When The Digital World Makes It Difficult To Remember

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death. His passing is a celebrity death I can remember exactly where I was when I got the news. More significantly, it was the first celebrity death that genuinely floored me. Sometimes it still does. Prince seemed mysterious and eternal. He wasn’t supposed to fall into the trap of using opioids to manage pain that lead to an accidental death like far too many in this country.

I went back and read some of what I wrote at the time. The post that jumped out at me was this one, where I shared a series of other great posts about Prince’s life and influence. I found it interesting because, just ten years later, over half the links are dead.

Websites have failed, been gobbled up in mergers, or moved to different locations. In most cases a little searching will find each piece in its new home.[1]

That temporal nature of web links highlights why Prince, and any artist who makes physical art, is so important. Their work lasts forever. You can delete your collection of MP3s, your hard drive can fail, a streaming service can go out of business, but the actual music lives on, recorded, published, and/or stored on some kind of physical media. If someone waved a magic wand and made digital music files obsolete, we could still, with some work and investment, rebuild the libraries of our favorite songs.

Web content? Not so much. Sure, projects like the Internet Archive work to document everything that gets published onto the web. But that is an imperfect solution. We’ve lost so much of the best of the web.

Maybe that helps explain why we can remember lyrics and melodies to obscure songs that are 50 years old we listened to on repeat on vinyl, but we can’t remember the article we read about the transfer portal 20 minutes ago?

Anyway, I recommend reading through the links that are still alive on my original post. Anil Dash, author of one of those dead links – which still lives on his site under a slightly different URL – put together a collection of his many Prince-related posts in his own 10th anniversary remembrance.

I hope Prince is still resting in peace, content knowing what a lasting impact he made on so many of our lives.

Purple Links