With regard to persistence, I don't think you can argue that the scale of what can now practically be stored hasn't changed significantly. Given that a larger

With regard to persistence, I don't think you can argue that the scale of what can now practically be stored hasn't changed significantly. Given that a larger amount of information can now be stored easily, the economics of what is stored is different, and one would expect this would lead to the storage of more information over time. If you can store in a single HD what would have previously taken a large room, for a tiny fraction of the cost, the bar for storing the information vs. discarding it is much much lower. I also think it's not only storage, but searching of large datasets that's another reason that information changing over time. Again, if finding information in a large blob of data is easier and as discussed above, is much cheaper, then this will also lead to people storing information for later retrieval. As you say, the fact that all this storage is not networked together means that this information is now easily retrievable from anywhere, only intensifying the impact.