What I got out of reading this is that to be careful how to save online citations although online tools like the wayback machine offer a way to securely save your citations they can’t always save the what all websites in the world wide web looked like at a certain time. The reason being that the wayback machine mostly saves what high profile websites looked like also they need to get more servers if they do wanna cover every single website. The only secure alternative I think would be approved by more people as an online citation is if we take screen shots of resource and add it as an extension of our citation just in case.
Tag Archives: archive.org
The Wayback Machine and a bias in the Digital Age.
When I first saw the title of “The Cobweb” by Jill Lepore I couldn’t even imagine what it was alluding to, once I read the article I realized that it was talking about how fragile web pages are. I never knew that the average life of a webpage was hundred days, like the article stated I always thought these web pages lasted forever. Don’t get me wrong not everything on the web is worth saving but a major event like Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shouldn’t disappear. So I was relieved to read of Brewster Kahle’s Wayback Machine at archive.org, the Wayback Machine releases a web crawler that makes a copy of almost every web page and is then saved in San Francisco at 300 Funston Avenue. Like it or not these web pages are our time capsules and they are an important piece of the information cycle that should be preserved.
“The Reading Brain in the Digital Age” by Ferris Jabr is an article which compares the tangible book to the intangible book (E-readers and tablets). From the very beginning the article seems to have a bias against E-readers and tablets, most of the research that is referenced seems to favor books. I remember my mom reading me books when I was little; I grew up on tangible pages so I too share the same bias. The next generation is growing up paperless so reading a tangible book will be foreign to them, they will most likely have a bias against tangible books. They will more likely approach screens with a serious attitude for learning. The article even realize this when it states”……her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of the older generations”. So I wonder if I still would have the same bias against screens if my mother was swiping pages with her finger instead of flipping them.