User:ThomasW/thesis v1

Thesis underdevelopment, not proofread

//////// WARNING DYSLEXIA AHEAD \\\\\\\\\//////// WARNING DYSLEXIA AHEAD \\\\\\\\\ 20.03.16

##Intro##

• • "It matters because we live in media, as fish live in water. (Nelson,xxx,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, 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 machine's, company’s that go bankrupt or file formats with no support in the future, changing user license, there are many points of failure., it seems that the more technical the technology gets, the more problems it creates. Jennifer Gabrys writes about this issue in here 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. Artifacts 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 page 64) This thesis will explore the question of if there is any things as perfect storage technology and have there ever been a perfect solution for human memory and what effects do it have on society. This thesis is result of a broad research done over two years into the topic of memory storage at The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.

1. 1. Future prediction NOT SURE WHERE THIS ONE FITS IN YET ##

Richard Barbrook wrote in his book “Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village” that according to the prophecies made in the post war era, more than four decades ago, about the advancement of technologies is still being retold. **“Even the embarrassing failures of prophecy had been erased from the collective memory. Instead of re-examining their credibility, the key predictions of the 1964 New York World’s Fair were reworked many times to ensure that these old futures always looked like the latest thing.” (Barbrook, 2007, p202) There have always been big promise for the future of memory storage, like the future of the paper less office, where computer and screens was going to take over the offices, that paper will be a thing of the past, But did it happen? In the book “Post-Digital Print” by 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, this section looks into electronic methods of managing information which were expected to reduce, progressively but drastically, the amount of paper used in the working environment.” (Ludovico,2013,p25)

Chapter Two

##Ink, Photography 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)**

##Library Alexandria##

One of the big “first” but also mostly one of the most well know library of ancient times is the Library of Alexandria, most famous for burning down. It was the first international library, a collection mostly Egyptian, Greek and Roman text. The growth of the collection can be attribute to local law that stated that all new arrivals had to hand over their written texts in the possessions so they could be copied. It was as much or even more a political decisions then of idea 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 nations power structor, so when they were burned to the ground, silence legitimized the catastrophe” (Baez,2008,p2)** The collection was not concentrated in one central location, but was distributed between different warehouses all around the city of Alexandria, most of which where at the docks in Alexandria, close to the ships from which the collection came from was gathered. There was a huge investment in labour, and a whole system was in place to feed skilled labour to the library **“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 never did burn down once. Its destruction happened over time. During its existence from around the year 145 BC to its last big conflagration in the year 642 AD. The main culprits of this burnings where many, we today don’t really know who did it, but the main culprits have been everyone from the Romans, Christian rebels oppose the ruling Egyptian powers, earthquakes and economical,, as it was part of the state system, different ruling powers may have had different opinions on the importance to its use and also how founding. The main format for recording texts in ancient Egypt was the papyrus, it was cheaper to record on papyrus then clay tables, by that it made it the most dominated format, according to Beaz. **“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, this made papyrus the dominate format of recording, the quality or durability was not the main issue of the user at that time. This in fact made it as Beaz writes in his book, a really issue and 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 cheap than and other material gradually gave it ascendancy, but its rapid deterioration was a matter of great concern to the monks” (Baez,2008,p95)** If one compare Library of Alexandria with today, we can see similarity’s, 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 under the last Iraq War.

