User:ThomasW/thesis Outline

SPELLING AND GRAMMAR MISTAKES EXIST, NOT 100% PROOF-READ

Save & Forget

“It matters because we live in media, as fish live in water.” - Ted Nelson (Wardrip-Fruin, 2003, p306)

As a society we always seem to be looking for a new technical solution for knowledge and information storage and for this, we hope there is one magic, final solution that will solve every issue. But easy solutions create their own problems. The perceived view of the stable nature of digital information differs from reality. Problems like old physical formats, lost or non functional machine's, companies that go bankrupt, file formats with no support in the future, changing user license are just some of the many points of failure. It seems the more technical the technology gets, the more problems it creates. Jennifer Gabrys writes in her book, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics: “ Much of the technology in the museum or archive of electronic history is inaccessible, however: ancient computers do not function, software manuals are unreadable to all but a few, spools of punch tape separate from decoding devices, keyboards and printers and peripherals have no point of attachment, and training films cannot be viewed. Artefacts meant to connect to systems now exist as hollow forms covered with dust. In this sense, the electronic archive can be seen as a “museum of failure.” (Gabrys, 2007, p64)

This thesis will explore if there is any such thing as a perfect storage technology. Has there ever been a perfect solution for human memory? This thesis is the result of broad research done over two years into the topic of memory storage at The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, its a research topic I stared while working on a project during my Bachelor.

I have written this thesis in a way that makes it easier for people less familiar with the subject to understand the topic. Although there are many academic texts on the discourse of archives and memory in media theory today. I want to focus on the “individual” and not on the governmental and institutional aspects of this topic.

In the first chapter “Ink, Photography and Bytes” where I will explain a bit the history of storage mediums, from The Library of Alexandria to the invention of microfilm to today with digital storage mediums and how there has always have been a promise of the “better solution”. In the second chapter “The Cloudy Industrial Complex I will be looking at what the «cloude» its effect on how we store our information and what risks we are taking by relaying on a third party. In the last chapter «My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart» I will be looking at how people are dealing with the where and how are storing our information and how we are dealing with our data.

Chapter One

Ink, Film and Bytes

“The media of the present influence how we think about the media of the past or, for that matter, those of the future.” (Kittler, 1999, p xxi)

One of the first, and best known, repository of knowledge in ancient times is the Library of Alexandria. It is most famous for burning down. It was the first collection of books and texts from more then one country and consisted of mostly Egyptian, Greek and Roman texts. The growth of the collection can be attribute to local law that stated that all new arrivals had to hand over their written texts so they could be copied.

“It was as much a political decisions as it was an ideal of knowledge sharing. Fernando Beaz wrote in his book The History of the Destruction of Books, about the link between government and its libraries: “We have to remember that museums and libraries were closely linked to the nation’s power structure, so when they were burned to the ground, silence legitimized the catastrophe.” (Baez, 2008, p2)

The collection in Alexandria was not concentrated in one central location, but was distributed between different warehouses all around the city, most of which where at the docks in Alexandria, close to the ships from which the collection came from. “There was a huge investment in labour, and a whole system was in place to feed skilled labour to the library and its infrastructure and upkeep. “The copying and classification of texts was the labor of entire generations educated according to the methodical axiom of the peripatetic school” (Baez,2008,p46)

As the library was a part of a larger power structure, it was naturally a target for those opposed to the current political system. Contrary to popular belief, it did not burn down once. Its destruction happened over time, from around the year 145 BC to its last big conflagration in the year 642 AD.

The suspected culprits of these burnings where many, and still unknown to this day, but the main culprits accused have included everyone from the Romans, Christian rebels oppose the ruling Egyptian powers, earthquakes and economical collapse. As it was part of the state system, different ruling powers may have had different opinions on the importance of the library. The main format for recording texts in ancient Egypt was papyrus, it was cheaper to record on papyrus then clay tables, even through the papyrus was less durable. Baez points out: “Nowadays there are no examples of Greek papyri prior to the fourth century BCE. In fact , despite the labor of libraries and the widespread book business of the Hellenistic era, texts on papyrus not recopied or copied onto codisc were lost.” (Baez,2008,p88) The fact is that it was cheaper to make, made papyrus the dominate format of recording, the quality or durability was not the main concern of the user at that time. This made it, as Beaz writes, a real concern from the monks in the ancient times: “paper was introduced during the ninth or tenth centuries, and the first paper found there is of the oriental type (called bombykinon or bambakeron). The fact that is was cheaper than other material gradually gave it ascendancy, but its rapid deterioration was a matter of great concern to the monks.” (Baez,2008,p95)

If one compares the Library of Alexandria with today, we can see similarities, the archive and library are still institution, run by governments and they still sometimes burn in time of conflicts, like the bombing, burning and looting of the The National Library in Baghdad in Iraq during the last Iraq War.

