(This is also demonstrated with the title text.) As the frames continue, they gain the appearance of images which have been screenshotted repeatedly, with a resulting loss of quality due to compression of the original resolution and JPEG artifacting. In addition, as technology advances, the method to save or call the information changes and the medium to view it changes, occasionally causing misinterpreted information. However, in this comic, Randall points out that while digital information itself doesn't need to degrade, things that are on the Internet are often degraded through copying when the copy is not a 1:1 copy or changes are deliberately introduced. While physical media themselves (such as books, or hard drives) and information stored by analog means may degrade as the universe continues, digital information as expressed by specific values, such as combinations of binary zeros and ones, does not decay over time and can be copied indefinitely with no changes.

Title text: â€œIf you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!ĭigital information has the potential to be copied such that the copy is 100% identical to the original.

Xkcd data dredging