##Mircofilm##

In the late 1800s the invention of microfilm made the storing and sharing of information a much space saving endeavour compared to collection of printed books. The invention of microfilm can be traced back to the year 1839 and inventor John Benjnamin Dancer , but it was no clear use of it in the function of in library before later. The main use of microfilm as an archive medium was not full grasped before Paul Otlet started using it for his library. Paul Otlet used the microfilm as a key part of his idea of making a universal library with all of world knowledge. Paul Otlet can describe as a 19th century utopian, an inventor, peace activist and Internationalist with a firm believed in building a new world based in pacifism and progressive ideals true the spreading of universal knowledge. This was a response to the political landscape of his day, with rising nationalism true out Europe. His most famous invention was the universal decimal classification system for library’s together with lawyer and president of the International Peace Bureau Henri La Fotaine any by using this he wanted to advance the human progress true the sharing of information. classification. For this the system was made from 3x4 sized index cards that was colour coded in custom made drawers. **“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)** In the time after Paul Otlet, more people and company started using microfilm as an easy way of spreading information, the selling of journals, and preservation as there was a notation that the paper archives was turning to dust. This notion was pushed by company provided this services and machines. Paul Otlet said on the other hand one must not “discard printed documents”. The notion was that microfilm will preserve the content better then keeping them on paper. The way of doing this was a destructive process as the book that they collected was cut open by removing the spine to be photographs. The truth is that it was mostly marketing point from the manufactured and sellers of the microfilm solution and the archives was not turning to dust. **“ The vast majority of original American newspapers from the 1870s on has been destroyed and replaced by microfilm —appears to be correct.”36 The full implications of this tragedy have yet to be completely comprehended” (Silverman,2015,p370) ** There was no issue in sight for microfilm, but in 2015 Nora Kathleen wrote in the Newspaper Research Journal on the topic of microfilm and newspaper archives and whats 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 decisions was in a way too optimistic for a long term solution, as microfilm deteriorates just as normal film as its subject to “vinegar syndrome”. The National Film Preservation Foundation in American explains what vinegar syndrome is **“are a pungent vinegar smell (hence the name), followed eventually by shrinkage, embrittlement, and buckling of the gelatin “ (The National Film Preservation Foundation,2015,Online)“ **'

##MEMEX##

30 years after Otlet, the American Vannevar Bush worth come up with his concept of the MEMEX. The MEMEX was a concept for information storing and retrieval created by him Vannevar Bush was an American inventor and engineer that also was the headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development under WW2.

He wanted to use the new technology that was being develop at the time to use it to make sense of the information explosion at the time was going to be easier to deal with. The editor of The Atlantic wrote this about Bush and the MEMEX in his essays. **“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)** When he came on 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, with him being part of it. **“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)**

---

After WW2 there had been a large buildup of the military industrial complex in the west. Bush worked in that system, as on the Manhattan project and on systems for the military, as a anti fascist he felt he did something to help the struggle against Hitler, but after WW2

≈ What is missing from your story so far is the motivation of the people who built the systems you talk about - what did they want?] 

[<<S-you need to be precise about what they did before you tell us what remains of their legacy

---

He wanted to create a new from of mechanical information retrieval system, a system that made it possible to retrieve and store every type of information like books, information like books, sound and text, something that for him worth make the access to information better then 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 envisioned 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 its inspired later people like psychologist and computer scientist and early pioneer in the field of cybernetics J.C.R Licklider. Licklider was a computer scientist and psychologist and foresaw the future of the computer, and the internet and he wanted just as Bush to change society to the better with information and his work inspired engineer, and an early Internet pioneer Douglas Engelbart that not only invented the computer mouse and the graphical user interface, video calling and file sharing, he most known for “The Mother of all demos” in December 1968 where he demonstrated his invention to the public.

The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would Hafner,1998,p21

Licklider wrote, “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

Also inspired by Bush was Ted Nelson, Ted Nelson that was a pioneer in the field of information technology and his concept of hypermedia with his “Project Xanadu”. An early concept for something that worth later be named the internet. What they all had in common except being inspired by Vennar Bush, was that they wanted to create a new society based on connectivity and feedback by the means of then the new field of “Cybernetics” Cybernetic was a new form of thinking that came after the developed the WW2 that believed that with the help of system, we are able to change society. Bush describe the function of the MEMEX in “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 Encyclopoedia 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)**'

###Bytes###

Not before the late 1970s and the rapid commercialisation of the computer to private individuals with the develop of the personal computer did the issue of personal generated information on digital formats became a topic. Before this point, the user of this technologies was large institutions. An industry of company and product was now market towards the home market, cases for formats and formats themselves.

