we will!
I’ve heard that all of my life; I have lived through the birth of the internet, the entire history of the internet, and I’ve heard that all the time. So, tell us, is the internet in fact forever? And if not, in what ways is it not?
I don’t understand why anyone ever thought that that was true. Okay? First of all, nothing is forever. And so if you start with “nothing is forever,” and then you look at a medium of publishing and communications as ephemeral and fragile as the internet, why would we possibly think that would be forever? Now, some things on the internet, a lot of things on the internet, have been around for a long time. That’s good. But a lot of the internet is gone, and these days, more and more of what people are sharing online is designed to not be around very long.
Sorry, I think I wasn’t being entirely clear in my meaning:
The Internet is actually just sets of data transmission protocols. The servers that the Internet connects to each other are where actual content lives, but who they are owned by, and their content retention policies and choices, are completely opaque and variable. That’s why relying on websites for long-term storage is a bad idea. YouTube can (and has) deleted entire decades worth of content with no justification or recourse.
Communication is very different than data storage, and data transmission, which is what the Internet is at its core, is essentially synonymous with the former. It excels at facilitating communication.
But storage of data for any period? Unless you know the owners of the site, its financials, its data retention policies, etc, you don’t really have any guarantees that the thing you posted yesterday will be there tomorrow.
And I don’t think that’s bad, I think it’s just the nature of the Internet.