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.