David Dylan Thomas questions the popular assertion that Internet content will be stored forever:

We assume that formats like .jpg (that picture of you doing a kegstand) or .mp3 (that ill-advised phone message you left at 3am) or — I won’t even pick a video format since they change every week — will be here forever because they’ve been around as long as we can remember consumer-friendly digital information. But the odds that your Facebook page will still be here in ten years — or will be readable in ten years — while not terrible, probably aren’t as good as you think.

His larger point is that digital information has to be stored somewhere. Old information often has to be converted at a cost. While reasonably current information has a value to market researchers, of what value is a 10-year old Facebook update? Perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, we’ll store our own information, but there’s some reason to question the notion that someone benevolent force out there will keep track of our digital lives for us for free.