think it is inevtiable that the huge online archive has to disappear soon. Just maintaining the necessary computer storage and servers to access it costs a lot of money, and uses up huge amounts of water to cool the data centres. Unless everybody starts paying fees to archive their stuff, I expect to see the end of blogs being archived within 10 years, if not sooner. This might not have happened if not for streaming TV and films, which use up 10+ times more storage than words and photos.
https://techhq.com/2020/05/data-center-cooling-a-24b-business-by-2024/
Best wishes, Pete.
Interesting…..thanx for the link…..chuq
If there is something that people can do, enjoy, participate in, or benefit from, you can bet your bottom dollar that some dick wad somewhere will find a way to monetize it or to censor it until subscriptions are paid and yes, I am sure that in time to come, anyone who wishes to have a blog will have to mortage their home in order to be able to afford to do so.
If that happens I will then go back to Plan B….pen and paper. chuq
The only reason we have what we call “history” is because it was written down in a more or less permanent manner, on paper, papyrus, parchment, stone, clay, etc. Materials that did not require a continuous expense and effort to keep from eroding away over time. Even so probably 95% of history has been lost due to no one bothering to write things down, or if they did the originals being lost to fire, disaster, etc.
This though is different. With everything going digital, requiring a deliberate effort and ongoing expense to maintain it, everything, all of our records have become ephemeral. Even if a backup copy on some type of media exists, often the technology needed to read that media is obsolete and no longer exists.
How much family history exists in the form of video tape, for example? No one even makes VCRs any longer.
We just went through the job of trying to transfer old 8mm family movies to modern video. Fortunately there are still a few services out there that can do that but those are fading away too
My daughter made tapes of my father talking about life and stuff and now she is doing it with me….kinda to preserve what little history of the family is left. chuq
That’s an excellent idea. On my wife’s side of the family they have a sort of family historian, someone who got interested enough in the family history to start doing genealogy research, digging through all those dusty old boxes of photos in people’s attics, talking to every family member she could track down either in person, by email, by phone, etc. She organized everything, made copies of everything, basically made a complete written record of all of the surviving documents, the family history, marriage and death certificates, baptismal certificate, property ownership records, all of the photographs she found along with notes about each. She put it all together in this massive scrap book and then had copies of that made to give to any family member who wanted one.
She found some interesting coincidences along the way. Apparently my, great grandfather was a groomsman at my wife’s great grandfather’s wedding, including a formal photograph of the occasion. Also her great, great (and maybe a 3rd great) grandmother is buried near my parents. She passed away in 1840 at the age of 96. We found her grave stone in terrible condition. Made of cheap limestone it’s deteriorated to the point where it’s almost illegible and at one point had been broken in half and badly repaired. So we’re going to replace that with a new one and the sexton at the church gave us permission to take the old one. Apparently replaced headstones are just discarded anyway. So we’re going to take it out to the family farm and use it as a sort of centerpiece for a kind of memorial garden. The farm has been owned by the family for something like 150+ years and now is in a trust so it seems like a good place for it.
It is great to learn family history….my daughter has done a lot of digging and found some things that we did not want5 to know…..but it appears that my grandmother was a distant cousin of Jefferson Davis and one family member twice removed (whatever that means) was a half Creek that was part of the Red Stick faction and was killed by Andrew Jackson and his thugs…..chuq