User:ThomasW/thesis Outline

Thesis Outline pzi

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 often hope there is one magical final solution, one that will solve every issue. But with 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, that paper still can outlast the 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 Library of Babel” The project was about “Bit-Rot” aka Data Decay with the starting point focussing on the obsolescence of floppy disks. 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 media is as a format for storing information. “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 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 media infrastructure and 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 located all around the world. The project explores the tension of a story about the manufacturing of paper on a digital format as the “epub”, that is by many seen as the “closest to paper” one can get with digital. 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 and its way more fragile than people believe. When paper disintegrates, you can see it, when digital disintegrates, its just vanishes. One moment its there, the next its gone. To 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.

“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) 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 got burned.

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..

"The computer industry is fifty years of over-promised and under deliver and continues to be to this day" (Crenshaw, online video, 2012) “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library. (LaFrance, 2015,online) 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 this problem, or do we even need one? One problem is maybe the amount of information out there, to have more of something often can undervalues it. What if we keep less to amount that we are more aware of what we have? Do we even need it all? What is the different in loss from the digital to the printed?

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

• Intro

The Historical Perspective

To understand the present, we need to look back to the past and to do that the thesis will have chapter that address past inventions. From Gutenberg, the MEMEX and magnetic tape and mystical clouded and how there construct effect todays systems.

Acient, Paul Odlet, early computer systems (memex) – floppy – cd ++ cloude

Where Excite To Announce

Where excite to announce is a common sentence seen and read in a lot of statements, its a statement that something have just happened and the once so great journey now is over. The journey is of a company or now more often called a “start-up” company in the internet/tech/IT sector often taking their use generate content and therefor people’s memory down with them.

My Hard Drive Died, Along With My Heart

My Hard Drive Died, Along With My Heart #help is a post twitter user @KatShambaugh The personification of technology is something that often common.. we name your cars, ships and so also your technology. But how is that relation when this devices and services fail to keep your memory’s safe.

The Doomsday Case / Digital Oblivion

This chapter will address and tell the stories of projects like the BBC Doomsday project, a project that where proposes as a great project for the future with the knowledge and information of the now and how it failed before it even started. It will analysis it and us it as case study and compare it to other proposes “new and great storage project” What can we learn of them?

The Day That My Floppy’s Died

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 and present and future.

Dictionary

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

Bibliography

• Ludovico, Alessandro (2013) Post Digital Print, Onomatopee

• Gere, Charlie (2002) Digital Culture, London, Reaktion Books

• Joanne, Gard-Hansen (2011) Media and Memory, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press

• Manovich, Lev, (2001) The Language of New Media, United States of America, The MIT Press

• 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 09:06

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/ (14.10.2015) (LaFrance, 2015,online) 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) Crenshaw, Adrian Crenshaw (2012) Jason Scott Rescuing The Prince of Persia from the sands of time, [Youtube], 12 September. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8 (Accessed 21/04/2015)