Microfilm

John B. Dancer invented microfilm in 1839 which compared to collection of printed books, prove to be a space saving endeavour, but the main use of microfilm as an archive medium was not fully grasped before Paul Otlet started using it for his library. Paul Otlet, a 19th century utopian, an inventor, peace activist and Internationalist with a firm belief in building a new world based in pacifism and progressive ideals through spreading universal knowledge. This was a response to the political landscape of his day, with rising nationalism throughout Europe.

He invented the universal decimal classification system for libraries, together with lawyer and president of the International Peace Bureau Henri La Fotaine. By using this system he wanted to advance the human progress through sharing information. The system was made from paper index cards, colour coded and filed in custom-made drawers. Otlet was thinking how in the future it would be possible to combine different mediums, he is quoted saying: “Phonographs, radio, television, telephone — these instruments taken as substitutes for the book will in fact become the new book, the most powerful work for the diffusion of human thoughts. This will be the radiated library, and the televised book.” (Truefilms, 2007, Online)

After Otlet, more people and companies started using microfilm as an easy way of storing and spreading information, often with the idea that the paper archive was turning into dust and need to be migrated over to this new format of microfilm. The notion of paper archive turning into dust and was obsolete was one of the stories being retold and it was urgent to move them over to microfilm. In contrast, Paul Otlet said often that one must not “discard printed documents”, was for him the original was as important, microfilm was only a way of distributing knowledge. The notion was that microfilm would preserve the content better than paper, as there was a notion that paper archives where turning into dust. The process involved was itself a destructive, as the book was cut open by removing the spine in order to be photographed. The truth is that it was mostly a marketing point from the manufactured and sellers of microfilm. The truth is that paper archives were not turning to dust, and the destructing was the process of putting the paper originals on microfilm. As Silverman points out: “The vast majority of original American newspapers from the 1870s on has been destroyed and replaced by microfilm —appears to be correct.” (Silverman Silverman , 2015, p370) and in 2015 Nora Kathleen wrote in the Newspaper Research Journal on the topic of microfilm and newspaper archives and what's happening with the microfilm archives today.

“Microfilm was declared the saviour of newspaper preservation, and by 1946 the Bell & Howell Company made the filming of newspapers a major part of its business. But microfilm poses its own preservation problems. Acetate-based film, which was used up until the 1980s, deteriorates when not stored at the proper humidity and temperature, resulting in the loss of information captured on the film. In most cases, the original issues from which the acetate microfilm was made were discarded” (Kathleen, Nora, 2015, p292)

Now it seems that the decision to transferee the newspaper to microfilm was too optimistic for a long term solution, as microfilm deteriorates just as normal film. It is subject to “vinegar syndrome”. The National Film Preservation Foundation in American explains what vinegar syndrome is: “…a pungent vinegar smell (hence the name), followed eventually by shrinkage, embrittlement, and buckling of the gelatine”(The National Film Preservation Foundation, 2015, Online)

MEMEX

30 years after Otlet, the American Vannevar Bush came up with his concept of the MEMEX. The MEMEX was a concept for information storing and retrieval. Bush was an American inventor and engineer, he headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War Two.

He wanted to use new technology being developed make sense of the information explosion of the time, and to make it easier to deal with. The editor of The Atlantic wrote this about Bush and the MEMEX:“For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. ”(Bush, 1945, Online)

The MEMEX was supposed to be a device that would store books, records and other forms of communication into a mechanical device. What we now will be calling a computer, but envisioned before the invention of the microchips and it will all be connected by providing “links” between the content. Bush describe the function of the MEMEX in his essay As We May Think “Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.”(Bush, 1945, Online)

When he came up with the idea, the world was just done with WW2, and he wanted to change and enlighten people with information by making use of the advancements of the new technology just been developed, “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”(Bush,1945,Online)

During and following WW2 there was a large build-up of the military industrial complex. Bush worked projects like the Manhattan Project and on other military systems. As an anti-fascist, Bush wanted to help the struggle against Hitler under WW2,but after the war finished the world changed and he found himself in a position in the Cold War.

