Epiphany is something I have written about quite a lot - that moment of sudden realisation that makes everything clear to you. I've written about it in the context of problems we try to solve and then almost give up only to find that moment occur that makes us realise the solution.
There is another epiphany though that I haven't written about and that's the type that causes you to re-evaluate your life. By that I don't mean where you are right now, I mean your past and what you have done. Epiphany in this context can completely rewrite our past, when we suddenly realise things we were oblivious to before. These moment of epiphany can almost rewrite history and it can make you very paranoid.
I've had a moment of epiphany that's made me re-evaluate my life during high school and college. There are seminal events in my life I now have to re-evaluate and think about from an entirely new perspective and that perspective is considerably more negative than I had already - which for me is quite disturbing because my perspective was already quite negative to begin with.
Seeing things from your own point of view you can only assess how those events affected you directly and how they made you feel. When you look at them from another point of view though, especially those events involving other people you have to re-evaluate how those events affected them too, and most importantly the interaction that occurred and the intended consequences of each side.
I realise I am being cryptic so I'll give you a fictional example. Imagine you and another person out hunting and they missed their shot narrowly missing you. Heated words would exchange more than likely and apologies exchanged. You would dismiss that event as being an accident and the other person being careless. You would be upset and angry. Now imagine a few years pass and you find out that they didn't like you as a friend as much as you had thought. Consider then how you would look back on that event and wonder - was that shot intentional? Did they try to kill you?
If you follow the example above then you will know where I am coming from, the events of our past and how they affected us, and what we thought of those events can be completely rewritten when we are given another point of view - finding out they didn't like you makes you re-evaluate the event and consider the possibility that it wasn't an accident that they almost hit you, but rather it becomes an accident that they missed you.
This fundamental change is something only epiphany can cause, paranoia can make us think of ulterior motives, but only epiphany can make us re-evaluate the event in context, because epiphany does not take just that event into account but every other linked event and every other memory that could be drawn in to the equation - like a brainstorming session where all the different ideas are pooled together and pieced together like a jigsaw.
I said I've had a moment of epiphany and it has indeed made me re-evaluate quite a significant portion of my life. If proves to be true then it turns me into something I never wanted to be.
I feel like my soul has been ripped from my body right now. I feel like my conscience transcends space and time and that I have been disconnected. I have had out of body experiences before but this is quite different. I can see more than I ever wanted to see and I am not sure I am comfortable with it.
Data Logging
I read a BBC News article titled "Web porn: Just how much is there?" - something admittedly I would not have expected the BBC to even cover in the first place. The article content didn't interest me much as I have read various estimates and guesstimates on this over the years and in my own experience you find porn in the places you would least expect - more than that the definition of porn itself is one that is not that clear, you would likely argue for instance that Youtube does not contain porn but that really comes down to what you define as porn, if we are talking about things you find sexually arousing and what you can masturbate to then for quite a lot of people yes there is porn to be found even on a site that officially does not allow it.
This is getting beside the point though, what did interest me about the article was this rather curious quote:
"According to estimates from Scandinavian research centre Sintef, 90% of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years"
Now if we ignore the debate about when the Human race was born and simply go with the one thing we can probably agree on - the birth of civilisation, which is marked to have been around 10,000 BC, that means that we as a race have lived in some form of civilised society for the past 12,000 years give or take. To consider the possibility that in the last 2 years alone we have generated more data than humanity did in the preceding 11,998 years is something that at first is quite unbelievable.
However, considering this quote and taking time to reflect on it, I do have to ask, is it really that unbelievable? I mean we live in a world that is connected like never before. There is an unprecedented amount of monitoring and logging of data to be processed - both authorised and unauthorised, through consensual agreements like your ISP's right to log every connection you make, to espionage and snooping. Computers themselves are a remarkable testament to how fast we are progressing now than at any other point in history. Beyond our habits on a PC though our day to day lives consist of fountains of information generation. Every single thing we buy is logged in some way or another, anywhere you get a receipt a copy of that transaction is stored in the computers of that retailer. From food to phone bills.
The question is raised - does this actually represent an increase in production or are we simply living in a time where the data we generate is recorded? i.e. did people thousands of years ago generate just as much it was just not recorded? We only have to look at our own society and see things that we had the capacity to record for a long time but never bothered - weather records from hundreds of years or thousands of years ago for example. It would have been simple enough to record a brief summary of the weather day by day for future generations to reference. Instead we end up in the situation where a lot of our historical records only mention events that were abnormal.
