Gone!

June 22nd, 2024| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Well, even if it isn’t gone entirely, it is going …, and going …. Soon to be gone!

I’m talking about the internet. It is disappearing.

So saith a study from the Pew Center published recently, “When Online Content Disappears.”

The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.”

Yup, the internet is disappearing, and web pages and online content are being lost.

To conduct their analysis, the Pew Center collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl, an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. They sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.

We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023.”

Not surprisingly, the older snapshots had the largest share of loss. Of the pages collected from the 2013 snapshot, 38% were no longer accessible in 2023. But even for pages collected in the 2021 snapshot, about 20% were no longer accessible just two years later. In fact, 8% of pages that existed in 2023 have vanished.

You might think the web is a fixed, permanent, and durable. Unfailing and everlasting. Nope. Swathes of its content are disappearing—either deleted or moved, or gone AWOL when whole websites disappear.

Even on Wikipedia, our beloved know-it-all, 11% of all its references are no longer accessible. At least 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.

Much the same effect is happening on social media. A fifth of tweets disappear from the site within months of being posted. (Which might not be a bad thing.)

In sum, vast amounts of news and important reference content are disappearing. Gone forever. Forgotten.

But God does not forget, despite what the world thinks.

He [the wicked] says to his heart, “God has forgotten;
He has concealed His face; He will not see in perpetuity.”
[The righteous says:] Arise, Yahweh; God, lift up Your hand;
do not forget the afflicted.
Psalm 10:11–12

He has not forgotten the wailing of the afflicted.
For the needy one will not be forgotten in perpetuity.
Psalm 9:12, 18

Do not give to the wild beast the soul of Your turtledove;
the life of Your afflicted do not forget permanently.
Psalm 74:19

This God doesn’t forget; he remembers!

With mercy:

And He, being compassionate, forgave iniquity and did not destroy,
and often turned back His anger and did not stir all His wrath.
And He remembered that flesh they were,
a wind that passes and does not turn back.
Psalm 78:38–39

With love and faithfulness:

Sing to Yahweh a new song, for He has done wonders;
His right hand and His holy arm have accomplished deliverance for Him. …
He has remembered His lovingkindness and His faithfulness to the house of Israel;
all the ends of the earth have seen the deliverance of our God.
Psalm 98:1, 3

And so …

The righteous will be remembered forever.
Evil tidings he will not fear;
his heart is steadfast, trusting in Yahweh.
Psalm 112:7

Yahweh—He has remembered us; He will bless; …
He will bless the ones who fear Yahweh, the small with the great.
Psalm 115:12–13

SOURCE: The Independent; Pew Research Center