He wanted to create a new from of mechanical information retrieval system, a system that made it possible to retrieve and store all types of information such as text, sound and images; something that for him would make access to information better than the traditional paper-based archive. The MEMEX was envisioned right before the microprocessor and was using the current day technologies like microfilm and vacuum tubes, and it was intended to be put inside a machine the size of an office desk.“In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the MEMEX is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.”(Bush, 1945, Online)

The MEMEX was never built, but it did inspire psychologist, computer scientist and early pioneer of cybernetics J.C.R Licklider. Licklider foresaw the future of the computer, and the internet and, like Bush, wanted to change society for the better with the help information technology; that in the future man and computer will be one. Katie Hafner, writes in Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, “is that in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled . . . tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”(Hafner, 1998, p22)

Bush and his work also inspired engineer, and early Internet pioneer, Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, the graphical user interface, video calling and file sharing. He is most known for his public demonstration of his inventions, in what have been called “The Mother of all demos” in December 1968 at the Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Bush also inspired Ted Nelson. Nelson that was a pioneer in the field of information technology and developed the concept of hypermedia with Project Xanadu. An early concept for something that would later be named the Internet. What all these individuals had in common was that they wanted to create a new society based on connectivity and feedback by the means of the new field of “Cybernetics” Cybernetics is an idea that took hold after WW2 discipline of treating everything as a system, a system that can be regulated and controlled with the help of technology.

Bytes

Not before the late 1970s and the rapid commercialisation of the computer to private individuals, through the development of the personal computer, did the issue of personally generated information on digital formats became a topic. Before this, the users of these technologies were large companies and institutions.

In contrast to Paul Otlet and his Mondeum, which was an institution, in the 1970s mass storage of information was moving into people’s private homes. But the issues that institutions had been struggling with followed. Katie Hafner describes digital information as: “Unlike analog systems, digital technologies essentially convert information of all kinds, including sound and image, to a set of 1s and 0s.” (Hafner, 1998, p37)

The nature of digital information compared to printed, is that its not fixed, is always being copied from one place to another, there is no “original file”, where as in photography there is one negative, one original. By moving a document for one place to another, its existence is copied. Henry Warwick, writer and assistant professor at the RTA School of Media at Ryerson University in Toronto talks about the nature of digital information in his text Radical Tactics of the Offline Library: “Computers, by their nature, copy. Typing this line, the computer has copied the text multiple times in a variety of memory registers. I touch a button to type a letter, this releases a voltage that is then translated into digital value, which is then copied into a memory buffer and sent to another part of the computer, copied again into RAM and sent to the graphics card where it is copied again, and so on. The entire operation of a computer is built around copying data: copying is one of the most essential characteristics of computer science. One of the ontological facts of digital storage is that there is no difference between a computer program, a video, mp3-song, or an e-book. They are all composed of voltage represented by ones and zeros. Therefore they are all subject to the same electronic fact: they exist to be copied and can only ever exist as copies.” (Warwick, 2014, p9)

Points of failure for digital formats can more then one is no machines to them, no programs to read the files or the format is damaged. With “the cloud” there is also a risk that services can shut down with no warning. Lev Manovich describe this issue in his book The Language of New Media: “In the 1990s, when the new role of the computer as a Universal Media Machines became apparent, already computerized societies went into a digitizing craze, All existing books and videotapes, photographs, and audio recordings started to be fed into computers and an ever-increasing rate.(Manovich, 2001, p224) Floppy=== The Floppy disk was invented in 1967 by David L. Noble at IBM. As an easy way to input information with a portable format to their new System/370 machines. The format has existed in numerous versions since its creation, the most successful being the 8, 5 and 3½- inch versions invented by SONY in the mid 1980s. It was not before the success of the personal computer systems in the late 80s that most people came to know the floppy disk as a way to store and share information, and not just something for major institutions and companies. Historian and activist Jason Scott wrote about the issue of old floppy disk on his blog post Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late . “There are libraries, archives and collections out there with floppies. They probably never got funding or time to take the data off – there’s a great chance the floppies are considered plain old acquisition items and objects, like books or a brooch or a duvet cover. They’re not. They’re temporary storage spaces for precious data that has faded beyond retrieval.” (Scott, 2011, Online)

The floppy disk contains a plastic disk coated with a magnetic oxide coating. As it is magnetic, it is sensitive to magnetic fields, which is how the information is stored, but it maybe to late for the floppies as times goes by as Jason Scott described. “I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-dependable storehouse are over. It’s been too long, too much, and you’ve asked too much of what the floppies were ever designed to do. If you or someone helping you gets data off of it, then it’s luck and chance, not engineering and proper expectation. A lot of promises were made back then, very big promises about the dependability, and by most standards, those promises came out pretty darn good – it has often been the case of extracting data from floppies long after the company that wrote the software, that made the computer, that manufactured the disk drive parts, and manufactured the disk have gone into the Great Not Here. (Scott, 2011, Online)