That does inspire another question though, maybe we should consider taking a leaf out of our ancestors' books and consider whether we really need to record everything that can be recorded - i.e. consider what is and is not noteworthy and only record that which is and discard the rest. The only problem I can foresee with that is that future generations would likely end up in the same situation as we are now - they might one day want to draw on records of something we decided wasn't noteworthy; maybe our ancestors thought "Oh no-one is going to care what the weather was like every day, don't bother writing that down"
The question remains, should we really be recording everything we can just because we can?
This is getting beside the point though, what did interest me about the article was this rather curious quote:
"According to estimates from Scandinavian research centre Sintef, 90% of all the data the human race has ever produced has been generated in the past two years"
Now if we ignore the debate about when the Human race was born and simply go with the one thing we can probably agree on - the birth of civilisation, which is marked to have been around 10,000 BC, that means that we as a race have lived in some form of civilised society for the past 12,000 years give or take. To consider the possibility that in the last 2 years alone we have generated more data than humanity did in the preceding 11,998 years is something that at first is quite unbelievable.
However, considering this quote and taking time to reflect on it, I do have to ask, is it really that unbelievable? I mean we live in a world that is connected like never before. There is an unprecedented amount of monitoring and logging of data to be processed - both authorised and unauthorised, through consensual agreements like your ISP's right to log every connection you make, to espionage and snooping. Computers themselves are a remarkable testament to how fast we are progressing now than at any other point in history. Beyond our habits on a PC though our day to day lives consist of fountains of information generation. Every single thing we buy is logged in some way or another, anywhere you get a receipt a copy of that transaction is stored in the computers of that retailer. From food to phone bills.
The question is raised - does this actually represent an increase in production or are we simply living in a time where the data we generate is recorded? i.e. did people thousands of years ago generate just as much it was just not recorded? We only have to look at our own society and see things that we had the capacity to record for a long time but never bothered - weather records from hundreds of years or thousands of years ago for example. It would have been simple enough to record a brief summary of the weather day by day for future generations to reference. Instead we end up in the situation where a lot of our historical records only mention events that were abnormal.
That does inspire another question though, maybe we should consider taking a leaf out of our ancestors' books and consider whether we really need to record everything that can be recorded - i.e. consider what is and is not noteworthy and only record that which is and discard the rest. The only problem I can foresee with that is that future generations would likely end up in the same situation as we are now - they might one day want to draw on records of something we decided wasn't noteworthy; maybe our ancestors thought "Oh no-one is going to care what the weather was like every day, don't bother writing that down"
The question remains, should we really be recording everything we can just because we can?
Ask or be asked?
I had a rather interesting conversation tonight about marriage, since it's quite likely that it will soon be legalised for same sex couples here in the UK - the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) bill is currently resident in the House of Lords, after a committee, report, and third reading it will return to the House of Commons where it will be addressed for the final time before it becomes law.
A question arose in our conversation of who we would prefer to ask the question and I had to think for a moment. In a heterosexual couple, it's traditional for the male to propose, with the exception of leap year proposals where a female would propose to the male. That was tradition something which many have said has little influence today - however I would argue that of all the women I have known every one of them wanted to be asked rather than asking. Rather interesting when Civil Partnerships came along I had never considered the question of who would ask - namely because I would not of had a Civil Partnership, I want to get Married.
Who would be the one "expected" to propose then? Well in any gay couple regardless of gender there won't be a 'man' and a 'woman' - any preconceived notions of gay men or lesbians conforming to this binary pairing should be put out of your head, our relationships don't work like that, no matter what you may have been led to believe.
There is perhaps a question of Psychology, that perhaps whichever partner is the most socially dominant would be the one to ask, but even this I find hard to use as a rule of thumb because as I have said in other posts on this blog, our social and sexual standing is often reversed - those who are dominant socially are often submissive sexually. You could perhaps say that sexual dominance should determine who asks, but even that is hard to do as sex and love aren't the same thing.
Then perhaps there should be a third standing, an aggregate position that combines your social and sexual role and produces your overall standing in the relationship as a whole? The problem with this is that there are a lot of factors beyond social and sexual roles in a relationship that would determine your overall position. There is also the question of whether you should be in one position or the other at all - the argument that a balanced relationship would see both partners as equal and therefore neither as being dominant or submissive, in other words, equal.
The problem with that is we don't get an answer to our question, who should be the one to ask? I would argue that your inclination to ask would be based both on a selfish consideration of your own desire, and a selfless consideration of whether your partner is ready - marriage is a big step.
