It occurs to me that I have not memorized my mother or father’s phone numbers. If all my contacts got deleted one day I would not have anyway of reaching anyone. In times where our most valuable info is in a volatile digital space, sometimes thinking about the simplicity of storage of objects in the physical world is surprising. The management and preservation of physical mementos does not seem to generate major anxiety. (Petrelli & Whittaker) The persistence and the sense of security associated with physical mementos clearly contrasts with the perceived fragility of the digital. Preserving physical tokens of children’s memories requires an effort in terms of selection but does not require becoming a large scale curator. In 30 years time, the collage might have lost a bit of colour, but its essence will be preserved. The same cannot be said of digital mementos. They demand more organizational effort, and attention has to be paid to move digital objects from old unused computers and migrate old files to new formats. Thus, while preservation from technical breakdown is anticipated, long-term preservation is viewed with trepidation. (Petrelli & Whittaker)"Difficulties in preserving digital information is focused on the longevity of the physical media on which the information is stored. Even under the best storage conditions, however, digital media can be fragile and have limited shelf life. Moreover, new devices, processes and software are replacing the products and methods used to record, store, and retrieve digital information on breathtaking cycles of 2- to 5- years. Given such rates of technological change, even the most fragile media may well outlive the continued availability of readers for those media. Efforts to preserve physical media thus provide only a short-term, partial solution to the general problem of preserving digital information. Indeed, technological obsolescence represents a far greater threat to information in digital form than the inherent physical fragility of many digital media.”(The Commission on Preservation and Access). For business, planned obsolescence is integral to making a profit. The life expectancy of digital media may be as little as ten years, but very few hardware platforms or software programs last that long. Indeed, Microsoft only supports its software for about five years (Rosenzweig). The different types of files into different places are also factors in digital preservation; there is a sense of complexity towards it as well. The organization of digital mementos is done around specific media: photos on external hard drives, videos on DVDs, emails zipped away, digital artifacts in several folders. This organization contrasts with that seen with physical objects which follows the logic of time (objects of the same era) or topic (objects about the same event or person) tend to be co-located.There are often work and family computers, several phones with images, clips and text, and possibly external storage media (DVDs, CDs). This makes up a multitude of devices that contain digital mementos for which the owners do not have a clear map of what is where.( Petrelli & Whittaker).“The central weakness of current digital mementos is that they are inaccessible and not well integrated into everyday life. As a result they are forgotten, even by people who have invested countless hours in creating, collecting and organising them, being seldom invoked except on special occasions. Their inaccessibility leads to unfortunate consequences. Unlike physical mementos, they cannot be distributed in different locations around the house to express and elicit different styles of remembering. Instead of being seen and discussed by guests in public spaces, reinforcing family memories in the kitchen, or supporting personal reminiscence in an office or study, they are locked in the computer. Certain other things follow from this lack of integration. They aren’t encountered on a daily basis, and organised or sifted according to their value. And the fact that they are locked into the computer means that they can’t be appropriated to express symbolic meanings through new uses, instead they are constrained to the simple representation of events and people.” (Petrelli & Whittaker) The meanings of physical mementos can actually change overtime, in a way that the digital space cannot change. For example, if you have a certain bike from your childhood, over time the bike may rust more and more and you are made aware of the passage of time. The meaning of that bike changes, as it and you get older, you get to see it age as you age and you may realize how old you have become. Digital mementos do not allow you to have the same experience. If you had a picture of this bike on your computer, you do not get the experience of seeing it age and its meaning actually changes. Regarding the placement of physical mementos, being aware of the placement is an experience unlike digital mementos. Knowing the actual place of physical mementos and that those spaces are exclusively for those mementos, such as a basement, makes you think about the mementos if you are in the space (the basement) simply because you are near them. When it comes to preservation on a laptop for example, the multiple uses of a laptop makes it harder to pay attention to the placement of digital mementos than it is to be aware of physical mementos in a particular space. Although I have thousands of pictures that I value as great memories I haven’t looked at them since the day I put them on my computer. I feel an anxiety that it isn’t organized how I want it to be and looking at it will make me want to organize it better. Viewed developmentally, the problem of preserving digital information for the future is not only, or even primarily, a problem of fine tuning a narrow set of technical variables. It is not a clearly defined problem like preserving the embrittled books that are self-destructing from the acid in the paper on which they were printed. Rather, it is a grander problem of organizing ourselves over time and as a society to maneuver effectively in a digital landscape. It is a problem of building -- almost from scratch -- the various systematic supports, or deep infrastructure, that will enable us to tame anxieties and move our cultural records naturally and confidently into he future (The Commission on Preservation and Access) Uncertainty and lack of confidence about our will and ability to carry digital information forward into the future exert a major inhibiting force in our disposition to fully exploit the digital medium to generate, publish and disseminate information. (The Commission on Preservation and Access) There needs to be a simpler way of preserving all things digital and for a prolonged period of time, regardless of the ever-changing software and hardware updates.
Petrelli, Daniela, and Steve Whittaker. "Family Memories in the Home: Contrasting Physical and Digital Mementos." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 14.2 (2010): 153-69. Web. <http://people.ucsc.edu/~swhittak/papers/photos_in_home.pdf>.
Works Cited
The Commission on Preservation and Access, and The Research Libraries Group, comps. Preserving Digital Information. Birmingham, Ala.: Ebsco Subscription Services, 2000. Web. <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/reports/pub63watersgarrett.pdf>.
Petrelli, Daniela, and Steve Whittaker. "Family Memories in the Home: Contrasting Physical and Digital Mementos." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 14.2 (2010): 153-69. Web. <http://people.ucsc.edu/~swhittak/papers/photos_in_home.pdf>.
Rosenzweig, Roy. "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era." (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 22 Feb. 2015. <http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/pdf/introduction/0.6b.pdf>.
--Ahmed