The magnetic oxide coating has a limited life time on how long it keep the information, so even with the machines on hand, to really get the information of the floppy, it still needs to be electric change in the oxide coating. The coating is so fragile, you can deleted the information with a fridge magnet or putting you phone next to it, its not a safe place for any information. Ted Jensen wrote about the frailty of floppy disks in an old computer magazine The KAY*FOG Online Magazine, which Jason Scott preserved on his website Textfiles.com. “Someone once raised the question of whether it makes sense to re-copy masters or back-ups from time to time to make new backups. My initial reaction was that I didn’t think it was worthwhile. Having given it some thought, however, it might not be a bad idea. If there is a degradation that takes place with time on an untouched back-up as it sits on the shelf, re-copying does in fact restore the information to a more pristine state and thus acts as added protection against the probability of losing your data.” (Janson, Textfiles, p4)

The floppy is now seen as a nostalgic relic, but just as the game cartridge for a video game system references the 8-track tape, the floppy disk is still referenced by its shape and looks in later optical formats such as Mini Disc (a format also made by SONY). The floppy lives on as the symbol for “saving”, as in word processing software. And the actual disks are still being used on in some places, mostly in old computer system that still exist in industry

In some governments, floppies are still used for certain functions, as in Norway where files of patients are all sent manually in the post on floppy disks as a way to swap patients’ data between doctors and hospitals. Magnetic storage has not been the only physical format. Optical storage has existed for a while now, the most well know optical format is the Compact Disc. Its storage size of 650mb was often larger then that of hard-drives. CDs were introduce as an audio format: “CBS released the world’s first commercially available CD, a reissue of Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, in Japan in October 1982.” (Lynskey, 2015, Online)

Compact Disc

The modern plastic Compact disc was invented as a format to replace vinyl and was made as joint venture by Dutch company Phillips and Japanese company SONY. It was proposed as a better format compared to existing format in storage size, sound quality and durability. There was a big emphasises on the durability of the format and its resilience to scratching was often highlighted. This focus made one of engineers at Philips annoyed. As Journalist Dorian Lynskey writes in his article How the Compact Disc Lost its Shine makes clear. “We should not put emphasis on the fact it will last for ever because it will not last for ever,” “We should put emphasis on the quality of sound and ease of handling.” (Lynskey,2015,The Guardian])

The Compact disc is two layers of plastic polycarbonate and a layer of foil in the middle. Lasers indent the surface lacquer with microscopic pits. The Compact disc inspired interactive fiction with its later versions of the CD-ROM; it promised a new way of experiencing media and things that used to be in print now moved over to this new style of interactive media – CD-ROMs. One of these experiments in publishing was from the British design studio 8vo, they published eight issues of their magazine, Octavo, a graphic design magazine that was true to this life of experimenting with the new type of publishing. Editor Hamish Muir later recounted the story in their book 8vo: On the Outside. “There were several Compact disc title available. These were mostly educational encyclopedic collections which used the (then) massive storage capacity of a Compact disc, 650MB (as opposed to a floppy disk of 2MB, or typical computer hard drive of 80MB), to deliver sound, text and moving image via user interface to a computer screen. (Muir, 2005, p384)

Another problem is the files themselves, as digital files are compatible to the current programs and system as they where design on, they often can’t keep up with current version of programs and systems. “Octavo 92.8 was designed to run on a minimum specified Mac with 68020 processor, 4MB of RAM, a colour screen of 640x480 pixels displaying 256 colours. Typical, this would have been a Macintosh LC. [...] The irony is that the pace of change of technology has left Octavo 92.8 largely inaccessible.(Muir, 2005, p386) The optical discs systems, are all subject to the same issues. They easily scratch; they break and are effected by temperature and oxygen. Old Compact discs will often turn yellow, because of the layers between the plastic and metal separates and the foil comes in contact with oxygen, and also: “In 1999 it was discovered that certain mushrooms of the Geoterichum variety (used in cheese making) can damage compact disks” (Baez, 2008, p261 )

Hard-Drive

The hard-drive has been a part of the computer through much of its history. It was first used in 1950 and was invented by IBM. But it did not reach consumer computers before the late 1980s. Inside a normal hard-drive there is a spinning disk, often aluminium or glass coated, with a metallic oxide coating that spins around few thousand rpm [not clear] inside a metal casing, often referred to as a platter-based hard-drive. The read and write needle floats on a cushion of air where it reads and writes on the metallic coating’

A common error effecting platter-based hard-drives is from shock damage, often leading to damage on the surface of the spinning platers, often referred to as the “click of death”, other failures include faulty circuit boards or corrupted sectors, the ball bearings inside the hard-drive that can fail, as the oil that keeps them rolling dries up. Computer recover company can recovery around 90% of hard-drives. But the future failures will come from the metallic oxide itself, as metallic charge has a finite life, there will come a time when the charge is lost even on perceivable working drives.

