He lies like a rug: Digitising memory

I built the first electronic digital computer and the prototype was finished up in October or November 1939.

John Vincent Atanasoff

He lies like a rug.

J. Presper Eckert (Shurkin 1996:93)

Reading about the proto-World Wide Web history of the Internet is like being caught in a Monty Python sketch. Harvard scientists, rather than Yorkshiremen, fight an intense battle to prove that they were there at the impoverished beginning, the real beginning - rather than a pseudo-scientific run to the U.S. Patent Office - and that other physicists, mathematicians and writers lie like a rug. Books have been written about the origins of computer-mediated communication. The most bizarre and fascinating is Joel Shurkin’s Engines of the Mind (1996), which features eleven chapters – each of which could be the ‘origin’ of the Internet. Pinpointing historical beginnings, like endings, is a messy business. Contestations over remembering and forgetting continue at the digital frontier.

David Lowenthal, just fifteen years ago, argued that the past is a foreign country. (1985) Increasingly though, it is the present that is becoming a tourist destination. The most significant analytical task for contemporary critics is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the now: inevitable technological change and progress. Only then, may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. This article investigates how digitisation challenges not only knowledge workers such as archivists and librarians, but raises the dilemma of obsolescence and the role of nostalgia in policy decisions.

Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, may have inequalities reified through the digital archiving of contemporary life. It is difficult and probably impossible to assess the impact of computer-mediated communication on society, broadly and ambiguously defined. There is little evidence to suggest that the Internet has made a difference to poverty or political powerlessness. As Jillian Dellit has argued, ‘the colonisation of Australia did not have to uphold democracy. The colonisation of cyberspace does not have to uphold let alone extend democracy’ (1999). The poverty line is being reinforced, rather than collapsed, by the information line.

While considering notions of popular memory, this article suggests that digitisation is actually and actively reinforcing the social exclusions of the analogue world. Obviously, the rhetorical flourishes of the Internet serve to unsettle and question notions of community and otherness. Therefore, it is easier – analytically, theoretically and politically – to determine technology as the primary marker of change. Notions of preservation, cataloguing and the structure of knowledge need to be assessed in the contemporary intellectual environment. The key theory of the Internet yet to be articulated is the history of the silences, not only what is not being mentioned, but also who is not in the conversation.

Building the prototype, and other clichés

The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment, pleasure and education. The ideologies of the analogue, invoking constant, subtle movement and continuity, are defined against the discontinuous, binarised structure of digitisation. The two states – on/off – are triggered by the profound simplicity of the binary-based computer language: 0 and 1. In reified – Shelleyfied - frameworks, digitisation may appear to be a neomodernist manifestation of scientific discourse, but this new world order has major advantages. Digital information is flexible, networkable and dense. These characteristics simplify into the clichéd term of our time: convergence.

While seeming to solve myriad problems of inter-media transference, the extent of digitisation in the contemporary environment can be over-stated. Technological obsolescence is a major concern, but so is useability. It will be several years, and perhaps a decade, before videodisc technology is able to surpass the convenience and economy of analogue tapes. As Tony Feldman has suggested, ‘while the future may well belong to thoroughbred digital systems, right now it is a question of satisfying today’s need with today’s technology’ (1997: 38). The transformation of analogue media into bits and bytes often appears as a commonsensical, inevitable formation. In response, libraries, offices, archives and educational establishments are altering their budget and training structures.

The institutions that store, trade or teach information are being moulded by digitisation generally, and the Internet specifically. While the binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data, meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Yet theorists need to ask more useful questions, rather than allow applications to mask processes. A significant query, for example, explores who is using this material and why. The internet is like a rapier that slices through the political boundaries of national policies. Once more the clichés emerge, of change, revolution, movement and motion. While the Internet is a wide-ranging social phenomenon, its uses are frequently reduced to e-mail and the most basic of search engines. Critical skills in information research and on-line communication are lacking.

A socio-technical approach, such as that instigated through Social Informatics (1998), provides modes of thought and meaning for the challenges of digitalisation. Information is not useful until it is accessible. Libraries, archives and museums are sites dedicated to classifying, storing and preserving cultural materials. The Dewey Decimal Classification scheme and the Library of Congress subject headings are being used to classify web-based resources. However the English language dominates the directory system, and Cyberstacks (1999) are still ‘stacked’ through national allegiances. Nineteenth century modes of organising space and time are ordering the World Wide Web.

The lie of the rug

The uneven nature of web search engines increases the vulnerability of digital information. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application. Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day.(1999) The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government’s PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum that may lay undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyphics carved on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now (1999).

Much information, particularly in governmental and university settings, is currently being released only in a digital form. If this material is lost, then significant ‘documentary heritage’ (PADI 1999) will be absent from the historical record. The speed of digitisation means that the responsibility for preserving information, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. Major structural problems confront the archivist. Inadvertent destruction of, or tampering with, data is matched with little systematic documentation of change.

