Some people want the right to be forgotten and demand that mentions of past embarrassments are expunged from the digital record. But what about those who want the right to be remembered?
A US-based blogger, Carter Maness, has discovered that more than 2,000 of his blogposts, written over a five-year period, vanished into cyberspace.
“Despite the pervasive assumption that everything online lasts forever, the internet is inherently unstable”, he writes. “Sites vanish with no explanation”.
Unlike print, where hard copies can be archived, a website can disappear without trace, perhaps because a company takes it down or because it stops paying for hosting or domain rights.
He gives several examples, including News Corp’s short-lived tablet “paper”, The Daily, plus various music outlets he has worked for since 2009 that have had their content deleted from the net. One of them was AOL Music’s Spinner.com, which closed in August 2013 and now redirects browsers to an AOL Radio homepage - minus Spinner’s content.
Maness was told by Spinner’s former editor, Dan Reilly, that he believes the outlet’s archives may exist somewhere, but has no clue where.
“We assume everything we publish online will be preserved,” writes Maness. “But websites that pay for writing are businesses. They get sold, forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and pulls it all down...
“For media companies deleting their sites, legacy doesn’t matter; the work carries no intrinsic value if there is no business remaining to capitalise on it”.
His point about the ephemeral nature of online content should give everyone who writes on screen, and only on screen, pause for thought. And it’s especially cruel for bloggers like Maness who lose their entire oeuvre.
Should newspaper websites close in future will the work of their journalists suffer a similar fate?
Source: The Awl
