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

Digital archiving and saving webpages from the internet is becoming increasingly important as the internet becomes increasingly important and intertwined in everyday life.

The most surprising thing that I found while reading Lepore’s article, was the lack of proper redundancy in internet archiving. While I had known about the Wayback Machine for a long time, I didn’t necessarily realize that that was the only archival tool for the internet–I also did not put together the importance of it being an “opt-out” service.

Sites like Perma.cc seem to be very important for academic and scholarly reasons, for the same reason that the Memex is important. However, it is an opt-in service. While that serves a good enough purpose, it mostly serves “ as the standard in legal, scientific, and scholarly citation.” As the example in Lepore’s article illustrates, sometimes it is necessary to have an opt-out service because it captures all of the going-ons in the internet.

I think the article frames mostly one advantage of having the Wayback Machine that is more related to the idea of catching the bad guy–with the record of the Russian social media site, the value of archiving the internet is easy to understand.

However, internet privacy and lack of record is something that is important as well. The Minitel is an example of a pre-internet system that was inherently private. When changes were made that compromised this privacy, there was immediate backlash.