New Media and Social Memory

Filed under: Digital Information — mike @ 12:19 pm

Yesterday, I attended an excellent symposium sponsored by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive called “New Media and Social Memory.” CNet published an article yesterday that covers some of the topics discussed. I thoroughly enjoyed most of the speakers, but was most impressed by Bruce Sterling’s keynote presentation on the Dead Media Project. Not only was the subject matter exceptionally thoughtful and detailed, but his presentation style was highly engaging, to the point of itself being performance art.

A recurring topic of the day was how our culture is becoming more and more digital over time, and the risk imposed by our inability to properly preserve the information we are creating. In his presentation, Sterling warned that our laptops were like sinkholes of information (I can’t remember the exact words or comparison): the hardware and software can and will become obsolete, and before that the hardware may fail at any time. The risk of obsolescence is compounded by the fact that we trust our machines with more and more valuable (at least to ourselves) information.

In my mind, this isn’t just a case for regularly backing up your data — everyone should be doing that anyway. It also emphasizes the importance of storing our information in a way that is open and easily accessible, and that allows it to be easily copied from one location to another. Too many pieces of software store your information in proprietary formats which only they can read. Stewart Brand, the President of the Long Now Foundation, based his talk on a presentation he made in 1992. When he tried to revive the file it was saved in, he found that most of it (all except snippets of text) was lost because the software had since become obsolete. Without using more open standards, we will have the same problem fifteen years from now with the information we’re creating today.

One of the motivations behind SPUD is to reduce the risk of data loss due to technical obsolescence. This is accomplished by encouraging applications to store their data using open standards, and making it readily available for other applications to process. It also simplifies archiving data to avoid catastrophic losses in the event of hardware failure.