“The internet is forever” is a trope and a warning to the young (and others) regarding to take care about what one posts to the world.
While the wisdom is obvious about what one chooses to post to the world, internet posts may not be forever, after all.
The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore has an article this week pointing out the difficulties the experts have in archiving the World Wide Web.
It notes that pages die, are moved and, most significantly, overwritten hence making it hard, maybe even impossible, to find documents once posted.
This has become a problem in academia, technology and especially law.
A study conducted last year at Harvard Law School showed that more than 70 percent of of the URLs cited in the footnotes of the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50 percent of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions do no link to the original cited information, as per Ms. Lepore.
This makes the footnotes useless and the opinions unsupported.
Maybe it is best to not let dead tree record keeping die, after-all, while “paperless” is a trope that should.
