To go on with the story of the website I made in high school, it’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about the notion of impermanence on the internet. I worked so hard on this website, I spend so many hours thinking about it and developing it, and one day, it was gone, it had disappeared from the web. Why is that ? Because of my hosting services provider. When a webmaster didn’t log in during six months, the website was automatically deleted. Growing up, my passion dramatically fading away, I just let my website die. I did not want it to happen, not at all, and believe me it’s a strange feeling to lose something that represents so much but is only virtual. Few months of inattention and the death sentence was decided. I wish I could go back and at least copy few pages. That’s what’s so different with the internet. I have this bad habit to keep everything. I try to treat myself thank you but I still have many boxes filled with old stuff, the oldest must be my first drawings, that is to say... I couldn’t live without a attic. But no attic on the internet. I wasn’t able to save my cute little website from its digital death. I’ve been told every website leaves traces, that some people can have access to it, so I wonder where this cemetery is, how it looks like. All those obsolete websites… I just hope mine doesn’t rest next to some star sex tape withdrawn immediately from the web.

Anyway, my point is that people tend to think that the internet is more reliable than paper, that it can overcome time. But the internet is not another dimension. It’s just servers, wires, computers and systems. Material things that can fail.

Another aspect of the impermanence on the internet is the fact that websites can know a great success one day and be forgotten the day after. The choice is so huge, so many websites appear every day that the competition is raging. Moreover, contrary to press for instance, the internet is unquestionably updatable. Its content is changing all the time, that’s even what the internet users are mostly expecting a website to do. When I check a website, I always look at the date of the last post. A website seems to be pointless if it’s not updated – contrary to books, which by the way have been through the ages.