The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?
Every few days, I open an email from someone asking after an old article of mine they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, journalists, or people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere.
People who searched the internet & found references, but not the article itself, trying to track an idea to its source. Readers trying to understand the throughlines of society & culture, from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.
This is not a problem unique to me: a recent study on digital decay found 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 are not so today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, & entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals & the critical research they contained.
This is especially acute for news: Northwestern University researchers estimate we’ll lose 1/3 of local news sites by 2025, & the digital-first properties that have risen & fallen are nearly impossible to count. The web has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be.
30-yr-old newsflash: internet content is ephemeral. Report at 11.
It’s truly sad how much web history seems untaught in contemporary school, or simply forgotten. Swipe to the next tiktok vid.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, the [wayback machine](https://web.archive.org/) is a good resource.
Abramor on
If the Internet disappeared, we’re currently living in a nuclear winter.
knotatumah on
None of this is new. We’ve experienced this multiple times already. The dotcom boom/bust introduced a wide variety of websites that disappeared as quickly as they became a “thing”. Then you had the early pre-flash days of the internet that spawned chat rooms, forums, and small websites especially with the likes of Geocities and Angelfire. The generation we *really* lost in almost complete totality is the Flash generation as once Flash was outmoded and removed there is no way to re-experience those sites. Some places like Newgrounds came up with emulation to help archive the content they had but even Newgrounds has a lot of missing material. Lastly large aggregate social media ushered in the final shift of the internet where small sites were no longer appealing and the thrill of large connected social networks took over. A vast array of content-generating mills where information churns at an unprecedented rate. For as much information it has generated who knows how much it also buried? Today its now a question of what the next phase of the internet is going to be and how that is going to impact the information we have now.
4 Comments
The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?
Every few days, I open an email from someone asking after an old article of mine they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, journalists, or people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere.
People who searched the internet & found references, but not the article itself, trying to track an idea to its source. Readers trying to understand the throughlines of society & culture, from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.
This is not a problem unique to me: a recent study on digital decay found 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 are not so today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, & entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals & the critical research they contained.
This is especially acute for news: Northwestern University researchers estimate we’ll lose 1/3 of local news sites by 2025, & the digital-first properties that have risen & fallen are nearly impossible to count. The web has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be.
Abridged (shortened) article thread ⬇️ 12 min
[https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3ldq2rvsun22y](https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3ldq2rvsun22y)
30-yr-old newsflash: internet content is ephemeral. Report at 11.
It’s truly sad how much web history seems untaught in contemporary school, or simply forgotten. Swipe to the next tiktok vid.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, the [wayback machine](https://web.archive.org/) is a good resource.
If the Internet disappeared, we’re currently living in a nuclear winter.
None of this is new. We’ve experienced this multiple times already. The dotcom boom/bust introduced a wide variety of websites that disappeared as quickly as they became a “thing”. Then you had the early pre-flash days of the internet that spawned chat rooms, forums, and small websites especially with the likes of Geocities and Angelfire. The generation we *really* lost in almost complete totality is the Flash generation as once Flash was outmoded and removed there is no way to re-experience those sites. Some places like Newgrounds came up with emulation to help archive the content they had but even Newgrounds has a lot of missing material. Lastly large aggregate social media ushered in the final shift of the internet where small sites were no longer appealing and the thrill of large connected social networks took over. A vast array of content-generating mills where information churns at an unprecedented rate. For as much information it has generated who knows how much it also buried? Today its now a question of what the next phase of the internet is going to be and how that is going to impact the information we have now.