Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling coined the term "dead media" in 1995 for a talk at a new media conference, as a way to remind technologists and marketers that their creations would not always endure. It was a time, just before the Internet took off, when a lot of creative effort was being put into CD-ROMs, a platform that was rapidly displaced by the Internet.

"Much of the new media in Sterling's time was an attempt to sell something and move on. Sterling came to speak against the new, new hotness, by pointing his audience to ... the obsolete, the dysfunctional, the has-been and never-was," Brunton said. 

Perhaps the canonical example of the dangers of dead media was the BBC's elaborate Domesday Book project, the results of which the corporation unwisely chose to place on LaserDiscs that ran only on Acorn Computers. 

The original Domesday book was a survey of England and Wales in the year 1086 to assess the land, owners and livestock in order to levy taxes. The BBC decided to re-render the book on LaserDisc in 1984, with new input from thousands of people.  

"It became virtually unreadable within less than two decades," Brunton said. The Acorn computer was not a successful platform, nor was the LaserDisc.