In contrast to Paul Otlet and his Mondeum that was an institution, now mass storage of information was moving into peoples private homes, but the issues that institution have been struggling with followed. In the late 1998 Katie Hafner in here book Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet” she describes what digital information is **“Unlike analog systems, digital technologies essentially convert information of all kinds, including sound and image, to a set of 1s and 0s. Digitized information can be stored efficiently and replicated an unlimited number of times within the circuits of a digital device, reproducing the data with almost perfect accuracy. In a communications context, information that is digitally encoded can be passed from one switch to the next with much less degradation than in analog transmission. (Hafner,1998,p37) **

So digital information is 1 and 0, but the state is not stable and there is never one copy or original, the nature of digital information compared to printed document. By moving a document for one place to another, its existence is being 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) ** With digital files, you need an interpreter to read the files are, all digital files are 1 and 0, when if they all look different to the user true the user interface as texts or icons, but to access the files can be lost in multiple ways. Points of failure can be that there is no machines to read the physical formats or the are no programs to read or understand the files when that the physical format still works and now with focus on online external storage or better know as “the cloud” there is a risk that services can shut down with no or short notices and therefore losing the access to that information, something that have happened with some services. 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, They wanted an easy way to input information with a portable format to their new System/370 machines. The format has existed in numeral versions since it creation, the most successful where the 8, 5 and 3½- inch versions, the lasted version 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 is a plastic disk coated with a magnetic oxide coating. As the coating is magnetic, it is sensitive to magnetic fields, this is how the information is written on it. The problem with the floppy is both files and machine issue. Too read a floppy disk, you need the machines and a system that can read them.

One can ask why even think about them now, as they was abandon long ago, but there is still data locked up in the format, local and governmental history, but it maybe to lat for the floppies as times goes by. Computer historian and activist Jason Scott explains the problem with old floppy in his text “Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late”.

**“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 is finite and has a limited life time on it will keep its charge, so even with the machines on hand, to really get the information out there still needs to be a charge on the disk and by being an object where you can deleted information with a fridge magnet, its not a safe place for it to be. Ted Jensen wrote about issue about the frailty to floppy disks in an old computer magazine “The KAY*FOG Online Magazine” that Jason Scott help save 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. “ (Jensen,unknown,p4)** The floppy is now a nostalgic relic of the past, but just as the game cartridge for video game system and its reference to the 8-track tape, the floppy disk is getting reference in by its shape and looks in later optical formats like the Mini Disc, a format also made by SONY.The floppy lives on as the symbol for “saving” as for example in word processing software.

But it is still being used on in some places, mostly in legacy system like industrial machines, also in some governments floppies are still being used for functions, like in Norway where files of patients are all send manual in the post on floppy disks as a way to swap patients data between doctors and hospitals. Magnetic storage have not been the only physical format, optical storage have existed for a while now, the most well know optical format is the Compact disc. Its storage size of 650mb was often larger then the hard-drives, first 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 replacement the vinyl. Made as joint venture by Dutch company Phillips and Japanese company SONY. Proposes as a may as more durable medium and better sound quality then the vinyl.

There where a big emphasises on the durability of the format, its resilience to scratching was often highlight. This focus made one of engineers at Philips annoyed. Journalist Dorian Lynskey interview on of the engineers from Phillips in his article “How the compact disc lost its shine” that was published in The Guardian.

