Dumb is good II: Descending further into Idiocracy

One of the great features, benefits and overarching promises of the Interwebs was its unlimited archiving capacity.

You didn't have to go to the library to read whatever back issues they had; websites -- particularly news and information websites -- could offer easy access to past issues and/or articles with relative ease. And often for free.

Now there's this:

U.S. News deletes archived web content published before 2007

The reason?

"A new content management system ... could not effectively keep archived web content published prior to 2007 on our site."

As with the ninny in my first "Dumb is Good" post, the decision-makers at U.S. News & World Report are proving to be exceptionally poor gatekeepers of their site and of seminal web standards themselves.  Their actions, certain to be copied and mimicked "because everybody else is doing it," degrade high standards and quality.

In this case, the magazine has chosen to essentially whitewash history for the sake of economics. Editors say the content will be available on Lexus-Nexus, but the cost of that is prohibitive for the masses.

Combined with the apparent upcoming loss of Net Neutrality, the so-called "democratization" of information is taking hit after hit. And with the degradation of the written word championed by the Abraham Hyatts of the world, we're seeing less and less of the Information Highway and more of what it has turned into today: the Information Stupidhighway.