From Steve Wilson
Your rather wonderful feature “The next wave” (14 May, p 30) listed technologies predicted to be big in the next decade and suggested what a “lexicon of tomorrow” might contain.
How about shifting your suggestion of “digital litter” to the lexicon of today, as a useful term for the many websites that can be accessed long after the businesses, societies or clubs that created them have become defunct and their contact details obsolete.
Just now I checked and, sure enough, a personal website created by an old acquaintance is still running 10 years after he died, with no mention of the fact that its creator is not going to be answering any emails.
Given that many older websites had unchanging static content, the code and files that create the pages are so small that many internet service providers cannot be bothered to clear them out, and free services such as Facebook are also unlikely to remove pages unless someone tells them that they are now just digital litter.
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• The editor writes:
Of course, one man’s litter could be another’s legacy, as mentioned in Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s recent look at efforts to archive the digital records of those no longer with us (23 April, p 41).
London, UK
