Flow My Thoughts, The IT Professor Said

Fading Memories

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8730-2003Nov23.html

Article discussing the degree to which intellectual works displayed on the InterNet [particularly the WWW] are ephemeral, particularly those which have a Web-only presence. Since the mean lifespan of a Web page is 100 days, we risk serious losses in our institutional collective memory. While librarians have suggested one solution in the form of a permanent URL, this has not caught on. Web archives like the "wayback machine" catalogue 20 TB of data monthly, and just barely keep up; other solutions impose additional complexity.

Of course, there is a lot of evidence that forgetting is beneficial for a culture; perhaps it is for individuals also. For a dark fictional look at some offshoots of InterNet information dependency, real Killing Time, by Caleb Carr.