NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: The disappearing web: Information decay is eating away our history
It's not just the Web, and much of it has nothing (directly) to do with technology.
I just finished reading a wonderful history of Bell Labs (The Idea Factory, by Jon Gertner). One of the things that made it possible to write this history - and helps bring it alive in quotations - is the availability of decades-old documents: Memos, notes of discussions, internal studies. We don't have to guess why Bell Labs spent many years pursuing millimeter-wave waveguide technology (which was all ultimately discarded in favor of fiber optics): We can read all the discussions.
Thirty years from now, if someone wants to write a history of how some startup came to be a giant, they will find very little. All the discussion was in e-mail or in other electronic forms - and all such discussions were discarded after a couple of years because of fear that it would end up in court. Ever since Microsoft's ordeal before a court as message after embarrassing internal message was entered into the public record, the universal recommendation of corporate attorneys is to establish a document destruction policy and engage in it consistently. In the Apple/Samsung trial, it emerged the Samsung's email system was configured to purge mail after a very short time (something like 2 weeks) unless an employee deliberately saved it.
When documents were on paper, the task of searching through and indexing huge numbers of them was so daunting as to be impractical. (Companies being sued in fact made it a practice to over-deliver documents, knowing their adversaries would have trouble finding the relevant data in all the junk.) Back when the US Department of Justice sued IBM for anti-trust, CDC joined in with a private lawsuit. Apparently CDC had the technological wherewithal - and forward-looking lawyers - to create a computer index of the blizzard of documents that IBM delivered. One morning, it was announced that IBM and CDC had settled. DoJ learned to their chagrin that the settlement included the requirement that CDC immediately destroy its index - and by the time the announcement came out, the index was gone.
Today, everything is digital and the courts have required that it be delivered in standardized, machine-readable formats unless you can show that's impractical. (Yes, for there were companies that, when ordered to produce records they kept electronically, printed them out and delivered paper by the truckload. They can no longer do that.) All this is great from the point of view of the court system - but a side effect will be for us to have a very impoverished view of our own history. Ironic, given that we now have a much better ability to preserve and usefully access this history than we ever did in the past!
-- Jerry
_______________________________________________
nnsquad mailing list
http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad