Your Permanent Record Isn’t
Comments: 3
I let all of my magazine subscriptions lapse some time ago but a kind and thoughtful friend keeps me supplied on a fairly regular basis with copies of Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly as well as Esquire, GQ and Wired (one ought to stay abreast of the decline of one’s civilisation after all). Wired has toned down its hype-addled techno-boosterism considerably, but is still capable of publishing some refreshingly stupid and short-sighted things, such as this opinion piece from Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch (it appears in issue 11.08).
“Your Permanent Record” is a response to an earlier opinion piece in the magazine (issue 11.02) by novelist Jim Lewis called “Memory Overload in which Lewis cautions against the true usefulness of the “uninflected cataract” of ubiquitous representation that springs from our ability to digitally record seemingly everything. Despite the somewhat panicky title (possibly the work of an editor although it doesn’t matter), Lewis’s article is a calm and non-polemical acknowledgement of a contemporary phenomenon which deserves serious consideration (and we can forget the whole philosophy of memory angle for now — it’s the mechanical preservation of recordings that immediately interests me). There’s plenty to argue with in Lewis’s story (“When it was rare and expensive, mechanical memory swamped the real thing; what you most vividly recalled from your vacation wasn’t necessarily the most striking part, but what you had the best picture of” — quite untrue as far as I’m concerned), but his subject is serious and well addressed, even in the meagre handful of paragraphs allotted.
“Recently,” Vaskevitch writes, “Jim Lewis suggested in this space that the ability to store ever more digital artifacts would lead to a form of forgetting.” Actually Lewis suggests no such thing, and is explicitly ambivalent about the phenomenon he’s describing:
Whether this is a boon or a disaster I can’t say. Such subtle patterns in the history of human experience tend to escape that kind of judgment. But the result is a telling contradiction: Our culture has become engulfed in its past and can make no use of it at all.
Vaskevitch goes on:
He also suggested that traditional techniques of gathering memories such as paper photographs not only avoided this overload problem [wrong again] but added a kind of patina of nostalgia as the pictures faded and cracked.
At this point I’m starting to imagine a lovely irony: did Vaskevitch really read Lewis’s article or did he paste it into a window and click “Summarize”? If there’s a victim of memory overload here (and think about how much the CTO of Microsoft has to get through each day — it must be one worm after another), then it may well be Vaskevitch. But I snarkily digress.
With the condescending smugness that vested interest and imperviousness to argument instill, he then says
What a scary thought: Not only do the memories that we’ve chosen to document degrade, but this is supposed to be a privilege! In fact, memory - the ability to record, store, organize, play back, expand, edit, and elicit experiences - is the future of computing. What we need is more memory, plus better software tools to manage this abundance.
Ah, OK — more memory and better software. This is alright because it’s the kind of thing that Microsoft’s CTO is supposed to say. But again, Lewis’s material is far more nuanced and interesting:
What’s missing is a cadence, a play of values, or a respect for the way loss informs our experience of time.
What a beautiful sentence, a novelist’s sentence, the kind of sentence you can take with you on holiday if you find you don’t have room in your bag for another book. (In fact it’s about nothing less than what’s kept many novelists busy these last 2 hundred or so years.)
But I didn’t really want to set up a CTO-versus-novelist situation (where’s the contest in that?) so let’s get back to Vaskevitch’s vision of the digital shoe box.
Not everybody uses a word processor or a spreadsheet or even email - but everybody takes snapshots. If you’re like me, you have them stored in a shoe box. Finding one in particular used to take a full day of sorting by hand.
This would obviously depend on how organised or eidetic you are. Being more of the latter I can get away with being less of the former, but adjust the ratio accordingly and you should be fine.
Vaskevitch believes that
Your computer will be your shoe box - one with a storage capacity approaching the largest paper-and-ink archive on earth. And ferreting out every picture of Granny at your daughter’s graduation will become a matter of simply setting a few parameters in Photo Find and pressing Return.
and that
Photos will categorize themselves “automagically” and provide us with a second memory system - a backup for our brains - that eventually will be, in its own way, as powerful as the first.
Ignoring for now the untold hours of manually readjusting our system’s “automagically” imposed categories and keywords, this all sounds great. I use a cataloguing application to keep track of photographs I’ve shot digitally or scanned and I love it.
Until my computer crashes or the application loses data or the hard drive becomes corrupted. Then I will hate it.
The trouble with storing such large amounts of data is, of course, backing them up. But this is a minor inconvenience to the media issue.
In junior high school I wrote computer programmes on cards where squares corresponding to characters were filled in with a thick black pencil. The carefully ordered stack of cards representing the programme was placed in a hopper and flicked through the computer to be read into memory. Needless to say, those programs are lost: even if I had kept the stacks of cards, how would I read them now (leaving aside the question of why I would want to in these particular instances)?
In the 12 years since I’ve seriously been using computers again, I’ve been through 3 other format deaths; floppy disks, Zip disks and Jaz drives (yes … I fell for these Gillette razors of storage). People who have been using computers longer than me have probably been through more. But wait, you’re saying, these formats are not dead. That’s technically true, but they’re dead to me. I no longer own a floppy drive (my wife has an external one because her publisher occasionally sends things on FD — call it a corporate legacy). I have years of projects on FD and getting them off the disks is not going to be fun. But time is running out so it will have to be done at some point. The problem of course is by no means limited to digital photography — it applies to digital anything.
What happens to your photograph collection when today’s CDs and DVDs are superseded? You have to go through the entire collection and transfer the contents to new a new medium. Rinse and repeat when that new medium becomes obsolete (or even before that when the current one starts to oxidise).
Compare this to the fact that I can take a negative I shot more than 20 years ago to a photo kiosk in almost any country in the world today and come back for prints less than an hour later. And it doesn’t even have to be a negative. You can easily get prints from prints and many places can retouch them to boot.
There are plenty of other howlers in Vaskevitch’s article (“We’ll have our digital memory managers by the decade’s end. And it won’t be Jim Lewis’ ‘memory overload.’ Au contraire; overload is a problem created by physicality, by pictures in a book, prints in an album, slides in a box, negatives in an envelope.” — aargh! How many ways is this wrong!?) but enough already. It’s simply another case of either/or thinking not getting us any further down the track. Preservation can’t rely solely on digital solutions any more than a healthy diet can rely solely on carrots.
The trick is to hedge your bets, round things out, be careful, and be ready to lose it all (as one day every one of us inevitably will). Get too excited about living in some eternal present where the past never dies and you’re bound to be disappointed (and minus a dimension). Our real home lies somewhere in what Lewis calls “the distance between now and then.”
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.08.18 (Mon) • 23:49
Comments
Posted by Bob Corporaal 2003.08.19, 18:36
Nice rant :) Exactly the same thing I was thinking when I read the column. Seems like a very typical Microsoft approach to the problem. Just technology, no thinking about the values behind it.
Posted by beth 2003.08.23, 05:13
very nice rant, indeed. plenty of food for thought, and i very much like your take on (im)permanence and memory. thanks for good words to read!
Posted by csz 2003.09.20, 14:48
As a genealogist I completely identify, and for desert I love the words for themselves. Rant on!
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