Personally I think I would rather be asked than be the one to ask. Having said that anyone who knew me that intimately would tell you that it would be hard to tell when I was ready and it would also be a bad idea to ask too soon [yea, I know, I have issue but so does everyone whether they admit it or not] the result is that I would most likely end up being the one who would ask, not out of personal desire but out of necessity.
There is the romantic element which is the most compelling, whilst most of the above takes the stance of debating being the one to ask, there is a romanticism to be found in the idea of being asked. Most straight guys will never have dreamed or fantasised about being asked, many straight girls will have though. For a gay person though there is no predisposition of that nature, either or both could have grown up dreaming of being asked. That puts you in the position where one would have to give up that dream to be with the one they love.
Love can move mountains, and there is no limit to what we will sacrifice for someone we truly love, and so we end up back at square one. Who should be the one to ask? Or rather, who will be the one to ask?
A question arose in our conversation of who we would prefer to ask the question and I had to think for a moment. In a heterosexual couple, it's traditional for the male to propose, with the exception of leap year proposals where a female would propose to the male. That was tradition something which many have said has little influence today - however I would argue that of all the women I have known every one of them wanted to be asked rather than asking. Rather interesting when Civil Partnerships came along I had never considered the question of who would ask - namely because I would not of had a Civil Partnership, I want to get Married.
Who would be the one "expected" to propose then? Well in any gay couple regardless of gender there won't be a 'man' and a 'woman' - any preconceived notions of gay men or lesbians conforming to this binary pairing should be put out of your head, our relationships don't work like that, no matter what you may have been led to believe.
There is perhaps a question of Psychology, that perhaps whichever partner is the most socially dominant would be the one to ask, but even this I find hard to use as a rule of thumb because as I have said in other posts on this blog, our social and sexual standing is often reversed - those who are dominant socially are often submissive sexually. You could perhaps say that sexual dominance should determine who asks, but even that is hard to do as sex and love aren't the same thing.
Then perhaps there should be a third standing, an aggregate position that combines your social and sexual role and produces your overall standing in the relationship as a whole? The problem with this is that there are a lot of factors beyond social and sexual roles in a relationship that would determine your overall position. There is also the question of whether you should be in one position or the other at all - the argument that a balanced relationship would see both partners as equal and therefore neither as being dominant or submissive, in other words, equal.
The problem with that is we don't get an answer to our question, who should be the one to ask? I would argue that your inclination to ask would be based both on a selfish consideration of your own desire, and a selfless consideration of whether your partner is ready - marriage is a big step.
Personally I think I would rather be asked than be the one to ask. Having said that anyone who knew me that intimately would tell you that it would be hard to tell when I was ready and it would also be a bad idea to ask too soon [yea, I know, I have issue but so does everyone whether they admit it or not] the result is that I would most likely end up being the one who would ask, not out of personal desire but out of necessity.
There is the romantic element which is the most compelling, whilst most of the above takes the stance of debating being the one to ask, there is a romanticism to be found in the idea of being asked. Most straight guys will never have dreamed or fantasised about being asked, many straight girls will have though. For a gay person though there is no predisposition of that nature, either or both could have grown up dreaming of being asked. That puts you in the position where one would have to give up that dream to be with the one they love.
Love can move mountains, and there is no limit to what we will sacrifice for someone we truly love, and so we end up back at square one. Who should be the one to ask? Or rather, who will be the one to ask?
Dance of Despair
Empty dreams and silent screams,
The music dies as a lone man cries,
The night has been and met its end,
In a world void of hope yet masked in smiles
Nothing is ever what it seems,
Ignore the mask yet meet the eyes,
Every stranger is a potential friend,
But not if your soul within torment riles
Take my hand come and dance with me,
If just for one night set your soul free
The music dies as a lone man cries,
The night has been and met its end,
In a world void of hope yet masked in smiles
Nothing is ever what it seems,
Ignore the mask yet meet the eyes,
Every stranger is a potential friend,
But not if your soul within torment riles
Take my hand come and dance with me,
If just for one night set your soul free
When should you buy content?
With the range of services you can use online like NetFlix that let you watch as many TV Shows and Movies as you want, or subscription based music services that let you listen to whatever you want whenever you want there is a question you need to ask - when should you buy content?
Buying content is defined in the traditional sense that is you pay a price and get the content to keep. Whereas renting content can be defined as buying a subscription for access to content which allows you to access the content so long as you are subscribed, but you don't get to keep it, so when your subscription ends so does access to the content.
In the two scenarios, the former, buying content, without a doubt will cost the most in the long term. The latter will cost less, the only catch is that when you stop your subscription you can't access the content.
