Digital fragility (I've made comments on this before https://lnkd.in/eCGzFPzv ) is not new, but today's signal, relating to CNET removing old articles from the web connected some new dots across the signals and the threads that bind them.
Firstly, the fact that reams of - even quality - data is removed, wiped, discarded from our collective digital memories every day should give us pause for thought. Your Facebook family photo albums are not more forever than your Flickr (remember that?) ones were. Your digitised company data is one malwear attack or clumsy data wipe away from eternal loss. Digital is fragile (centrally controlled cloud based digital has its own vulnerabilities). We take it for granted that the blog post we shared yesterday will be there tomorrow, but censors, governments, web admins, search algorithms and individuals can erase and replace what was in ways that not even the wayback machine can retrieve.
Secondly, and more interestingly to me, is the reason why CNET removed its once valuable content : in order to please and dance for the latest Google search algorithm updates which now preference and new and fresh over the old and (according to the bots, less important) . Imagine changing yourself - erasing your past - to please a changeable piece of code. Imagine a society that believes that the new is so much better than the old that the old should not exist at all.
How fragile are we?
How fragile when we rely on changeable, erasable digital data. How fragile to believe - or at least act like - only the new matters.
What are your thoughts on playing the dancing monkey to the whims of your digital algorithmic overlords in exchange for likes and clicks and attention?
How poorly do you value yourself (or your business or your content) that you are happy to erase what you were proud of yesterday to be "relevant" today?
How dumb are we as a society to give attention and credibility to algorithms that value us and our heritage so poorly?
What is all this recency and attention bias doing to our collective wisdom and individual brains?
How can you and your business stop playing the zero-sum algorithmic popularity game and start playing a different game on more human terms driven by value and values rather than made up metrics?
What does the outsize asymmetric power balance here say about economic and political inequality? And if we don't like the answers, how are we deliberately resisting the trend?
Let us know.
Read more:
The past is a foreign country : https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23826342/cnet-content-pruning-deleting-articles-google-seo
One of the very first articles I wrote for Flux Trends predicting some of this: https://fluxtrends.com/curated-information/
Disposable memories