The average lifespan for a hard-drive is four years, but even with old drives there is possibility for recovery with the right procedures. “The challenges of maintaining digital archives over long periods of time are as much social and institutional as technological,” reads a 2003 NSF and Library of Congress report. “Even the most ideal technological solutions will require management and support from institutions that in time go through changes in direction, purpose, management, and funding.”(Broussard, 2015, online)

Currently, the SSD or Solid State Drive are taking over the market for hard-drives. Their big selling point being more shook resistance and a faster read-write speed. But is it better? Currently there is a 90% recovery rate on the old magnetic hard-drives, but SSD there is only a 70% recovery rate on dead drives, according to figures stated by the Dutch data recovery company Stellar in Utrecht.

Chapter Two

The Cloudy Industrial Complex

The commercialisation of the internet began in the early 1990s, with larger investment in infrastructure giving way to high speeds that made the idea of external storage a reality, This gave way to the notion of the “cloud”, a term pushed on the public throughout the media, from names of services to the news media. But what actually is the cloud? When you ask people what the “cloud” is people may imagine something floating in the sky. The problem is that most people don’t know what the cloud is. The “cloud”, in the sense of external information storage, is not a new concept, IBM has been a proponent of centrally located data processing since the 1950s. Then the focus was on government and defence. The term “cloud computing” is something rather new, and was not commonly used before the 2000s, but it can be traced back to a meeting at the offices of the computer company Compaq in 1996. “A Technology Review article in 2011 suggested the oldest use of "cloud computing" was at a 1996 meeting of Internet and startup-company executives at Compaq offices in Houston, who's imagineering described the universe being transformed by the Internet as one in which "'cloud-computing' enabled applications" would become commonly available via the web.” (Fogarty, 2012, Online)

One early version of free online storage was created in 1999 by Yahoo. They called it services “Yahoo! Briefcase”, it gave users 30MB of free storage on Yahoo servers, people where able to access the file as long as there was an internet connection, the services was shut down in March 30, 2009 in a statement yahoo stated the reason ‘usage has been significantly declining over the years, as users outgrew the need for Yahoo Briefcase and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities,’ the company said in a statement.” (Meyer, 2009, Online)

One of the well known cloud services for file storage today is Dropbox. Dropbox started in 2007 in San Francisco and the company now give away for free 1GB of online storage with the possibility of a paid upgrade. But why? How can someone just give away things for free? The aim is market share and not some sort of permanent archive, their own user agreement tells that in the end, you and not them, are responsible for your data. “You’re responsible for backing up the data that you store on the service. If your service is suspended or cancelled, we may permanently delete your data from our servers. We have no obligation to return data to you after the service is suspended or cancelled. If data is stored with an expiration date, we may also delete the data as of that date. Data that is deleted may be irretrievable. “ (Broussard, 2015, online)

This disregard for their users’ information is not unique to Dropbox, all of the other cloud services have a similar policy. In the end only you can fully take responsibility for your files: “all major cloud storage services refuse to guarantee the safety of any data uploaded to their servers. Dropbox, Box, RapidShare, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive… not one of them will guarantee the safety of your data. “ (Van Camp, 2011, Online)

In contrast, to the term, “cloud computing” is in reality just hundreds and thousands of normal hard drives in centrally located buildings all around the world. They are often placed in locations close to larger Internet infrastructure, such as transatlantic cables, cheap electricity, and rivers where they can access water for cooling. This facilities are run by larger corporations like Google, or a company that rents out the storage to other companies. Where your data is located is often a secret and its never fully revealed to users. As research and technology writer Amelia Abreu points out in her article The Collection and the Cloud. “Paul Jaeger points out, “geographical considerations” such as physical location, environmental resources, and legal jurisdiction are key questions for evaluating the integrity of cloud services for archival storage. Cloud computing, he argues, represents “centralization of information and computing resources in data centers, raising the specter of the potential for corporate or government control over information.” (Abreu, 2015, Online)

We store more and more, but in the past ten years the use of social media networks has been reinventing the way we create information, along with why and how we create information. Wolfgang Ernst addresses this issue in Digital Memory and Archive: “The so-called cyberspace is not primarily about memory as cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication. “ (Wolfgang, 2013, p99)

So what is the impact in the future when Facebook or Whatsapp are gone? One example can be seen in the demise of the image platform Tabblo. Tabblo was an online platform for image storing and sharing. It was launched in 2005 and came to an end after Hewlett-Packard bought up the company and ended its service in 2007. Tabblo’s impact on people can be seen from the demographic they marked themselves to. They often targeted young families with kids. Tabblo is one of many company killed off by profit-driven market strategy, done way with something often called a “Acqui-hiring”. This is when a company buys a company and fires its employees and rehires them in the new company. It is a common way of buying up employees or “talent”, as it is called in Silicon Valley, to keep them away from legal issues the old company may have had, as that old company is terminated.

