The Cobweb. Can the Internet be archived? by Jill Lepore (New Yorker, 2015)

I thought the story opened up with a very frightening but important example of how the internet can be an archive, but not necessarily in it’s standard ephemeral/easily-editable state. Does this mean we archive the entire internet at all times of the day? The only platform I can think of that archives itself is Twitter, with the Library of Congress archiving every tweet. The interesting thing is that this doesn’t stop people from deleting their tweets. My only other reasoning is that they don’t want to deal with the real-time backlash and people replying to and/or retweeting the tweet, but people can still reply to the tweet’s author and send their commentary without the tweet existing. Throughout Lepore’s discussion of how the internet was formed with ease of use in mind rather than preservation. I wonder what the web would look like had preservation had been an important factor in building the infrastructure of the internet. Perma.cc seems very interesting, and will hopefully be a vital digital humanities tool to solving the problem with rotten links in scholarly documents. I also think the Memento project, in it’s ability to link various archives together, helps solve the problem initially stated with various countries and organizations wary of outside parties archiving their digital footprint. However, I wonder how much biases organizations have when archiving their own data. In general, I’m very glad organizations have taken initiative to archive their websites. During my research earlier this semester into AI fairness and ethics policy recommendations in the US government, I would have struggled greatly if there hadn’t been an archive created of various whitehouse.gov pages specifically from the Obama administration, as they no longer exist on the current whitehouse.gov.