The Illusory Permanence of Information Technology
I remember burning my first DVD-ROM. I thought, ‘wow, this will last me decades, and my data will be immune to viruses and accidental deletion’. I felt I’d achieved the Holy Grail of data archiving. Plus, hey, nearly 4 gigs on one disc? It seemed like science fiction.
Fast forward to 2023, with its cloud drives, external hard drives, micro SD cards, and thumb drives. My data is spread across various devices and platforms (Google Drive, Dropbox, various external hard and SSD drives). Call it an obsession, but when you’re a writer, with thousands of documents, you want to ensure the viability of your data. Plus, there’s all of my personal photos and videos. I keep carting this archive to the latest data storage method, to ensure it remains with me throughout my life.
The problem is, electronic devices, software, and digital data lack the permanence of practically any other technology. They not only aren’t built to last, but progress has moved so quickly since their inception, that electronics become outdated abruptly. I’m not complaining; I love tech that works faster and offers more features. The downside, of course, is how much of that tech ends up in a landfill, or an electronic junk sorting yard in Nigeria. We want progress, no matter the cost.
Some technologies have remained relatively unchanged over the centuries: the wheel, cutlery, gears, clothing, furniture. Their materials, and manufacturing processes, have changed many times, yet their function is the same.
Information and its dissemination, however, is constantly evolving. From clay tablets, to carved wooden sticks, to books, then to the latest mobile device, information’s medium doesn’t remain idle. We find ways to share that information faster and farther with each passing year. One downside is that electronic devices are far less durable than the aforementioned clay tablets or wooden sticks. We can still read cuneiform tablets from Sumer; good luck converting text files off a 5.25 floppy disk from the 1980s. This is a major issue regarding the passage of knowledge to future generations, and we have yet to solve it on a large scale.
Maybe that’s why there’s a nostalgia for older formats. Take vinyl records, for instance. The sound quality isn’t better, and the format is unwieldly, prone to damage, and expensive. My son was fascinated by a portable cassette player I dug out of my closet—a Walkman—and he used it to play the cassette inside. It blew my mind that he’d be interested in what I regarded as inferior tech (I stream everything these days). Hell, I was surprised it even worked.
Such nostalgia is strange to me. The message—the content—is what matters, not the medium. I rarely buy physical books now; yet I read Kindle titles on my tablet every day. The same goes for the comics and magazines I read. The past is fascinating, but that doesn’t mean I wish to live like my counterparts would have in ancient Rome. There’s a certain charm to experiencing, firsthand, how people lived, ate, worked, and entertained themselves in previous eras. It was like the first time I rode a horse; I was being transported by a living creature, rather than a machine. There is much to be said for examining the past—but to dwell on it? I don’t see the point.
I do, however, see the need for greater efforts to preserve information. Yet the amount of it continues to grow. And who has a say in what gets preserved? Do we save the records of every social media account, in addition to books, films, songs, and all the other creations that make up the corpus of human culture? Sometimes, social media feels like writing a diary that someone will never read. I understand that isn’t the reason people keep a diary, but once that person is gone, so is much of their information.
There’s no harm in someone buying vinyl records, or enjoying past technologies. We humans are odd creatures, after all, with odd obsessions—like me constantly archiving and updating my data in the digital cloud, or on local hard drives. That information means something to me, and like a creature all too-aware of its mortality, I try to save such things for as long as I can. Maybe that was how those Sumerian scribes felt, when they carved letters into those tablets millennia ago.
Image credit: Fredy Jacob via Unsplash