Eradication of Online Information

[Totenkindly]

MTV erases news website, decades of internet archives

“So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace,” a former music editor for MTV News wrote.

www.pennlive.com

So this is starting to move beyond just execs removing streaming creative media from public domain / accessibility and is now impacting actual news repositories. People assumed the Internet would be forever, but we're now seeing the danger of virtual dependency and how simple it is to lose access to information.

The goals of the original information producers differs from large corporations taking ownership or buying up smaller organizations and seeking only to further stock price or their own bottom line, and culture is now vulnerable to simply having large chunks of data removed based on a small cluster of executives.

People had assumed the internet was forever, just like they assumed democracy was unassailable, but here we are.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Down the memory hole. Not sure why more people didn’t see this coming.

Honestly it’s been going on for a while. Multiple times in recent years, I’ve tried to go back to old news articles only to find they have vanished. I know I’m not imagining this because the links often come up in search engines, only to lead to “this page no longer exists” or similar messages on the news sites.

Journalists need to be saving copies of their old articles, backed up to offline storage. The cloud is not a guarantee.

This is why hard copies of media will always be superior. It’s not about being old fashioned, it’s about preservation

 

[Coriolis]

Down the memory hole. Not sure why more people didn’t see this coming.

Honestly it’s been going on for a while. Multiple times in recent years, I’ve tried to go back to old news articles only to find they have vanished. I know I’m not imagining this because the links often come up in search engines, only to lead to “this page no longer exists” or similar messages on the news sites.

Journalists need to be saving copies of their old articles, backed up to offline storage. The cloud is not a guarantee.

This is why hard copies of media will always be superior. It’s not about being old fashioned, it’s about preservation

Hard copies can deteriorate, and are subject to loss in fire, floods, etc. The ability to store huge amounts of information electronically means that it is fairly easy to create mirror sites, or at least storage, of important information. Sure - print it out if it is important to you. Or just buy a relatively inexpensive external drive and store your own copies -- and share them.

 

[Totenkindly]

Mostly for entertainment media, the choice is between purely virtual/streaming and having tangible hard media for your albums and films and TV shows. I think with a few scares over the last year, we can see how quickly an available piece of media can just disappear and become inaccessible -- or maybe even never released and just canned despite all the people who worked on it for multiple years.

It's a little more complex with regular online content, news, and other information. It could be difficult to get everything into a tangible medium like paper due to the sheer volume of what is online. But definitely download and burn copies of electronic media to tangible media like bluray or CD or other forms of personal permanent storage.

The Wayback Machine foresaw this and was mentioned in the article, although it didn't manage to capture everything and eventually couldn't keep up. (It still has some decent stuff from the early days of online content.) But I think the changes in the online industry now make everything more susceptible to control by self-interested corporate entities, versus the early days when the Internet was viewed as freedom of information. Now information is monetized and controlled. The people in charge of key hubs on the Internet (and repositories of content) no longer have the interest of the public in mind.

 

[The Cat]

RIP The Trove. The players miss you.

 

[SensEye]

I'm wondering about their motive. It doesn't seem like a cost cutting move as it can't possibly cost that much just to continue hosting the information. There is no obvious profit motive (but with corporations it's best never to rule that out).

This wipe appears to serve no purpose. I hope it is not due simply to some SJ executive 'decluttering' something he/she does not perceive as profitable.

 

[The Cat]

Oh it serves a purpose. Everything serves a purpose even if its not an overt purpose. If knowledge is power; then forgetfulness is an exploitable resource.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Hard copies can deteriorate, and are subject to loss in fire, floods, etc. The ability to store huge amounts of information electronically means that it is fairly easy to create mirror sites, or at least storage, of important information. Sure - print it out if it is important to you. Or just buy a relatively inexpensive external drive and store your own copies -- and share them.

That’s why you need to back up multiple copies. Hard print/media, and on a personal backup hard drive or data disc.

Especially if you are publishing work in an industry in which this sort of mass data deletion is becoming commonplace

 

[ygolo]

The internet is now a digital serfdom.

MTV may not have been able to afford the rent to their cloud lords.

 

[ceecee]

I just assumed they did this to sell people a "subscription" for access down the road.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

I used to be strongly in favor of replacing all of my physical music media with digital files. Now I prefer to keep records and CDs of my favorite albums. I still keep digital music on my personal computer, but I like to have that physical copy. I’ve had music files become corrupted and unplayable in the past, and was frustrated to find I’d sold the original CDs thinking I’d never play them again. I also used to be in favor of dumping DVDs and Blu-ray since most everything can be streamed, but now I prefer to own my favorite films, since movies are getting chopped and edited and censored all the time.

 

[The Cat]

*cough cough dnd episode of community cough*

 

[Virtual ghost]

This is exactly why I never had super high faith in the digital domain.
You just click "select all"+"delete" and with that you wipe out someone's lifetime of work.


Therefore to me putting all of your eggs into this basket always seemed as a bad idea (for this reason alone).

 

[The Cat]

The Cloud says: "Give me all your hard work. I'll give it back to you when you ask for it...maybe."