**“We should not put emphasis on the fact it will last for ever because it will not last for ever,” he says. “We should put emphasis on the quality of sound and ease of handling.” (Lynskey,2015,online)** The Compact disc is two layers of plastic polycarbonate and a layer of foil that is in the middle, lasers indent the surface lacker with microscopic pits. The Compact disc inspired interactive fiction with its later versions of the CD-ROM, its was promised as a new way of experiencing media and things that used to be in print now moved over to this new style of interactive media as 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 recall 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 cant 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 system, are all subject to the same issues. They scratch easily, they break and are effected by temperature and oxygen. Old Compact discs will often turn yellow in colour, this is because of the layers between the plastic and metal layers is separating and the foil is getting in contact with oxygen.

**“In 1999 it was discovered that certain mushrooms of the Geoterichum variety (used in cheese making) can damage compact disks” (Baez,2008p261 )**

HARD-DRIVE

The hard-drive have been a part of the computer since much its lifetime, first used in 1950 and invented by IBM, but did not reach consumer computers before the late 80s. The platter-based hard-drive, its a spinning disk, often aluminium or glass coated with a metallic oxide coating that spins from 5000 to 7500 rpm inside a metal casing. They read and write needle floats on a cushion of air where it read and write on the metallic coating,

A common error that effects latter-based hard-drives suffer from is shock damage, often leading to damage on the surface of the spinning platers, often been quickly to recognise as the “click of death”, others failures can the faulty circuit board. Hard-drive not being used for a while also has a tendency to size up as the oil in the ball bearings can dry up.

Even that often all of this failures makes the unusable for most people, computer recover company can recover around 90% of hard-drives they work on. But the future failures will come from is the metallic oxide itself, as metallic charge have a finite life, its will be a time when the charge is discarded even on perceivable work drives. The average lifespan for a hard-drive is four years, but even old drives there is possibly for recover 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) Current the SSD or Solid State Drive are taking over the market for hard-drives, with the big selling point of them being more shook resistant and faster read-write speed, but is it better? Currently there is a 90% recovery rate on the old magnetic hard-drives disk, but SSD there is only a 70% recovery rate on fatality drives, figures stated by dutch data recovery company Stellar in Utrech.

##Chapter Three##

###The Cloudy Industrial Complex###

With the commercialisation of the internet in the early 1990 began, with larger investment in infrastructure gave way to high speeds that now made the idea of external storage into reality, something that This have given way to the notion of the “cloude”, a term pushed on the public true out media, from names of services to the news media, but what is the cloude really

When you ask people what the “cloude” is people will maybe imagine something that is a floating in the sky. The problem is that most people don’t know what the cloud is, the “cloud” or external information storage is not really a new concept, IBM was a hug proponent of central located data processing all the way since their start their computer division, but the term “cloud computing” is something rather new, the term was not commonly used before the 2000s, but can be traced back to a meeting in 1996 at the computer company Compaq offices.

**“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)

So the cloud is not something new, it often exists with promise with always access and its free to use. 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 more well-known cloud services for file storage today is Dropbox. Dropbox started in 2007 in San Francisco and are now giving away for free 1GB of online storage with possibility of a paid update. But why? How can someone just give away things for free? The main is market share and the effect on it stocks, its not an archive or something that is meant to permanent, its own user agreement tells this.

**“You’re responsible for backing up the data that you store on the service. If your service is suspended or canceled, we may permanently delete your data from our servers. We have no obligation to return data to you after the service is suspended or canceled. 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 to people information is not only Dropbox are doing, all of the other cloude services have the same or similar policy, in the end only you can fully take responsibility for your files in the end.

“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,2011,Online) how was it stored? Contra to the term, “cloud computing” is in reality just hundred and thousands of normal hard-drives in central located buildings all around the world. They are often placed in locations close to the bigger internet infrastructure, like transatlantic cables, cheap electricity, and rivers where they can get water for cooling. This buildings are run by larger cooperation like Google or a company that rents out the storage to other company’s. Where you data is located is often a secret and its never fully reveal to the users,

“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 using social media networks have been redoing the way and why we create information. Wolfgang Ernst talks about this issue in his book “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 is gone?, One example can we se on the demise of the image platform Tabblo. Tabblo was an online platform for image storing and sharing. It was launch in 2005 and came to an end after Hewlett-Packard bought up the company and ended its service in 2007.

