Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
Being in the public eye, with the Internet - it's scary. You can put out too much, and it becomes a part of the pie chart of who you are. Things stick. And they never go away.
The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.
With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.
We have persistant objects, they're called files.
Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.
I tell young people all the time, and now I'm telling anyone, no matter what your age: You can't take back the stuff you put out there on Twitter and Facebook, even e-mails.
Twitter does have an effect on everything - things you put out there, they are out there for good.
People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.
A sexy selfie can be incredibly empowering - but remember that, while a Snapchat message might expire, nothing on the Internet truly disappears.
When you upload a picture of your delicious Caesar salad to Instagram, you don't realize that what you're doing is leaving a tiny little footprint that will be there forever. This seems to be a human impulse.
Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.
I don't think people realize the risks they face every time they create a text, or post on a social network. Unless you expressly make the effort, everything you do online, including texting, has a shelf life of forever.
Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.
We're now seeing email that people thought they had deleted showing up as evidence in court. You can't erase email. As that becomes more commonly realized, people will be a little wiser about what they type.
Cool URIs don't change
I believe in the not-too-distant future, people are going to learn to trust their information to the Net more than they now do, and be able to essentially manage very large amounts and perhaps their whole lifetime of information in the Net with the notion that they can access it securely and privately for as long as they want, and that it will persist over all the evolution and technical changes.
