The trAce redirect was turned off without warning or consultation. Everyone who works with online new media knows how important it is to maintain such linkages. Anyone who teaches digital writing or new media knows how frustrating it is to find a broken link to an important work, or how embarrassing it to be presenting at a conference to find that a link has suddenly become 404. It can also be embarrassing to find that links on your professional or academic resume no longer work.
@ Writing & the Digital Life
The comments thread to the post quoted above asks and discusses a number of important questions arising from this lost redirect, but I’m left wondering about the more romantic possibilities of data and link decay. In the future, perhaps, when redirects fail and old links have all broken, will we be able to make discoveries in abandoned regions of the web akin to uncovering the fragmented tablets of Gilgamesh or the manuscript of Beowulf? What mundane scraps of the blogosphere might be as potent as Liebowitz’ pound of pastrami?
I’m thrilled by the potential for the web to go wild — physical space or not (I’m looking at you, AKMA), atrophy and entropy seem as much in play as they would in a forest with its forgotten paths and overgrown corners. That metaphor is imperfect, of course, because the web going “wild” depends on human beings to leave our old servers and sites online, but I like it all the same.
Commenting is closed for this article.
This is great; very evocative. You are probably already familiar with this, but Vernor Vinge has at least one novel where the entire structure of a planet-sized body is storing data, which people are busy mining (at their peril). You might also be interested in a post of mine on “Refracted Footnotes.”
A large part of Iain M. Banks’ book Feersum Enjin is about this. Works off a piece of wordplay about data encryptian and being in a crypt. Poetically, old dead data sinks to the bottom and gradually decays. A friend who is doing a sociological study of virtual archiving often talks about the “dark” archives. Something that always sound rather ominous to me.
BTW, Sue Thomas is presently working on a study of the natural metaphors of the web. I should ask her how she envisions this possibility.
Thanks to both of you for the suggestions.