A bit of irony re: that (not good) New York Times piece about how "We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel": The "defining" post being discussed here -- a Jezebel post containing unretouched and retouched images of Faith Hill from Redbook magazine -- no longer contains those pictures, since a change to the Kinja platform permanently disappeared the images. (Though it still of course has pictures for ads and chum.) You can still find them on various bottom-feeder aggregator blogs, at least for now until they disappear. But the "defining stunt" no longer contains what made it defining; as a piece of digital media, it has effectively ended.
This kind of linkrot and link decay is everywhere. Digital news companies and platforms break, go bankrupt, or just yolo their money away until they get bored. The publications and websites that shaped the Internet disappear into stray links that managed to survive, stray ProQuest articles no one will read, the dwindling memories of people who were there, and the theories and vibes of people looking for something to blame.
idk; it seems to me like news companies viewing their news product as ephemeral throwaway content might also be relevant to "the end of a digital media age," but what do I know, I just read and write it
Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you "the internet is forever."
On timescales that matter, the internet does not exist.
No no, you misunderstand. What they mean is, "forever" has been redefined to match the internet.
