Electronic Impermanence

The flip side of Permanent Ephemera.

Yes, this electronic world means things are easily "stored / archived" without having to worry about massive physical structures. And the ease with which "things" can be generated in or converted to electronic formats means an exponential explosion in such content.

This explosion is a boon to many folks. Lots of collecting hobbyists are either finding examples of the things they collect, or information relating to those things history, etc. Genealogists, historians, all kinds of scientific endeavors ...

And efforts like the Internet Archive try to guarantee that at least periodic snapshots of the "Internet's content" would be caught and preserved. Thus we can compare the December 1998 and current version of the York Area Chamber of Commerce's web site. Such comparisons are imperative if our question is something like "could that have been known then?"

BUT

As noted in WHOOSH vs. WHUMP, sometimes electronic resources simply vanish or otherwise become unavailable because of inattention, changes in technology, or altered priorities of the original content producers.

Another aspect of electronic formats and content is the lingering uncertainty that the content will not be silently altered. If I comment about the photo of Ellen Degeneres' AmEx ad on the back cover of the Jan. 22, 2007 NEWSWEEK, I'm relatively sure that reference will always mean what I had in mind. I'm pretty sure that a comment about the contents of the "slideshow" on the Local Features page of the Kilgore Memorial Library web site cannot have the same certainty.

And finally, stories like this one about evaporating web pages hint at other reasons for the disappearance of electronic content.