If it was not for small activist such as Ned Batchelder, former Tabblo engineer and the Archive Team, the story and memory may have been lost for most people.. Jason Scott, main activist behind Archive Team stated in his keynote, The House is on Fire, the Fire Trucks are on Fire, The Fire is on Fire, at the Harvard Law School, a story of a Tabblo user.

“… this is a particularly tragic one , this is a guy with photos watched his house burning down and he says yeah I lost everything but luckily I have my five thousand pictures on Tabblo and a month later they deleted them all…” (Caliorg, Online Video, 2014)

Tabblo is not a unique case, there have, and will be, dead services and companies in the future. How long the current big services like Facebook and Instagram will last we cannot predict, but a careless view on the content and how it is stored is not the way to go for future access. As the drives being used an are same as on your own machine, they are subject to the same laws of nature as every hard drive. There is monitoring of the drives and broken or unstable drives will be removed and replaced. But this stable system will only work if someone is monitoring the system. A big concern is not only where and how things are stored, but why things are stored. With infinite storage, why do we store everything and do we even need to store everything. In 1994 internet user Humdog wrote about her experience with the internet and how it was not as Utopic place as she first imagined for free expression. It was turning into more and more an economic and corporate lead market place where the content made by individuals was transformed into things to be sold and traded. "…proponents of so–called cyber–communities rarely emphasize the economic, business–mind nature of the community: many cyber–communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction. they market their businesses by appeal to hysterical identification and fetishism no more or less than the corporations that brought us the two hundred dollar athletic shoe" (Humdog,1994,Online)

Shifting terms of the services are an issue, the apparently “better” solution in the form of user interfaces, services and service plans often mixes up the terms of the services. Something that works often can be put to one side for something new and better. Norwegian broadband company Telenor shut down its older home.no services, an online free web-hosting services in favour of its new Home.Cloud services in 2016.

Chapter Three

My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart

We record more and more of our daily life, images are now more then just trinkets of the past; they actively remake the past. French philosopher Jacques Derrida talks about this issue in his text Archive Fever. The invention of the Internet has intensified a wave of recording and archiving that began in the 20th Century, Wolfgang Ernst addresses this in Digital Memory and the Archive. “According to Jacques Derrida, “The Twentieth Century, the first in history to be exhaustively documented by audio/visual archives, found itself under the spell of what contemporary philosopher called 'archive fever', a fever that, given he World Wide Web's digital storage capacities, is not likely to cool any times soon.” (Wolfgang, 2007, p137)

The impact these devices have is not just physical but also mental, it changes the way we remember events. There have been a long standing idea that computer memory replicating the way human memory worked, but, as José Van Dijck maintains, “American psychologist Susan Bluck contends that autobiographical memory has three main functions: to preserve a sense of being a coherent person over time, to strengthen social bonds by sharing personal memories, and to use past experiences to construct models to understand inner worlds of self and others.” (Van Dijck, 2007, p3) Media as memory constructor is central to Van Dijck’s argument: “The endless potential of digital photography to manipulate ones self-image seems to render it the favourite tool for identity formation and personal memory construction.” (Van Dijck , 2007, p106)

One key issue is people’s understanding of technology, of what the devices and services really are, how do they work? Some will maybe describe their understanding in the same way as some will describe magic. The famous Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke stated in 1969: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Feigelfeld, 2015, Online) One of the reasons for people’s lack of understanding of technology is due to what the industry calls “black boxing”. "In the computer industry, the term is described as “ a usually complicated electronic device whose internal mechanism is usually hidden from or mysterious to the user” (Merriam Webster, Online).

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan stated in his book Understanding Media: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us" (McLuhan, 1994, p xvii). So how have the storage devices and services we use today shaped our memory, and what is the emotional impact on us when they fail?

For my graduation project at the The Piet Zwart Institute I made the book project My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart, the book contain online forum posts and tweets from social media on the subject of data loss. This is from the perspective of people who lost information when their hard-drives crash and then deal with the aftermath.

The name of the project comes from a tweet made by @KatShambaugh“My hard drive died along with my heart #help”. By reading the book you will be able to read your way through time, from month to month and across the years, from 1991 to 2016. The topics range from lost iTunes music to more severe issues, such as the loss of valuable information and research, like a post from USENET user Mark Harries.

