It's not clear who coined this term, but I heard it first from Emma Sadleir when she told me and a number of parents that it's better to put your dubious comments on a sign over the highway than post it on the internet. "The sign," she told us, "will be taken down, the internet does not get taken down." In other words it's there for ever.
This is probably relevant to social media that backs up its content to multiple servers all over the world. It's not true for my blog.
Yes I had a blog on the internet once. It was up for 19 years. And it was a great body of work. Some of it is on this blog and I have all the written content which will be posted up on another blogger site at some stage. It was in excess of 2000 posts, mostly about black economic empowerment. People knew me because of the blog.....
And now it's gone. In effect I have gone. I don't exist. Google does not know about me at all. Typepad closed down and switched off their servers. They did give me a month or so to extract the content. I got all the words but I didn't save the pictures. That's all gone.
Do I still exist on the internet, I do. The most active site is LinkedIn, and I'm not that active on it really. I don't do Facebook because I don't care how fantastic my old school friends' lives are. I do have a Facebook profile but it's largely inactive. I do like the Marketplace though. I exist on Twitter (that's how long ago I was on it) and I think that's about it.
I don't exist and the internet does not remember me. I'm strangely okay with it. I don't require the publicity anymore.
The internet does forget and it will forget when it makes no commercial sense for the large content providers to retain the information. It will take longer for the bigger social media platforms to disappear.
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