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scraps of paper

The Cost of the Eternal Recurrence of the Digital

Published December 24, 2007 by cgerrish

DVD Disk

There’s been some talk recently about creating permanent archives of personal digital content. I wrote a post recently about how the digital artifacts of our day might look exactly the same in 2,000 or 10,000 years. The digital doesn’t age the way the analog does. In 1999, NASA found that it couldn’t read the data from the 1975 Viking space probe– the formats were obsolete.

Then I read an article in the NY Times about the preservation of films and the cost of preserving digitally produced films. Turns out it’s much more expensive to preserve the digital. DVDs and hard drives require constant maintenance and care to assure the quality of the data. More than $200,000 per year to preserve the digital, under $1,000 per year for the analog. Once the data is messed up, there’s no good way to fix it. We can use digital techniques to fix analog films, but you throw away a scratched DVD.

The human ear can tolerate and compensate for analog distortion, but digital distortion is just plain creepy. A DVD that skips and smears images across the screen completely ruins any unfolding narrative. We’ve reduced the cost of producing films and music through digital technology, but have we also created a era of fragile data that will be entirely lost to future historians?

The analog can be lost and forgotten, left in an attic in poor conditions for years, and still tell us a story when it’s discovered. The digital is simply unplayable. DVDs and CDs start to break down after 30 years. There are claims that with archival treatment they can last up to 100 years. But without archival methods (freezing for instance) CD-ROT can cause a CD or DVD to start breaking down after a few years. The digital has the potential to be eternal, but it may end up being the most ephemeral of all.

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Erasure or Silence: Steve Gillmor and Rose Mary Woods

Published December 20, 2007 by cgerrish

Rose Mary Woods 

Coincidence? Rose Mary Woods erases 18 1/2 minutes of the Nixon tapes, Steve Gillmor claims that the 7 minutes of quiet at the beginning of a Gang de Gillmor podcast is meaningful silence. Will we ever know for sure if the silence was simply silence– or was erased on purpose.

 Steve Gillmor

Some think that Gillmor concisely explained attention and gestures during the missing minutes. Others believe that Gillmor has never recovered from his youthful dalliance with Nixon’s personal secretary Rose Mary Woods. While Gillmor was never able to reconcile himself to Woods’s politics, the heart wants what it wants. Since that time, erasure and silence have had a strange hold over Gillmor.You can judge for yourself by finding the Gang podcast on Facebook. Gillmor’s absence from the rest of the Internet is simply another example of his obsession with not speaking, not linking and recording silence (erasure). 

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Doris Lessing and the 7 Deadly Sins of the Network

Published December 11, 2007 by cgerrish

Bosch’s vision of gluttony

The digerati scoff at Doris Lessing’s Nobel speech for the sections that refer to the Internet and ‘computers.’ The Internet and computers haven’t made them dumb, therefore they haven’t made anyone dumb. While it’s certainly possible to do interesting work with the tools that computers and the network provide, Sturgeon’s law always applies. Why would it surprise anyone that a medium with so many inputs would contain a lot of crap. If the network didn’t contain a lot of crap, why would we need so many tools to filter it?

People Magazine is only published once a week, but on the Internet it’s possible to immerse oneself in celebrity gossip 24 hours per day. It’s possible to focus on one’s obsessions to the exclusion of the rest of the world. We sometimes call it the echo chamber. The network doesn’t require that we challenge ourselves, it’s happy to endlessly feed our gluttony. Do we even view it as gluttony? Do we think of it as one of the seven deadly sins? It’s a vision out of Dante, a machine that feeds itself, a hunger never sated. Is the Internet post-moral?

We laugh off an old lady’s comments about the Internet without really thinking through the deep rivers that run underneath. It’s as though we really believed that time started on January 1, 1970 at 12:00 GMT. (and that the Apocalypse is scheduled for January 19, 2038)

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Do Digital Artifacts Stand Outside the Stream of Time?

Published December 10, 2007 by cgerrish

Greek and Roman Rooms at the Metropolitan Museum

 The Metropolitan Museum’s new Greek and Roman section is a revelation. When looking at the work you are deeply impressed with the power of the classical forms. But the other thing you learn is the sculpture, that today is simple white marble, was painted to simulate human appearance. The effects of time have uncovered the classic form in the work.

I wonder how the digital artifacts are our time will be viewed in 2,000 years. Presuming the file formats can be properly decoded, time will have had no effect on them. Color won’t fade, text will be just as readable, layouts will be intact. No noses lost, no missing arms, no papyrus scrolls with faded writing.  The digital will appear dated by language, hairstyles, turns of phrase and clothing. But the viewable artifact will appear exactly the same in 2,000 years, or for that matter in 1,000,000 years.

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