Will Link Rot Destroy Our Collective Memory?

TheInternetIsNot

AlexandriaVille

How do I know my memory is not what it used to be?

Well, the other day, while working on a wee post to come about Shohei Ohtani, I kept thinking that 'Moneyball' by Michael Lewis was actually called 'Billyball'.

Also, I increasingly find myself leaning on the archives tucked away down in this blog's basement whenever I have weird a thought about, say, something silly Ronny O' wrote about the patently obvious non-prospect of a BC Liberal/BC Conservative party fusion in 2012.

Which brings me to an aspect of old-timey blogging that I have always prided myself on - and that is that it is important to show your work with links 'n stuff that actually mean something.

The only problem with that now, in mid-2021, as reader NVG will tell you (and tell me, often, in the comment threads), is that the internet is rotting.

Jonathan Zittrain has the story in the Atlantic:

...It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web...

{snip}


....We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in (U.S. Supreme) Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.

People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents...


This development is bad enough for little F-troop list blogs like this one but in an era where shit-posters run countries, corporations and news organs this is a very disturbing development, indeed.

OK?

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Image at the top of post...The pre-Parks and Rec edition of Andy Dwyer was not Scott Hatteberg and he did not bat left before he took on the role of A's early oughts catcher in Brad Pitt's movie of M. Lewis' book.


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