Buying content only makes sense if you are going to watch the content hundreds of times or you need access to it without an internet connection. I say this because when most people buy DVDs for instance they don't watch every DVD they own hundreds of times. In fact some DVDs you own you've probably only watched once or twice at the most.
We have over a hundred DVDs, I know people that have extensive collections that take up entire rooms, but really there's only so many times you can watch every one of them. Even if you don't do anything but watch DVDs all day and all night there will still be a limit to the number you can conceivably watch. There comes a point were you will have redundant content. That is content that you have, but don't need, and probably never use.
If you have 200 DVDs and you paid £15 for each one then you will have spent £3,000 on DVDs. NetFlix membership costs £6 per month, with the first month free. For the cost of your DVDs you could have paid for 500 months + 1 free of NetFlix, that's 41 years and 9 months. Now consider the fact that membership of £6 per month gives you access to NetFlix entire library with near unlimited usage. When you compare the two scenarios, the latter, renting content, makes more sense economically arguably it leads to greater freedom in content choice as well.
Now I realise this entire blog post sounds like an advert for NetFlix but the concept doesn't just apply to it, it applies to a number of other things. I do question whether in a world that seems to push people towards buying things, how much could we save if we rented things instead? Consider your car. If you buy a car that car becomes your sole responsibility, your upkeep. You need to pay for repairs, it likely costs a fortune in the first place. Consider the cost of renting a car instead. You rent the car for a fixed term and then rent another. You get a new car each time. Repairs and upkeep are the responsibility of the company you rent it from. Really the only thing you pay for is the rent and the fuel.
I live in a Western country, arguably one that is considered capitalist and one that promotes the capitalist idea of the ownership of private property but truth be told I have to question whether it actually makes sense to buy things and own them as opposed to renting and using them. Movies are just an example of this idea.
Buying content is defined in the traditional sense that is you pay a price and get the content to keep. Whereas renting content can be defined as buying a subscription for access to content which allows you to access the content so long as you are subscribed, but you don't get to keep it, so when your subscription ends so does access to the content.
In the two scenarios, the former, buying content, without a doubt will cost the most in the long term. The latter will cost less, the only catch is that when you stop your subscription you can't access the content.
Buying content only makes sense if you are going to watch the content hundreds of times or you need access to it without an internet connection. I say this because when most people buy DVDs for instance they don't watch every DVD they own hundreds of times. In fact some DVDs you own you've probably only watched once or twice at the most.
We have over a hundred DVDs, I know people that have extensive collections that take up entire rooms, but really there's only so many times you can watch every one of them. Even if you don't do anything but watch DVDs all day and all night there will still be a limit to the number you can conceivably watch. There comes a point were you will have redundant content. That is content that you have, but don't need, and probably never use.
If you have 200 DVDs and you paid £15 for each one then you will have spent £3,000 on DVDs. NetFlix membership costs £6 per month, with the first month free. For the cost of your DVDs you could have paid for 500 months + 1 free of NetFlix, that's 41 years and 9 months. Now consider the fact that membership of £6 per month gives you access to NetFlix entire library with near unlimited usage. When you compare the two scenarios, the latter, renting content, makes more sense economically arguably it leads to greater freedom in content choice as well.
Now I realise this entire blog post sounds like an advert for NetFlix but the concept doesn't just apply to it, it applies to a number of other things. I do question whether in a world that seems to push people towards buying things, how much could we save if we rented things instead? Consider your car. If you buy a car that car becomes your sole responsibility, your upkeep. You need to pay for repairs, it likely costs a fortune in the first place. Consider the cost of renting a car instead. You rent the car for a fixed term and then rent another. You get a new car each time. Repairs and upkeep are the responsibility of the company you rent it from. Really the only thing you pay for is the rent and the fuel.
I live in a Western country, arguably one that is considered capitalist and one that promotes the capitalist idea of the ownership of private property but truth be told I have to question whether it actually makes sense to buy things and own them as opposed to renting and using them. Movies are just an example of this idea.
Hatred Reborn
There was a time, when 'hate' was an extreme word, when it was only used to mean what it meant. To hate something truly meant to truly hate. Today hate and dislike have become synonymous. I blame this for the extremities in our world. When did we become so extreme that anything we disliked it was socially acceptable to say we hated it? Has real hatred become acceptable in society because we have forgotten how to define the difference between things we dislike and things we hate?
