Volatility of the Internetz

I like books. The problem is that I'm not a fast reader. I don't mean I have to sound out words or anything, I'm just easily distracted and lack focus much of the time when I try to read something. But I like books. I've bought them faster than I can read them ever since one summer in college. I bought four more this weekend at thrift stores in St. Louis. Four dollars, four books. A couple of times I've had to purge used books I had sitting on the shelves on in boxes because I realized I'd never get around to reading them...also I currently have 3 magazine subscriptions, at least one of which I'm probably going to allow to expire.

What does this have to do with the Internet? I've noticed in more and more magazine articles and current events-type books (global warming, politics) cite specific web articles as sources and references. I haven't gone and looked at these (literally) hundreds of urls, but a person has to wonder how long these references will remain valid. In the past, sources cited would be other books, or newspaper articles that a person could find in the library. Solid. Physical. Even microfiche was something a person could hold in their hand. Internet articles are fragile, volatile entities that may or may not be around tomorrow. I realize most major news outlets are going to archive their articles for future reference, but even those may change. Christopher C. Horner, in Red Hot Lies, makes note of global warming articles changed multiple times within 24 hours due to outside pressures, often without even a note recording the edit.

They say that whatever we put on the internet never really goes away. Even if I delete this post, it's supposedly archived on a server hard drive somewhere. Who knows? That could very well be. My inane ramblings preserved forever (hey, if this guy [http://blog.nbc.com/CreedThoughts/] can do it...).

I read an article online about a year ago (that I now can't find) about the exponential growth of information produced and saved and the need for new ways of saving it, but it's not all being saved. Anyone who has done an online search knows that some results will be a bad link because something has been taken down. I dealt with this last week when I was trying to find audio for a theology debate I know existed, but the first four or five links I tried yielded no results.

Short story long: I imagine a day when someone reads a book and wants to dig deeper, looking up the references cited, and can only find maybe half of the referenced articles because information stored as zeros and ones never required ink to touch paper.