The Internet's Dark Ages - The Atlantic - 51 views
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It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.
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“Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”
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Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.
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And yet there are no robust mechanisms for libraries and museums to acquire, and thus preserve, digital collections.
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The Internet is now considered a great oracle, a place where information lives and knowledge is stitched together.