“This is a *serious* cry for help ... if you have any advice, [..] My hard drive is dead and - more important than the fact that this is my computer - this computer is my wife's lifeline of communication to treat my son. This is the most important point - I have a 3 year old autistic boy (Alex). My wife (Kelley) spends many hours a day doing research - dietary interventions, applied behavioural analysis, social stories, enzymes” (Harries, Google Groups, 2003)

Conclusion

“The present is shadowed by the inverse omens of its past”. (Wolfgang,2007,p170) History tells us there has never been any permanent solution to our storage needs. The notion of a permanent, solution is highly utopian and naive one pushed on us by their creators. It is driven on by the thinking around the subject, the technology is what it is, over promising and under delivery is a key point, as its or really the technology itself, but the thinking around it that is the problem. German philosopher Martin Heidegger talks about the “technological thinking” or what we can call now as “technosolusisens”, that technology itself is the solution, if we only invent something new, it will solve the problems of the old, but we know that the solutions always bring with its own problems. The rapid commercialisation, market drive computer industry have since the 1980 active move into the private life, but bringing with its problems that only institutions need to deal with before and the mystifications of the technology have not help people understand the nature of what it is.

Its hard to say what dangers that exist in the future, its impact is often on the individual level, as we know human memory works, its not to remember everything, but to makes sense of the world around us. Often what we know about the past comes from trash, trash is the biggest export to the future, but will we only have broken machines to send into the future. What often survives, is culture, we know the ancient text from Greece not from it being stored in a single place, but it was spread around, copied. Making copies and spreading it around is a good start, but not a safe one.

Digitizing where supposed to going to make paper useless, like the future of the paperless office, where computer and screens was going to take over the printed book, and paper will be a thing of the past. But did it happen? In Post-Digital Print Alessandro Ludovico looks where the notion of the paperless office came from. “We can trace the actual expression ‘paperless office’ back to an article titled The Office of the Future, published in Business Week in June 1975. The second section of the article is titled The Paperless Office. Besides predicting how computing giants (IBM and Xerox) would dominate the office market until the end of the century (Ludovico,2013,p25)

==Bibliography== *

*Merriam Webster (2016) Merriam Webster [Online] Available: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/black+box( Accessed:18.03.2016) 
*Kittler, Friedrich A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press
*Meyer, David (2009) Yahoo drops its Briefcase [Online] Available: http://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-drops-its-briefcase/ .(Accessed:05.03.2016) 
*Mike Harries (2003) 'UPDATE on my Dead Hard Drive (was HELP ME PLEASE! MY HD'S DEAD!), groups.google.com [Online] Available: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/aus.computers.mac/9CMovhsW5oc/iB-ZbdvSe5oJ (04.03.16) 
*Johnson, Bobbie  (2008)  Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman [Online] Available: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman  .(Accessed:17.02.2016) 
*Abreu, Amelia (2015) The Collection and the Cloud, The New Winquiry [Online] Available: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-collection-and-the-cloud/ .(Accessed:10.10.2015) 
*Baez, Fernando (2008) A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq, Atlas & Co
*National Film Preservation Foundation (2015) Vinegar Syndrome, [Online] Available: http://www.filmpreservation.org/preservation-basics/vinegar-syndrome (06.02.2015) 
*Hafner, Katie (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster
*Manovich, Lev, (2001) The Language of New Media, United States of America, The MIT Press
*Bush, Vannevar (1945) As We May Think, theatlantic.com [Online] Available: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ (13.11.2015)

Van Camp , Jeffrey (2011) "Why should we trust Google Drive, or any cloud storage service? [Online] Available: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-can-we-trust-google-drive-or-any-cloud-storage-service/ (24.11.2015)

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*Caliorg (2014) Keynote I - Jason Scott - The House is on Fire, the Fire Trucks are on Fire, The Fire is on Fire, [Youtube], 15 August. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh7EARxkxoU (Accessed 08/09/2015)

*Warwick, Henry Radical Tactics of the Offline Library, (2014), Amsterdam, INC 
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Thesis Outline(08.01.16)

[Steve: I think this is a good basis to begin, but you need to give more thought to how the argument develops. We can start the process whereby I ask questions within the text which help this development. Today, let's think about the existing material you have and how to order it.]

Summary

”There is no identity without memory” (Baez,2008,p12 )

As a society we always seem to be looking for a new technical solution for knowledge and information storage and for this, we hope there is one magical final solution, one that will solve every issue. But easy solutions, creates there own problems, the perceived view on the stable nature of digital information differ from reality. Problems like old physical formats, lost or non functional machines, company’s that go bankrupt or file formats with no support in the future, changing user license, there is many points of failure.

When something happens in the digital world, it happens often quickly. There is a paradox that in a digital world, paper still can outlast digital.

