Do We Need the Internet?

I just finished reading a story which has gotten me more excited than anything I have seen online in I don’t know how long. It’s a summary of a new report from the Pew Research Center, which basically says that more old content is disappearing from the internet than new content is being added, to the point that total internet content, including social media posts, is in a serious state of decline.

As someone who writes and posts more than 1,500 words every day on an aggregate blog, you would think that such a report would fill me with dread. To the contrary, I’m not only pleased by this information published by Pew but can only hope that the diminution of the web’s importance as a communication device will not only continue, but actually increase.

The Pew study is based on a random collection of roughly one million web pages published between 2013 through 2023, and Pew not only counted the number of pages which have disappeared during this ten-year period, but also counted broken links and deleted content on pages which are still online.

In sum, all three categories showed significant increases with nearly 40% of the pages counted in 2013 having disappeared over the course of the following ten years.

As for social media, the Pew researchers found that 20% of the tweets on X-Twitter were deleted within several months after…