Digital Dark

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Digital Dark

Now that we’ve all put our lives online, along comes a report that we are facing a new digital dark age, as all that good and important stuff gets systematically deleted and forgotten forever.

Here’s how the story written by Adam Rogers for Business Insider begins:

The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post.

Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I know—not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear.

The melodramatic tone soon ebbs leaving the essence of the actual news: Online stuff isn’t permanent (as we were once warned—for those aiming to pose naughty stuff). In fact, some bits of things we record digitally and put online in the hope of long-term safekeeping may have already disappeared for good.

The example of URLs from the story, whether shortened or full length, helps illustrate part of the problem facing a broader range of what we used to think of as the public record. It used to be that newspapers, magazines, and even specialized academic publications were warehoused somewhere in a physical form accessible later on. These could take the form of paper and ink, or to save space, microfilm and microfiche. Anyone remember looking at those in high school or college introductory research classwork?

The internet was supposed mean all that stuff could be stored somewhere online on some server, where it would take up even less space as bits and bytes on some digital storage device. It only needed to be present on a couple such sites (duplication only in the name of security, in case one server failed for some reason) in order to be accessible to everyone.

But that is turning out not to be. Everything from online news to official documents relies on HTML hyperlinks to other documents. The hyperlinks in many cases point to web pages that no longer exist, or in some cases that have been moved out of reach of the public internet. Maybe the companies or publications simply went out of business: their websites went dead and all the data vanished. When a modern online researcher tries to follow the links in extant articles, some of the citations have vanished.

The internet archiving site “The Wayback Machine” strives to keep the main internet content available, but the article describes the challenges involved in keeping up. In addition, the foundation that runs it depends on private donations.

But “Dark Ages”? Isn’t that a bit dramatic?

There seems to be an underlying assumption that because we can record things everywhere and all the time, everything is worth recording and keeping forever. Is there any reason to assume that is true? And if it is, does it need to be online? Surely not every memory is precious and worth keeping forever—even if there’s a link to it at another online site.