This article was really eye-opening. I had always thought that whatever goes online, stays online, and that nothing can be truly deleted. And while that may be true of a hard-drive, Lepore highlighted the importance of internet archives by demonstrating that, information can be removed (the all too familiar “link rot”), or even worse, “overwritten” (content drift) which is arguably more dangerous because one can’t tell if he/she are looking at the original or modified page. I think “Memento” is a really interesting response to content drift, allowing the user to see a webpage at different time points by searching internet archives, such as the Wayback Machine, and adding another dimension to the internet. I was really interested in seeing memento in action so I downloaded the extension and looked at the wikipedia page for “Optogenetics” from 2005 and today. 2005 Screen Shot 2017-11-21 at 2.11.06 PM.png

Today Screen Shot 2017-11-21 at 2.11.23 PM.png

I was amused, but not surprised, to see that the page had gone from a skimpy one paragraph to a multiparagraph page with many subtopics. Overall, I think memento is a really useful tool and I’m surprised more people don’t use it!