An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. Qualitative criteria construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. Institutions will validate particular information over others. Archivists and librarians have always made these decisions. However the time frame by which these choices are being enacted in the digital environment is shortened. The media’s instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions. The scale of preservation is also far more encompassing. If a hypertext document is preserved, then the links must be maintained to grant the interactivity, context and affectivity of the site. A digital document without hyperlinks does not present the capacity of the medium.

A far more profound question is who has the responsibility for preserving digital information. While the Australian government site argues that ‘creators of digital objects have the initial and in some cases a continuing role in preserving access to them,’(PADI 1999) this is a naïve expectation. Without refreshing or migrating the data, digital information can only be displayed and used through hardware that is continually tumbling into obsolescence. Therefore, the creators/preservers of these texts would also need to establish a collection of archaic computer systems, to ‘guarantee’ the survival of documents created on them. It is technological obsolescence that is the primary problem facing archivists.

For example, I still own my first laptop computer, bought in 1991. It is an Olivetti M316. It functions, although the battery no longer does. It has a 40 MB hard drive, which is not large enough to install a current version of Windows 98, let alone the ability to use the Windows environment to prepare documents. That is probably quite fortunate, as the ‘F’ key does not work, and most of the letters on the keyboard have been scratched off through excessive use. There is no possibility or space for a modem connection. It does, however, have an expansion slot that is filled with the full-card for my Hewlett Packard flat-bed scanner of the same period. It only scans in black and white, and in enormous TIF files, rather than JPEG or GIF. I actually maintained this computer, existing alongside my Sharp PC-M200, until February 2000, because I needed the scanning technology, and had not yet bought a scanner for my new computer. Once this hardware was bought, the Olivetti computer and scanner became redundant and was ‘taken over’ by my father, who is teaching himself to use computers through Winders 3.1 and Word 5. He is managing the technology very well, placing marked stickers over the keys without letters. The ‘F’ still is causing problems.

Between my current computer and the Olivetti, I owned an X-Press 420. The hard drive on this computer had a ‘melt down’ in April 1998, and five of the keys – the F (there is a trend here), G, S, L and O, did not work. This computer was still ‘living’ in my house for the year after it was replaced. I would not throw it away, even though it could not even be switched on. My inability to dispose of it had nothing to do with sentiment. In fact, I had a profound hatred for this machine, triggered by the aforementioned ‘stuck keys’ and the timing of the meltdown – just as semester started for the year. Even though I felt this computer was the digital equivalent of Damien, son of Satan, I could not throw something that that cost me $5 570 into the weekly garbage collection. Thankfully (well sort of), I did not have to bring myself to dispose of this computer, and I gained my revenge on the digital nightmare. Burglars robbed my house last December. Quite wonderfully, they took the obsolete computer that will not even power up for them. I do not know for whom I feel more sorry: my old computer or the burglars who will have to cope with the damn thing.

The point of this story is that these three computers chart the tale of my intellectual life over nine years. These machines contain documents and images that can only be read on this hardware, because of obsolete word processing and scanning programs. If this ‘problem’ of obsolescence is magnified to a national – and then an international – level, it is clear that no library or governmental institution could store this range of technological support systems for digital data

Questions of information transfer

Digital material is fragile. While migration allows the digital information to be transferred between hardware and software configurations, there are intellectual property rights and questions of copyright law which result from this movement. The profound uncertainties derived from the preservation of digital documents are undermining the enormous potential that digitisation offers for disseminating data. Textual, numeric, pictorial, video, sound, multimedia and simulation will necessitate different preservation tactics. While the ASCII character sets allow standardised character mapping, there are documents where these codes are not representative, such as those involving formulae or multiple languages. Once more, an (over) emphasis on English is serving to reduce the presence of other languages in the archived and preserved digital environment.

The consequences of digitisation are that the information industries, and the professionals trained in them, hold enormous responsibilities. They are moulding and shaping the future of the past. This process has always taken place in the analogue world: the archive has never been a neutral formation. Previously though, there were myriad alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the blind spots of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the ‘trash’ of a culture. A light sabre, toy Dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera – the texture and light – of the analogue world. That task is left to popular cultural experts. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture.

The tactility of popular cultural sources is already lacking from the historian’s database of the post-war period. This absence will be exacerbated through digitisation. Even a scanned colour image of a talking Stone Cold Steve Austin is not an adequate – or perhaps even meaningful – representation of the three-dimensional cultural figure. As the Australian Society of Archivists has recorded, ‘archivists ensure that records which have value as authentic evidence of administrative, corporate, cultural and intellectual activity are made, kept and used.’(1999) There are ethical questions invoked through the preservation of digital documents. Ephemeral material, by definition, is transitory. Digital ephemera are merely an enhancement of the principle.

