The thing about the internet is … it lasts forever.

Or it must seem that way for those who wish people would stop dredging up some social-media faux pas of theirs from four or five years ago.

The reality, says a key official at Google, is that we may be entering a new Dark Age, in terms of how much of this “eternal” information will be accessible in future, saying this could be “a forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century“.

All that information we are swimming in now? Future generations may be unable to access some huge fraction of it.

In the Guardian story linked (above), the author notes: “Researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, [but] the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.”

I can testify to that.

This blog goes back “only” seven years, but that has been a lifetime in web advancement.

This blog has come within an inch of disappearing because of constant shifts in the Word Press systems. As well as not paying the annual fee to the operators — a billing cycle I am expected to remember.

More evidence?

Pick any wikipedia file from the distant past — like, 2010 or earlier — and see how many of the footnoted hyperlinks already have gone dead.

I could invite you to do the same here. Many of the links put up, way back when, are equally broken.

As a newspaperman, I am alarmed at publications which no longer archive their products on microfilm (and many have given it up, over the past decade) — because their digital archive may be untouchable, sometime soon.

The National newspaper, for which I work, to my knowledge has never made hard copies of its editions, going back to the April 2008 launch, making it a strong candidate to be impossible to look at, decades from now.

The Google executive suggests that all the information we have stored digitally is at risk. He suggests printing out hard copies of your favorite photos, for example. Right now.

He also wonders how much history from this period, will be accessible, even compared to the 19th century — when leaders wrote letters that they left behind and are available to scholars.

(At least as interesting as the story are the comments — in which mostly tech-savvy readers argue what might still be saved and what is already gone.)

(The Dark Ages, referred to above, were the centuries in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, about 500 to 800 AD, when much of the knowledge of the ancients was lost forever.)

It may be a blessing that some huge percentage of the inane chatter of our era likely will disappear. But historians would rather wade through the irrelevant than be shut off. Indeed, many find more interesting the rambling of the common man than the chronicles of the powerful.

Some books and many stone inscriptions have already lasted centuries — because they are palpable. They can be held, turned over, examined.

Not so the internet, or your selfies, or this file. Our information, written on the wind, may be less likely to last than the ruins of ancient Rome.