The internet as a medium

Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/

Was it thought? Wasn't it meant to be a way to display documents and content? Or am I getting confused with Internet 1.0?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web as a platform that could facilitate collaboration and the sharing of ideas among scientists around the world. The web was designed to be an open, free, and universally accessible system where information could be linked to other information in a non-hierarchical and decentralized manner. It was this idea of a global and accessible information network, allowing users not only to read but also to create and share content, that laid the foundation of the modern internet we use today.

Source: ChatGPT

This messaging then was not one-to-one but rather one-to-many.

Thr web is both a messaging system and a library. A platform for communication, that also serves as a vast repository of information.

Hyperlinking makes it possible to navigate this repository in a non-linear and decentralized way, effectively interconnecting ideas and content.

Although libraries are ephemeral when considered in a large enough time scale. Like the article points out with the famous example of the library of Alexandria, which was active for seven hundred years.

For pragmatic purposes, and considering the scale of a lifetime, they are permanent.

The web, on the other hand, is constantly changing. Content comes and goes. Some types of content are very short lived, the half-life of a tweet is only 24hs (citation required, trust me bro). Others forms live longer. Some never die. Some never live, if content is published to the internet but nobody consumes it, was it ever published?

To me that description is more akin of a living organism than of a library or a message system.

Note to self: search for book/article on the internet as a living organism and or architecture (ie. buildings) as living organisms (can't remember where I read about such metaphor nor if it was about one thing, the other, or connecting both?)