Digital Decay: (Wo)Man Yells at Cloud

The Pew Research Center came out with a recent analysis that discovered that a quarter of all web pages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

For pages that existed in 2013, 38% are not available today. Even 8% of webpages from just one year ago are no longer available.

This phenomenon is called “Digital Decay.”

Sure, we’ve all been on a webpage, clicked a link, and gotten the dreaded “404” error: Page not found. But seeing these numbers, especially the one that says 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “references” section that points to a page that no longer exists, is a bit sobering.

Proverbial wisdom states that once something is on the internet, it never disappears. Generally, we think that applies to things some wish would disappear like embarrassing photos, compromising videos, and public gaffes. But what the Pew Research Center is suggesting is that the internet, the vast network that puts so much knowledge at our fingertips, that which sucks up hours of our day with an endless barrage of news, celebrity gossip, adorable puppy videos, social networks, how-to videos, and on and on and on … is no better off than Grandma’s attic. It’s starting to get cluttered and dusty, filled with items that are no longer wanted or useful.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, the internet is akin to a fraternity house without a house mother. I mean, who is in charge? Who is picking up the wet towels and dirty gym shorts and laundering them and neatly putting them away?

The answer is…nobody. For the past 30 years or so we’ve been expanding and adding to the internet, linking one thing to another, creating websites for everything imaginable, then abandoning them once we get bored. Or we trust that someone else is taking care of it, and we were lulled into the false sense of security that our old photos, blogs, videos, and musings would be there, always accessible to us, for all eternity.

Sorry to bring this up: Remember Myspace?

I admit my stomach still lurches when I click to save something to the Cloud. What does that even mean, really? All my precious family photos, old blog posts, emails from relatives with meaningful stories…all sent off somewhere into the ether, tethered to me only by a monthly fee for “additional data storage” and a password I’ll most certainly forget.

So much of our existence has been relegated to light on a screen, and nothing lays that stark reality bare like a power outage or a lack of a wi-fi connection.

“I have more photos of my children than my father ever looked at me,” says comedian Jim Gaffigan. That joke always hits a nerve. My laptop currently has more than 11,000 photos stored on it, and most of those photos are only 10 years old or less. I think about my mother’s closet: she has a neat stack of photo albums, filled chronologically with photos captured on film, developed onto actual acid-free paper, and placed behind an adhesive sheet of plastic in colorful albums with “My Photos” or “Precious Memories” emblazoned on the cover in gold embossed print.

In contrast, I have precious photos and anecdotes of my children as toddlers that I falsely believe I have lovingly archived on Facebook. If I had to produce a photo taken 20 years ago, I’m not sure how I would find it. Is it stored somewhere on the bubble-shaped enormous iMac G3 with bright orange plastic trim that’s stored somewhere in my crawlspace? I shudder at the thought.

Digital decay forces us to reckon with the fact that all new, shiny technology becomes old, whether it’s the printing press, the record player, or a VCR. How will we go about archiving the internet? How many things will be lost to future generations? But also, how much of what we have on the internet and in the Cloud is simply useless clutter, destined for a digital dumpster?

What this means to me is that I’m experiencing what every generation has discovered before me: so much of our lives are ephemeral, and we cannot possibly preserve everything. We shouldn’t want to. Even as we get older and more set in our ways, it’s more important than ever to stay nimble, and accept that the world is moving at a different speed than we are.

Heaven forbid I become “Old (wo)Man Yelling at Cloud.” I’m not going to raise my fists in impotent anger at clouds in the sky or the digital Cloud. Maybe I’ll sit outside today and write a blog post on paper with my favorite pen. Perhaps I’ll take a photo of my children and immediately take it to a print shop and hang it on my wall. I’ll fold myself into a pretzel and rifle through my crawl space and pull out that old iMac with my firstborn’s baptism photos on it.

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