Urgently Relevant

 

I started keeping an electronic journal around 2008, and would frequently save articles that I wanted to read later. One of the articles I saved was titled Written On the Wind by Stewart Brand. It was about the impermanence of digital media, and that we had to make a concerted effort to archive it and to continually migrate it to new media. I realized that the more effort that you put into this doesn't always have a payoff. It has in my electronic diary because I frequently farm it for information. I used to have an extensive library as well, and I have pared it down over the years, simply because I realized that I didn't re-read or refer to many of the books and that I could easily get the books from a library. 

Here is a (paper) diary entry from 20 years ago:

8/7/2000

Prediction: People will eventually get sick of downloading entertainment. You'll have 10,000 files on your hard drive and not use any of it. You'll want to go out and see a film or a concert and not have to have a copy of it.

Recently there was an article about a Hollywood research library packed into over a thousand boxes looking for a home, ideally to be digitized and put online. But who will do this?

This was an interesting comment: “Everyone thinks you can find everything on the internet, but you can’t; you can only find the things that someone has put there.”  

But even if it's there, how often will someone look for it? 

What makes a library or any information universe resilient is daily use and connecting it to other things (consilient). We have thought that the Internet would have been the biggest library ever, but it really isn't. What you want is a library of things that are relevant to your life and that you can connect in some logical way. 

What I never liked about ebooks is that they don't have spines that can be placed on a shelf. Very often when I go to a library to look for a book, I'm always looking at the other books around it, and taking those out and not the book I was looking for. Hypertext does this as well, but usually that hypertext information also has hypertext within it, so attention is always unmoored and not necessarily making any relevant connections. But anyone that does any research these days couldn't just use print materials-- although you could probably write something that relied on print materials only. Even if you had a large library yourself, and it was the only one that you had access to in a cabin in the wilderness, you could probably write an interesting book. (And there certainly are!) There has always been some form of hypertext before we had the actual hypertext. The brain naturally wants to connect information and will find some way of doing it with the resources available.

As an artist, I have stopped making objects in a similar way that I have pared down my library. One of the great things about music is that it doesn't necessarily have to be connected with an object. As a creative person, I can get just as much satisfaction from writing a song and creating a lead sheet or score, as making a painting. When I create digital art, I now see it as a “plan” or “blueprint” for placing on a physical object--not unlike using a recipe to make a dish that you like. Each iteration is slightly different,  but mostly the same result.

***

Part of the reason that history repeats in ways that we don't want it to is that we have chosen to forget what had been in our collective libraries and collective wisdom, and we decided to pare it down because it wasn't relevant. But even if you kept everything and had access to either a physical copy or digital version, it has to be made relevant in some way. Making the relevance is where all the hard work is. And like the digital assets that continually have to be migrated, that relevance also has to be migrated and accessible to future generations. 

Every once in awhile younger generations will go back and sort through what was left behind. I did a lot of that years ago with my family photographs--scanning, cataloging, blogging about the photographs. But in the end, not many people really cared. The best thing about the internet is that it keeps things relevant enough in order to be accessed when people want the information. If it wasn't for my taking an interest as a photographer in my family's photographs, none of that information would have ever been available--including what I thought were excellent "embed" photojournalist photos from World War II.

What amateur archivists do which is really useful is to add metadata--what was once just a caption on the back of a photo. And not many people actually did this even when there were print photographs. Who would take the time to describe every photograph in a time when more people had cameras and we're making lots of prints and putting them in boxes, (which is exactly what I have). 

But even the few people that take the time to archive and tell the stories can make a difference in the future. They are the people that provide relevance. 

***

Here is my piece from 2010 titled Residuum, which again has relevance. It's a topic that we keep revisiting, and I think that is a good thing to do. Our brains are wired to forget if there is no urgency. But I think now at this point in history, knowing history is urgent.

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Residuum

(9/18/2010)

Things became important because they required significant effort to design and print books, make films, write symphonies, etc. Each of these forms became gradually easier with use of technology and consequently became less appreciated because they could be generated at will. Now that cameras are cheap and ubiquitous anyone can be a photographer. Rock Band gives us the impression that we are good musicians. These feelings seem righteous, but not relative to what they were fifty, or even ten years ago. We can conjure relevancy whenever we want. Things also achieve importance by the confluence of interest, demand and financial resources, with the internet giving it extra resilience. But what if there is no internet, or a very limited one? And if the photo print, printed book or other old media have already been cashiered to the media scrapyards, there may be huge gaps in cultural memory, or replaced with myths, rumor, and conspiracy. The yardstick with which we measure cultural relevance changes from generation to generation. For example, it is agreed that Beethoven is important just on the basis of its accumulated importance, regardless of our appreciation of his music. It is conceivable that the appreciation or knowledge of Beethoven may become a mere Cliffs Note in another generation. By the same token, Beethoven may enjoy a resurgence in another twenty years, with more people interested in going to the symphony to hear his works. But even if that is true, will the resources and talent be there to meet the demand? We can say the same thing about lots of obsolete industries and professions that rely heavily on honed skills: Without use, they atrophy and die off similar to the way languages die if not used.

The longer something propagates within culture the more it is likely to survive, and become mimetic. Even a mere Wikipedia article can preserve cultural icons insofar as the information is easily accessible on the net. Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and any additional future technologies will increase the survivability of these memes. Remix culture has been very instrumental in preservation of certain elements of culture, even though they are usually bereft of original context. While Remix may not have historical authority, it at least saves it from complete obscurity. For all the artifacts that we think will define our culture, in a thousand years may reduce to a mere smattering, pieced together by archaeologists and anthropologists. We now find a vase, a necklace, pottery from an ancient civilization, but in another millennium, we’ll find bits of electronics, aluminum parts from cars and appliances, etc. Seeing these types of things in a museum causes one to contemplate what a museum visitor in 3010 will be thinking about when looking at the electronic cuneiform of our culture, oblivious to all the knowledge that once existed in a data cloud, then only referenced in a caption: “Their society relied on the fragile nature of electronic data, and was lost forever. Now we can only posit what might have existed in that cloud”. What we stored in the cloud will be the equivalent paradox of the pyramids, with huge parts of the narrative difficult to reconcile, with lots of missing or broken pieces. What did the people of 2010 think was important? What story will the residuum tell?