Spend 10 minutes on any forum or social network or a site like youtube open to comments and you quickly see that negative moderation seems to have died. I say negative as positive moderation still exists, for that I blame or I guess I should say thank, facebook. Through the popularisation of the word 'like' facebook has managed to keep the word like in our vocabulary and in such a way that it makes it true to its definition. The valuation of a "like" on facebook is negligible. It means nothing more than what it states, that someone has a moderately positive view of whatever it is they "liked" - it doesn't mean they love it, and it doesn't really signify any deep rooted emotional attachment to a brand - although if you follow social marketing spiel you'd believe "likes" were the holy grail of marketing.
No. 'like' on facebook is a moderate indicator of positive opinion. It means "I don't mind XX" - as a result like, and love, still exist in our vocabulary as distinct entities. They still exist as differentiable levels of positive accord. Dislike and hate however have melded into one common meaning, that now acts as a catch-all to the point where expressing the sentiment "I don't like XX" is by many viewed as a remark of hate. For this I could arguably turn to facebook again, this time unquestionably the correct term would be 'blame' - they are to blame for this, they contributed to this wholeheartedly. Facebook has never had a "dislike" button, despite the multitude of efforts by members over the years urging the network to create one.
As a result it is my view that 3 levels exist today:
I like this
I love this
I hate this
People have forgotten how to say "I don't like this" without it having to mean anything at all other than a simple statement of whether or not you feel positive or negative about something.
Where's the line between dislike and hatred? Or rather where was it? Well that's rather easy to answer, again it comes down to the role of active and passive emotion. Disliking something was a passive emotion, "I don't like this, but meh I don't care" whereas hatred was an active emotion "I hate this, and I am gonna make sure the whole world knows" - the latter is the problem we find ourselves with. There is no moderate negative emotion anymore, it is always extreme.
There will of course be people who read this and disagree, and I welcome that, I would argue that you are in a minority however, and I would even go so far as to say that this is self evident as you will likely already know this. You may be moderate, but you will surely know from experience that your moderation is rare online. "We do exist" is something that becomes increasingly harder to convince people to believe.
Spend 10 minutes on any forum or social network or a site like youtube open to comments and you quickly see that negative moderation seems to have died. I say negative as positive moderation still exists, for that I blame or I guess I should say thank, facebook. Through the popularisation of the word 'like' facebook has managed to keep the word like in our vocabulary and in such a way that it makes it true to its definition. The valuation of a "like" on facebook is negligible. It means nothing more than what it states, that someone has a moderately positive view of whatever it is they "liked" - it doesn't mean they love it, and it doesn't really signify any deep rooted emotional attachment to a brand - although if you follow social marketing spiel you'd believe "likes" were the holy grail of marketing.
No. 'like' on facebook is a moderate indicator of positive opinion. It means "I don't mind XX" - as a result like, and love, still exist in our vocabulary as distinct entities. They still exist as differentiable levels of positive accord. Dislike and hate however have melded into one common meaning, that now acts as a catch-all to the point where expressing the sentiment "I don't like XX" is by many viewed as a remark of hate. For this I could arguably turn to facebook again, this time unquestionably the correct term would be 'blame' - they are to blame for this, they contributed to this wholeheartedly. Facebook has never had a "dislike" button, despite the multitude of efforts by members over the years urging the network to create one.
As a result it is my view that 3 levels exist today:
I like this
I love this
I hate this
People have forgotten how to say "I don't like this" without it having to mean anything at all other than a simple statement of whether or not you feel positive or negative about something.
Where's the line between dislike and hatred? Or rather where was it? Well that's rather easy to answer, again it comes down to the role of active and passive emotion. Disliking something was a passive emotion, "I don't like this, but meh I don't care" whereas hatred was an active emotion "I hate this, and I am gonna make sure the whole world knows" - the latter is the problem we find ourselves with. There is no moderate negative emotion anymore, it is always extreme.
There will of course be people who read this and disagree, and I welcome that, I would argue that you are in a minority however, and I would even go so far as to say that this is self evident as you will likely already know this. You may be moderate, but you will surely know from experience that your moderation is rare online. "We do exist" is something that becomes increasingly harder to convince people to believe.
Online Life Expectancy
Twice in as many days now the concept of online life expectancy has cropped up in conversation - for a definition use the following:
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
Online Life Expectancy is the duration of time a web page or web site is expected to stay online before being replaced, updated or closed.My blogs are an example of websites which are not expected to remain online forever. I say this as I have mentioned numerous times that I often go through phases where I remove content and rework things. My facebook profile was another prime example, having been deleted last June almost 6 years worth of content went with it.
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
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