Question

"Is the net itself profoundly robust and immortal or is it the most ephemeral digital artefact of all?" Today, with so much more of our lives online, the question hits us more forcefully. Sometimes the internet has the memory of an elephant, and sometimes it's an amnesiac. I once went to an online archive and dug up a dispatch from my first-grade class that had appeared as a newspaper filler item in 1977. But there are comments posted to Facebook less than a year ago that have already melted into the ether. The same goes for music and motion pictures.

• A. And when a page survives, it isn't always legible.
• B. Physical media face their own struggles with obsolescence.
• C. And of course, every medium has an expiration date.
• D. Preservation is a constant war against decay, a war where the losses outnumber the victories and the victories are only temporary.
• E. Relatively recent YouTube videos have vanished, even as online archives overflow with palaeolithic public-access TV shows and other relics that once seemed lost.

Answer 1

Answer: (E)

Relatively recent YouTube videos have vanished, even as online archives overflow with palaeolithic public-access TV shows and other relics that once seemed lost.

Answer 2

The passage is about the net and whether it is immortal or ephemeral. The last line of the passage mentions how Facebook posts less than a year old have disappeared and the author says the same holds true for music and motion pictures. So the next line should be an extension of this idea of some things disappearing on the net and other old ones existing.

This is done by option E
Hence option E is the correct answer.