Last Friday, when I was bitching about repeating myself, Ryan Macklin brought this up:

To be fair, I often find myself revisiting old topics months or years later, with a new perspective. And because they’re old, either people have forgotten about it or new readers haven’t seen it. [E]ven when I tread the same ground as in past years, something will be new and new eyes will be on it.

This has stuck in my head, and I’ve been serious kicking around the repercussions of that idea.

You see, I’ve been on this here Internet for a very long time.¹ At first, the Internet was barely a “network” – more a collection of nodes that were available at random intervals. Once things collected into the World Wide Web, data (and the ability to access that data) became more permanent. You could put something on the Internet, and it would stay there. This was an amazing idea – anything in the world could be found, accessed, and referenced. It was the world’s biggest library, and you could always go to a place and find that information waiting for you.

Now, there’s so much data and information on the Internet that it’s become ephemeral. Instead of storing static data, it’s extremely dynamic, showing the latest of a particular thing. Twitter is a perfect example of this – blink, and an entire conversation can pass you by. You can go back and read posts, of course, but much of Twitter (for me, at least) is the crawl, watching the world go by in posts of 140 characters or less. It’s a social stock ticker, a whirlpool of quips, links, and thoughts that is always something new.

But for some reason, I still haven’t completely internalized the idea that other parts of the Internet work this way. The value of hyperlinks are that you can point to a previous page to provide context, but nowadays the page I point to today might be gone in a year, or radically changed. There’s a churn of content everywhere.

From a writing perspective, that’s good. This means that there’s always something to write about, even if you’ve written about it before. Content is moving to bite-sized and episodic – what once would have been a novel might now be a story in several parts. What would have been a movie becomes a web video series. And what would have been a dense manuscript of critical analysis becomes a series of irregular essays.

Again, on an intellectual level I understand this, but I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that past content can be future content. That’s the part that’s still odd to me.