Archive Fever: Enduring Ephemerality

Digital-specific techniques of conservation are still in their infancy. The oldest digital files currently preserved date back less than half a century: a mere drop in the bucket from the standpoint of cultural record.

(Schnapp, 2016)

The very fragility of digital data and Internet sites, the fact that digital content is so prone to disappearance and loss, means that no Internet archive should be regarded as a structure that will last into perpetuity. Most, if not all, digital archives that currently exist will not survive into the next century.

(Kosnik, 2016)

Digital media is not always there. We suffer daily frustration with digital sources that just disappear. Digital media is degenerative, forgetful, erasable.

(Chun, 2008)

(...) digital storage media at first appeared to be archivists’ ideal solution to the degradation of paper, but then turned out itself to be highly degradable. After Lesk’s talk came a report by Paul Conway (1996) (...), which pointed out, “Information in digital form—the evidence of the world we live in—is more fragile than the fragments of papyrus found buried with the Pharaohs,” because “the permanence, durability, and stamina of newer recording media” have declined steadily over the course of the twentieth century, making the digital age one in which we have “information density” but few options for permanently preserving that information and keeping it accessible.

(Kosnik, 2016)

Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.

(Chun, 2008)

Other media do not have a memory, but they do age, and their degeneration is not linked to their regeneration. This crisis is brought about also because of the blind belief in digital media as memory.

(Chun, 2008)

The Internet, the World Wide Web, and desktop and mobile digital telecommunications devices comprise a system of networked computing that is often framed as a giant memory machine, a comprehensive and infinitely expansive archive, which automatically saves users’ posts and emails; the sites they have visited; and the text, image, and video content they have uploaded, downloaded, emailed, or blogged/reblogged/tweeted/pinned/tagged.

(Kosnik, 2016)

However widely the myth of the automatically archival Internet has spread over the past seventy years, the fact is that the system of networked computing utterly fails as a memory machine.

(Kosnik, 2016)

'Acidified paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic light attacked by light, heat, humidity or dust' all assault archives. 'Floods, fires, hurricanes, storms, earthquakes' and of course, 'acts of war, bombardment and fire, whether deliberate or accidental' wiped out significant portions of many hundreds of major research libraries worlwide. When expanding the scope to consider public, private and community libraries, that number becomes uncountable.

(Dockray and Foster, 2018)

The current historical moment, they argue, may be a “digital dark age,” a time of which future generations will have scant records, owing to the short lifespans of our current digital platforms, devices, and applications (as compared to the lifespans of older technologies, such as paper).

(Kosnik, 2016)

(...) digital data is so prone to disappearance that constant intervention is required to refresh data storage and keep it retrievable. At the least, data must be migrated to new servers when old servers cease to function optimally. Also, the rental costs of server rack space must be paid, ownership of website URLs must be renewed, sites should be mirrored (redundancy is one of the best methods for staving off accidental data disappearance), and when a lead archivist decides to quit her archival responsibilities, she should recruit her replacement(s) and oversee the smooth transition of the archive into new hands.

(Kosnik, 2016)

(…) if digital objects and practices do not remain accessible long enough to be thoroughly understood by the society that produces them, there may be no digital cultural memory at all.

(Kosnik, 2016)

(...) technical accidents like disk failures, accidental deletions, misplaced data and imperfect data migrations, as well as political-economic accidents like defunding of the hosting institution, deaccesioning parts of the collection and sudden restrictions of access rights.

(Dockray and Foster, 2018)

(...) digital cultural memory means cultural memory that lives in and as digital media (…)

(Kosnik, 2016)

So one can say that digital culture has no “passive storing memory”, because that passive memory differs for each individual. The culture as a whole cannot clearly define what lies fallow as “archive,” as opposed to what is activated, living, in “repertoire,” or “canonical,” for every member of that culture.

(Kosnik, 2016)

They have collectively proclaimed that the Internet and computers do not constitute the greatest archive in human history, but rather the reverse.

(Kosnik, 2016)

(...) it is uncertain whether any digital artifacts produced over the past twenty-five years will remain; but it is very likely that much of the current digital repertoire will still be in use, albeit modified to adapt to new device types.

(Kosnik, 2016)

The conditions of use and access that [digital materials] enable may make it possible for everyone from high schoolers to local historians to become archive builders and archival researchers. But, for the very same reasons, digital assets are volatile […] Every burial ground needs to be cared for continuously if it is to endure.

(Schnapp, 2016)

(...) so much selecting-out is already executed by the ephemeral properties of digital data and the proclivity for forgetting in digital culture. The propensity of data to disappear or to become unfindable, which stems simultaneously from technological affordances and information abundance, is so great that universal archives define victory as the accumulation of preserved data. (...) In volume lies their victory.

(Kosnik, 2016)