As much as we'd like to think that with the internet, suddenly things are never going to be erased and it's a permanent record of history... imagine one day, all we have are secondary records of something called 'Facebook'. Or 'MySpace'. The internet, if anything, is far more ephemeral, and with Flash officially being killed as a medium, that leaves a select few old websites, if their servers are still running, about as good as dead. <br><br>Things get destroyed all the time. Sometimes on purpose (see Yes Minister and the many convenient floods), and sometimes on accident (see link rot). There's an xkcd about this, though I don't remember, about storage mediums, and books/microfiche technically are still the best way we have of preserving something. Heck, with new OSes disregarding backwards compatibility, especially on phones, many applications simply don't work anything, though that might be more to blame on the developer's side. I bet most "apps" that we see today will be lost to history, forgotten faster than living memory, and we'd have little way of communicating/preserving these ephemeral media except in secondary sources like books and journal articles, which will ultimately mystify the future generation as to how we could spend hours every day staring at our phones, while we're still laughing at the Romans taking the advice of headless chicken as if word of law.