”Material storage devices are supposed to preserve their contents faithfully. Human memories on the other hand, tend to select reconfigure and forget their contents-and we know from theory that this is the real achievements of human memory. Forgetting, in that sense, is not a defect, but an absolute necessary form of protection.” (Van Dijck,2007,online)

One of my past projects was the book “The Library of Babel” The project was about “Bit-Rot” also known as “Data Decay” with the starting point focussing on the obsolescence of floppy disks.[S: explain project, if it helps dvelop the argument] Bit-Rot is something most people aren't aware of, but in a digital age this is a really interesting topic, as most people don't realise the how unstable digital storage is.[so, what is bit rot?- in two sentances] “You can read a book that's 200 years old, but you can't read a computer file that was created five years ago” The format and size of the book is based on the dimensions of the 8-inch floppy disk with the main body copy from the short story “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luís Borges; a short story about a library which contains every story ever written and that ever will be written and how this is stored. I illustrated the book by corrupting it and its based on research of how corrupted files appear. Another past project is ”Who Needs Paper”, a digital photo-book project on the topic of whats left when a format is no longer needed. Behind every storage format there exist a larger and often unseen infrastructure. With the internet, there is large server in large buildings and with paper there is large paper factories but that got an impact on its surroundings. The project explores the tension of analog and digital in the story of paper manufacturing on a digital format as the “epub”, that is by many seen as the “closest to paper” one can get with digital.

”In 600, Niu Hung wrote a report in which he suggested it was important to keep multiple library copies in order to foil the destruction of written knowledge” (Baez,2008,p72)

Printed matter is physical and understandable for people, the nature of a computer file is not. Digital informations ephemerality is big, its generates as much as is deletes. When paper disintegrates, you can see it, when digital disintegrates, its just vanishes. One moment its there, the next its gone. Most people don’t have the knowledge of how or why.. people feel betrayed or let down by their technology that promises god and stable storage.

The digital material is physical one places.. as big server farms, burning coal or hydroelectric power, its have a big physical present, but is part is out of sight, so out of mind for people. The digital is mystic for people, it works so it works, but when they crash, disappear, gets deleted, its impact is just the same as if it where in the house that just burned to the ground.

Marketing makes us believe that storage is forever, that thin pieces of metallic foil, spinning disk or a “cloud' are there when we need them. That free endless storage is free and endless.. but even perceived solid and trustworthy services and companies vanish in the end..

”Digital media, through the memory at its core, was supposed to solve, if not dissolve, archival problems such as degrading celluloid or scratched vinyl, not create archival problems of its own. The limited lifespan of CDs will no doubt shock those who disposed of their vinyl in favor of digitally remastered classics, that is, if they still use CDs or an operating system that can read them. Old computer files face the same problem.” (Hui Kyong Chun,2008, p153-154)

So are there any solution to the problem, or do we even need one? One problem is maybe the amount of information out there, to have so much of something often can undervalues it. By having 1000 pictures from a trip, its maybe better to deleted 950 of them. And do we even need it all? What is the different in loss from the digital to the printed? Have it not always been a loss?

”Whether on hard drives or on centuries-old parchment, what appears to be lost is often only hidden. And the technology we use—both to record information in the first place and to recover it when it’s gone—reflect the fundamental values of our time. (Shawn,2014,online)”

Outline

Not If, But When

The Historical Perspective

[S: next stage: be more spacific and make more detailed sub-outline]

To understand the present, we need to look back to the past.This chapter address past inventions that have directly influence current storage format and systems. From Gutenberg, Paul Odlet, Von Neumann “MEMEX” to magnetic, optical systems, solid state and “cloud” technologies. I will also address projects that where proposes as a great projects for the future but that never lived up to this promises, like the BBC Doomsday projects.

We're Excite To Announce

We're excite to announce is a common sentence seen and read in a lot of press statements. Its a sign that something is going to happen, and that is not good news for you memory’s, data and personal content. Its a statement often that appears on the final words from a lot of online company and startups. So what and who got responsibility when you content disappears with out your knowledge.

My Hard Drive Died, Along With My Heart

My Hard Drive Died, Along With My Heart #help is a post twitter user @KatShambaugh posted after here hard-drive died. Small but still genuine statement. The personification of technology is something that often common.. we name your cars, ships and so also your technology. But what happen with that relation when devices fail to keep your memory’s safe.

The Day That My Floppy Died

[S: this strikes me as a good introduction-first chapter, a reason to write a thesis, maybe start with this as an intro-- first chapter]

Since I started using a computer around the age of 5-6 years old I always been somehow hoarding information, its more a thing, my collection of odd bit of compute ephemeral at home will tell. But no one is immune to loss, this chapter will tell the issue of a personal side.. past, present and personal look on the topic and its future.

Bibliography

books, papers and notes

Dictionary

Dictionary for technical terms, slang and other words of interest.

Bibliography

• Van Dijck, José (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, United States of America, Stanford University Press
• Shawn, Martin (2014) The Age of Erasable Books, http://www.theatlantic.com [Online] Available: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/how-monks-remixed-technology-in-the-middle-ages/373956/ Accessed: 11/10/2015
• Baez, Fernando (2008) A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq, Atlas & Co

• The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory Author(s): By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 148-171 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595632 . Accessed: 22/09/2015