The Internet Is Dead, And So Are You.

Ever trawled through your old 'net favourites list? One theme always prevails, that of decay, death and deprival. Websites that no longer update, that just were left indefinitely by their owners, forums with the last post dated nearly a year ago, where you refrain from logging in to avoid disturbing the dust, and so on and so forth. A huge portion of the internet is essentially dead. Life and activity flourish for short periods of time when a site has interest and can attract visitors, but as its purpose expires or other new interests drain the attention it was once given, it slows, stalls, and thoughts of it gradually cease to exist. However, due to the ever-living immortality of computers, the site itself cannot die and be truly forgotten, it is condemned to an eternal life of inactivity and staleness. Coming upon such a site brings such an odd feeling, a place once thriving now lays empty and unloved, but unlike traditional reality would have us believe, there is no collapse and ruin, rather an eerie moment frozen in time, as perfectly preserved as the day it was abandoned. Of course, everything dies eventually, even in the digital dreamworld, as old and obsolete machinery is unceremoniously severed from the community and replaced by superior new equipment, but equipment that lacks the forgotten heritage of the pages on the elder server. Maybe this is a fitting release for these stores of thoughts left behind in the flow of time, not even deleted but just cut off from all access to the outside world. Thoughts is what they are, do not forget that this whole universe online is created entirely by individual minds expressing themselves, whether it be in art, text or other. Thoughts are forgotten, but these live on in eternal solitude. Dead forums, blogs or even plain old pages contain casual expressions of opinion, many of them yours or mine, beliefs that may no longer be held or thoughts you wish weren't shared, but it cannot be altered, it remains a solid untouchable history of what you were, an archive of some part, some form, some character of yourself expressed briefly on that screen, or another's emotion borne out in bits and bytes. Some past part of yourself is there, not you any more, but lost and drowning in the river of the past, to be fossilized in the mud and remain everpresent and unknown, for ever and ever and ever and ever and...

Eternally.