Tabblo impact on people can be seen from the demographic they marked themselves to, often to young families with kids.. Tabblo is one of many company killed of by profit driven market strategy, done way with something often called a “Acqui-hiring”, where a company buys a company, then it fires its employs and rehire them in the new company, its common way of buy up employees or “talent” as it being called in Silicon Vally, but not be effected by legal issues the old company may have had, as that company now does not exsist no more.

If it was not or small activist as Ned Batchelder, former Tabblo engineer and Archive Team, the story and memory may have been lost for most people.. Jason Scott, main activist behind Archive Team state in his keynote “The House is on Fire, the Fire Trucks are on Fire, The Fire is on Fire” at the Harward Law School at about a story of one of the users of Tabblo.

“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,2014,Youtube) Tabblo is not a unique case, there have and will be dead services and company’s in the future, how long the current big services like Facebook and Instagram will last we can not predict, but a careless view on the content and how it is stored are not way to go for future access. how was it degraded? (apparatus) 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. There still need to be a person that take out the drive and monitors the system.

A big concern is not only where and how things are stored, but why things are stored, with infinite storage, de we store everything and do we even need to store everything? In 1994 internet user Humdog wrote about here experience with the internet and how it was not a Utopic place as she first imagined for free expression, but was turning into more and more an economic and cooperate lead market place where the content made by individuals was transformed 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 and apparently “better” solution in the form of user interfaces, services and service planes often mixes up the term of the services. Something that works often can be put on the 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 for its new Home.Cloude services in 2016.

The big issue for the future now is Facebook, biggest world wide social media and its where most of peoples expression is put. One can often think if there is any point of it, but its where people share and post what they make, with the idea that is something ephemeral or not.. to ignore this issue is not beneficial.

Related to current day practise futire (it is current day practis)

Kahle is a digital utopian attempting to stave off a digital dystopia. He views the Web as a giant library, and doesn’t think it ought to belong to a corporation, or that anyone should have to go through a portal owned by a corporation in order to read it. (Lepore, 2015, Online)

It’s hard not to worry that the Wayback Machine will end up like the computer in Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which is asked what is the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” and, after thinking for millions of years, says, “Forty-two.” If the Internet can be archived, will it ever have anything to tell us? (Lepore, 2015, Online) I realized that plumbing, like softwar, is a complex system built by humans. (Broussard,2015,online)

Facebook only has to manage 11 years’ worth of data, all of which is digital and all of which is structured exactly the way it needs to be structured. A legacy media company might have to deal with more than a hundred years’ worth of data, only some of which is digital, all of which is potentially important to scholars, all of which has different licensing restrictions and preservation needs and is ambiguously structured. Remember when Macromedia Flash was the new hot thing in journalism? Most of those elaborate Flash projects have disappeared now. They’re probably archived on Jaz drives in a storage room somewhere, next to boxes of color slides and piles of floppy disks and other outdated media. Future historians will likely lament this loss. (Broussard,2015,online)

lesh out 'history' (done-ish) flesh out cloud chapter write text on structure of thesis in relation to grad project- i.e: 1)" the historical chapter addresses poster project; 2)personal relation addresses the book- my hard drive died.3) cloud address the web site. The promises of perfect information storage are repeated with every new generation of technology development from the analog systems like scroll, books and microfilm, to the digital systems like magnetic systems like the floppy disks, hard-drives to the optical systems like CDs and CD-Rom's and now with the increased focus on external storage systems that also is commonly know as the cloud that are turing more int other industrial complex of modern day information storing. People are mistaken to pin their hopes on a final technical solution, or to expect perfect memory storage. On the surface these systems look different but they are all external systems for the recording of human memory. The belief in progress hold the promise in perfection, but perfection never supports stability. An industry develops around each mode of storage like microfilm with is promise of easy handling, sharing and storage perfectly mirror current day paretics of digitalizing of books and the convinces of the cloude. The creation and marketing of this format and services have different ideas on its use and even nature. Engineers creating the CD wanted to make a better sounding format, but marketing department focus on the presived durability of the formats.

