The internet seems to be permanent. But all these dead links are a reminder that useful information sometimes remains accessible when someone is paying for it.
At some point in early 2010, it occurred to my high school teachers that they should teach us something about how to interact well on the internet. “The internet lasts forever,” I remember being informed, with the vague threat that future employers can find my Facebook sources and judge me based on their content.
Although this has not prevented my friends and I send dozens of photos of us participating in the school ball, eyes shining in red from the flashes of our small point and shoot cameras, this invested in me a feeling that the Ephemer world was solid, permanent and unchanging. It was a safe place to keep my photos, words and ideas.
Far from it. It is very easy for the internet to disappear. Perhaps this is particularly noticeable because I work in digital journalism, where your work can easily dissipate in digital ether if someone stops maintaining a domain. The term for this is Linkrot, the language of organic things applied to sterile servers.
Take Thewireless.co.nz. The site, founded in 2013, was an effort by RNZ to involve the youth public. He employed journalists who covered the mental health crisis, the impact of inaccessible housing on young people, sexual health and more, publishing a wide range of longtime and shorter articles. Closed 2018with most of the content migrating to the main RNZ Website. RNZ did not continue to pay for the domain, even for a redirect to the main site.
Although the content is preserved (if you know what to look for), any links that have been made on the RNZ website or elsewhere now display a series of apparently written content made to get research results with titles such as “What month is winter in New Zealand” and an email to contact potential advertisers. The fact that the site will be getting regular, if not high, visitors of these old links, is certainly why the new owner bought the domain.
The National Library Digital Archiving Service does an incredible job, preserving what New Zealandes are doing online; They save everything With the .NZ domain using a webcrawler once a year and also collect social media records under specific topics; They hired a specific archivist to collect digital documents that record their useful life under covid blocks, for example. Public members may also suggest digital records that could be preserved. The National Library maintains several safe and separated servers in various places to preserve this information and have various flaws.
Digital records in the National Library are a great resource, just like Internet Archive’s Wayback Machinewhich shows previous versions of the websites and the date they were captured. Useful, say, to compare which slogans and political parties of images have used on your websites over time, or to find a specific article you remember reading in 2017, but whose publication ceased to exist. However, having to specifically look for information about a separate service is more than most people who negotiate when clicking on a link.
Another example of information that has disappeared is the Auckland city libraries website, which was used before the merger of Auckland’s advice in 2010. I was looking for a blog post to a piece on the library website about the street names a few weeks ago. I found that the site now has A lot of game ads and some limited information about the library’s opening hours. There are dozens of more examples of how useful information for the audience and, as in the case of wireless libraries and the city, also paid by the audience- can disappear when the websites change. VI viewing views of walking route descriptions near wairapa train stations in search results disappear when you click on the link, or a Wikipedia link to the NewsHub website evaporate because the domain name automatically redirects to things and the link has not been archived.
Linkrot’s phenomenon raises larger questions about how we sail in internet information. It is certainly frustrating not being able to find something you are looking for – but, unlike the fear of my digital permanence teacher, there is something liberating to make my teenage blog serious private or know that my first raids in journalism in Uni Student Magazine have disappeared. Before the age of ubiquitous digital information, there would be no expectation that writing print on paper and distributed to a limited audience would remain accessible to all forever.
But the ephemeral nature of the internet is also a loss, because much of how we live and interact now is online. Having easy access to information about the place you live is important, and although it can cost money to continue paying for domains or digital storage, it makes information a place to live outside the for -profit social media.
In a way, my high school teachers were right. The internet is forever, but only if someone can profit from the information that remains there. Maybe I call these enthusiastic photos of myself, 14, in school dance when the AI team of the goal finally finds a way to use my resemblance to create hyperpersonalized ads. I prefer the rehearsal I wrote for a 19 -year -old Tumblr literary diary, but has been gone for a long time.
In the great scheme of things, every human idea can one day disappear; But in the short term, it seems absurd that Google preserves excerpts of what used to be on a site and sell advertising in the search results, even if the ability to read and see it is gone. This is bad for journalists now – but when social media is the only place to look for information and the links have disappeared, it will be bad for everyone else.
