From the course: Building a Resilient Web

Impermanence as a model

From the course: Building a Resilient Web

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Impermanence as a model

“

- [Narrator] If you ask me to make a list of the defining features of the web, high on that list would be the word impermanence. With all this talk of resilience, that might come as a bit of a surprise so let me explain. When I was in university, I read a lot of random books while traveling to and from campus on the subway. Once I finished a book, I'd leave it on the subway with a note saying something like, "Read it and leave it for the next person." Then one time I found a book on the subway and when I picked it up, I realized it was one of the ones I'd left almost a year earlier. And on the inside of the cover, someone had written, "I found this book on the subway with a note saying to read it and pass it along so I did. Now you read it, put your name here and pass it along." And underneath was a list of five names. I wish I'd kept that book, but I left it for the next reader. To me, there's something almost magical about this idea that once you create something, be it text or images or a physical object or a sculpture, it gains an existence beyond you and can continue to exist outside your knowledge. True, things can be destroyed, but if they have value, they tend to be preserved. My university thesis on some obscure philosophical concept exists somewhere in the bowels of a university library and will live on in obscurity long after my time, but it does continue to exist. The web is different. When we put something on the web and on the internet in general, it is by virtue of existing on that platform impermanent. On a base level, the existence of web content is predicated on infrastructure, servers and networks and memory and processors, all of which can be cleared or deleted or fail at any time. On a higher level, web content tends to be modified and updated over time, overwriting the original content so completely it's as if it never existed at all. This is actually a serious problem for historical reasons. Even though we produce more information and more data than any time before, much of that data will be modified and remixed and disappear altogether leaving no trace of its former existence. And in many cases, we deliberately produce ephemeral content with a short expiry date. Look no further than Instagram stories for an example of that. When we talk about resilience, we also have to talk about the preservation of information. The resilience of the web isn't just about the web working for everyone. It's also about preserving history and allowing people to find their way back to information. If we accept that impermanence is a feature of the web platform, we can make conscious choices to ensure that impermanence doesn't result in information loss. It can be as simple as archiving old published content and ensuring links are not broken. It can also be as complicated as adding and extending editing features on the web platforms so visitors can see the earlier versions of content. Bottom line, while we work on making the web technically resilient, we also have to work on making information historically resilient.

Contents