I don’t know that our history is disappearing more quickly because so much of it is now reported and recorded online, but maybe we had unrealistic expectations about new technologies defeating the wasting away of information. I would assume, on average, we collect and retain more info now than ever before. But the fraying of facts can only be kept at bay for so long–in our minds and in our machines. No matter how advanced the system, the system will eventually fail. From a post about the Arab Spring vanishing into the Twitterplex at MIT’s Technology Review:

“On 25 January 2011, a popular uprising began in Egypt that  led to the overthrow of the country’s brutal president and to the first truly free elections. One of the defining features of this uprising and of others in the Arab Spring was the way people used social media to organise protests and to spread news.

Several websites have since begun the task of curating this content, which is an important record of events and how they unfolded. That led Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, to take a deeper look at the material to see how much the shared  were still live. 

What they found has serious implications. SalahEldeen and Nelson say a significant proportion of the websites that this social media points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. 

In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.”