##Chapter Five##

###My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart###

how was it generate

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us" McLuhan,1994, Page xvii

In the beginning digital information where something only government and large private institution had to deal with, Personal digital information storage did not really happen before the late 1980s to early 1990, following the development of the personal computer. After the system became more advance and technology’s likes smart phones and the creation of the internet can we see more and more information getting stored, the creation of information and knowege have change. So Media therision McLuhan said in his book Understanding media: The extensions of man

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us" McLuhan,1994, Page xvii But what is memory? How is biological memroy? xxxxxxxxxxx “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 wolds of self and others.” (Van,2007,p3 )

One issue is the understanding of the storage technology’s and services, if one obscures what the nature of what it is, people maybe more likely to xxxxxx

“In 1961, the British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke suggested that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Feigelfeld,2015,Online)

There is few points on the transformation of the modern image from a documentation to the performance tool. The image acts as an external storage. From images of friends, last dinner to generation of a public self.

Joanne XXX talked about the topic of photograph and the family in here book XXXX The family photograph functions primarily as a record as visible evidence that this family exist (Joanne,2011,p35 ) But the change to digital and now social media, the change of the role of the image have change, Joanne talked again about the change role of the ima

Biography

Kittle http://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-drops-its-briefcase/ http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman

• 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 (06.022015)
• Hafner, Katie (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster
• Lepore, Jill (2015) The Cobweb, Can the Internet be archived?, newyorker.com[Online] Available: hhttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb (24.11.2015)
• 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)
• A. Hansen, Kathleen, Paul, Nora (2015) Newspaper archives reveal major gaps in digital age, Newspaper Research Journal.
• Warwick, Henry Radical Tactics of the Offline Library, (2014), Amsterdam, INC
• Hafner, Katie (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster
• LaFrance, Adrienne (2015) Raiders of the Lost Web, theatlantic.com [Online] Available: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/ (24.11.2015)
• Jason, Scott (2011) Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late , http://ascii.textfiles.com [Online] Available: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191 (12.12.2015)
• Hansen, Kathleen A, Paul,Nora, Broussard, B, McCain, E, Silverman, Randy (2015) ‘Newspaper archives reveal major gaps in digital age’ Newspaper Research Journal, Vol.36, No.4, Fall 2015 pp.290-298
• Orland , Kyles (2015) The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever, http://arstechnica.com [Online] Available: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/the-quest-to-save-todays-gaming-history-from-being-lost-forever/1/ (08.06.2015)
• National Film Preservation Foundation (2015) Vinegar Syndrome, [Online] Available: http://www.filmpreservation.org/preservation-basics/vinegar-syndrome (06.02.2016)
• Lynskey, Dorian (2015) How the compact disc lost its shine, The Guardian.com [Online] Available: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/28/how-the-compact-disc-lost-its-shine?CMP=fb_gu/ (01.06.2015)
• 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 09:06
• Holt, Mark Muir, Hamish 8vo - On the Outside (2005), London, Lars Muller Publishers
• Truefilms (2007) The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World, http://truefilms.com/ [Online] Available: http://truefilms.com/the-man-who-wan/ (14.02.2015)
• Van Dijck, José (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, United States of America, Stanford University Press

Gabrys, Jennifer (2007) DIGITAL RUBBISH a natural history of electronics, Paperback , United States of America ,The University of Michigan Press

Wolfgang, Ernst (2013) Digital Memory and Archive, United States of America, University of Minnesota Press

Parikka, Jussie (2012) What is Media Archaeology, United States of America, Polity Press