Disempowered groups will have their voices, writing, entertainment and pleasures decentred through digital sources. This is not only an ethical question, but also a political concern. The stresses on archivists are enormous: gaining the space and financial support for analogue-based preservation is difficult. Archives, as ‘one of a kind information sources,’(Understanding and using archives 1999) are person or organisation specific. It means that the ephemera of popular culture will be lost unless organisations like Sony Music, Phillips, Mushroom Records, Lucas Enterprises and the World Wrestling Federation actively archive their history. But, as Peter Lyman revealed, ‘as information loses its commercial values, it is unlikely that commercial rights-holders will subsidise its continued existence’ (1999).

Libraries, as institutions of the public sphere, have a role in furthering an informed citizenry. How this process will be maintained through a networked, digitised environment, where the disadvantaged are further excluded and unconnected, remains a site of debate and discussion. Tony Barry, while a self-described ‘patchy seer,’ (1999) predicts the long-term survival of a hybrid library, of both paper and bytes. The library building is a symbol of public life and community-based culture. As public institutions, libraries provide a framework for the formation of social relationships. Lyman recognised that ‘the “digital” library is still a metaphor, not yet a social institution.’(1999)

Of greater interest and concern for organisations placing (too) much budgeting emphasis on the digital future, is information from the United States showing that former internet users outnumber current users. While Universities, schools, libraries and archives place great time and finance into internet literacies, the World Wide Web is unable to maintain long-term interest for those actually and actively utilising hypertext.

Digital forgetfulness

Digital awareness, while growing, does not counter the rhetoric of the Internet’s egalitarian ethos. The phrase ‘virtual communities’ mobilises boundaries that mask legal, physical, social, linguistic, religious and ethnic affiliations. Symbols can be disempowering or enabling, allowing some groups to express meaning, while disenfranchising others. Communities claim interpretative frameworks, and seek out surroundings that are filled with symbols in which they are literate. Those who are poor, old, young or a member of a minority, have few resources or iconographic databases within responsive environments.

The ideology of a digital revolution makes possible the reproduction and dissemination of cultural symbols. Like the agrarian and industrial societies, the informatic age is determined through the primary commodity of exchange. This will leave communities with few resistive options in the increasingly capitalised and commodified information economy. As Nils Zurawski has suggested, ‘the value of the Internet as a means of resistance will have to be proven in the future.’(1996) Access to the digital realm, and the development of literacies in the computer-mediated communication, is the most significant issue to address.

The new virtual middle classes are dangerous to democracy because egalitarianism is the marinade of the Web. Feldman offers an off/back hand corrective to this pseudo-utopia. The global reality is that 60 per cent of the world’s population has never made a phone call and more than 50 per cent could not do so because of a lack of phone lines. So, while we glibly agree that the telephone is the most widely available form of network technology in the world, we should – in a small corner of our minds – remember the privileged position from which we make such judgments (1997: 76).

Discussions of the massive potential bandwidth of cable over the telephone network are not tempered by social justice concerns, and only occupy a ‘small corner of our minds.’ Internet access is dominated by affluent, employed men, under the age of thirty five (Liff and Watt). The information rich and poor is a new division of societal disadvantaged that overlays the old. Class remains an undertheorised variable in Internet Studies. Clearly though, those with access to networks, on-line fora and cable television are off-set by those citizens who do not possess regular use of a telephone. Telecommunication firms in the United States for example, bypass minority areas. With digitisation fortifying already existing inequalities, the future of ephemera in the digital age will remain underdiscussed in the preservation discourse. Feldman predicted that ‘the future, therefore, is digital.’(1997: 38) This statement may be true, but that truth may cost us a popular memory of the past.

Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Archivists, librarians and academics are pivotal arbiters of public value and taste. Samuel Florman stated that ‘in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?’ (1997: fulltext). The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue conservation, will never represent plural paths through the past. There is always a limit to what is acceptable obsolescence.

Whenever considering the future of memory, digital or otherwise, I remember a comment made by my (nearly) seventy year old mother. She rarely travels in aeroplanes – and I am terrified of heights – but in one of our few flights together she made a remarkable statement. While I sat perched on an aisle seat, with gaze averted from the view and attention placed on anything except my disgruntled stomach, she happily watched the clouds racing by the window. Her thoughts were drawn to the past as much as the future. Half way through the journey from Perth to Sydney, and after looking out the window for about three hours, she said, ‘You know Tara, people have to die, or else the changes would kill them.’

Perhaps that is the greatest fear of digitisation. Will the mind of the analogue age ‘die’? Are the changes – or the rhetoric of change - killing the passion, humour and affectivity of our time? By revelling in the play of progress and technophilia, we must also monitor the digital future of the popular cultural past.

The above article first appeared in Media International Australia No. 96 – August 2000 and is reprinted with permission.

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Tara Brabazon (PhD) is Seniuor Lecturer and Programme Chair of Communication Studies ion the School of Media, Communication and Culture of Murdoch University, Western Australia. Her field is cultural studies with specialiost interests in television and popular, and cultural difference and diversity. She can be contacted at: tbrabazo@central.murdoch.edu.au