I needed some information.
I thought I knew something, but I wanted to be sure. Double-check, if you like. So I was doing a web search but coming up with nothing helpful. And then, as is often the way, in the middle of doing something else altogether, I remembered where to look. The blog I used write for work – back in the day I used work for a wage – had the information I needed. I’d written it myself.
Next time I was on the Internet I went looking again. I thought it would be simple. Find the blog, enter the search term, get the result. Check for myself with myself. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, I wasted an awful lot of time before accepting the brutal but absolute fact that the blog no longer existed. It was gone – Pffftttt! – lost from cyberspace, lost to posterity.
I was taken aback. In fact, shocked would not be out of place in description. I didn’t feel anything on a big picture level, I just reacted at a very personal one. My work! All those words! Laboured over, crafted, chiselled, researched, edited, dusted, polished, drafted. All those pictures found. All those enticing headings. The tags. All that rejection and acceptance. Gone.
Not needed anymore.
Things had changed. Things had moved on.
And the World Wide Web had discarded what was no longer needed. Just as the person who finds the scrapbook in the cupboard and the notebooks in the drawers after death will. It would have been a simple execution really. Click, click, click and let’s pretend that never happened.
If I had given any thought to it at all, I realised I was labouring along in the belief that the Web was forever. That once something was posted there, there it would remain. That maybe, decades from now, somebody might find some of my words doing a Google search, read them, and know something that they didn’t know before.
I know, I’m embarrassed too.
And naive. And showing my age, yet again.
Nothing stays the same. The old goes out, suffocated by the new. The new masquerades as a friend at first, all pally and compatible and agreeable. But the job of the new is to replace, outdate, redo. Streamline. Meet the needs of the community. It must be better. Because it is new. Right?
I’ll get over it. It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything. Time has just marched on, as it should. It’s like life really.
When you’re gone, you’re gone. And soon nobody can even see where you’ve been.
RosieL
endgame 