Our reading for this week seemed to stress the impermanence of digital formats, and for good reason – it’s already become hard to reconstruct files from the obsolete systems and bizarre programs of a decade or two ago, and yes, the medium of an archive changes at least its user experience, if not its broad philosophical scope. But I wonder whether some of it is technophobia masquerading as authorial panic.

I’m not an archivist, but I like poking around in classical and medieval studies, and so I can’t help but hold our halcyon analog past up to the same scrutiny: there are enough palimpsests out there that the “trouble-free erasure” of videotapes (90) doesn’t necessarily panic me, for example. Paper decays, or molds, or gets destroyed by flood or fire; the Library of Alexandria burned with probably tens of thousands of documents and manuscripts lost (or did it? – because we don’t even have good enough records to know what we lost, or even what century it was lost in. We do, though, have an incomplete but pretty substantial record of e.g. what public and university libraries in New Orleans lost after Hurricane Katrina.)

And as much as “a medieval document on or of parchment indissolubly fuses materiality and message” (88), a good deal of the content – literature, scripture, important letters – was copied, and often altered in the copying, and our trusty, reliable vocalic alphabet system was subject to profound human error in storage and distribution. And, of course, although it’s obviously the case that the sheer amount of data to potentially archive has grown exponentially with the rise of “user-generated content” and the audiovisual medium’s sudden entrance into legitimacy, the production of paper material was rapidly reaching that point as well before the switch to digital storage. I’m not sure I buy, at all, the “difference between the effects of Renaissance print and contemporary computer technologies” (122), or at the very least I want to also seriously look at that summary’s limitations, how reductive it is to the many print and literacy culture(s) there have been. And in fact Ernst seems to move to acknowledge this, before wandering off elsewhere: “of course there is a constant and permanent movement between the media-archaeological layers of writing.”

(Plus, of course, material degradation aside, learning paleography to actually read a medieval hand – and what is that if it’s not being able to access the information in the outdated medium it’s stored in – is as tricky to anyone working more than a few centuries out as finding the floppy drive or creating a virtual machine for an obsolete file is to a technology specialist.)

In case anyone else needs to wash their mouth out with a shot of technology after having read all of that meandering around the problems of the medieval archive, now you too can be the sort of person who reads about ISO standards for the PDF/A long-term archival file format. I like the standards they suggest for digital preservation: a file format designed for long-term use should be device-independent, self-contained, self-documenting, unfettered, publicly available, and widely adopted. This is the sort of practicality that I think broad-reaching claims about the authoritativeness or underlying assumptions of “cyberspace” tend to miss: rather than saying, for example, “the Internet can’t transmit the semantic content of pauses and silences,” we could say, yes, that’s true, but has any archive ever been able to do that? And if it’s important, how might we try to archive that? (My inner cranky tech hipster wants very badly to point out that data transfer — in particular of, say, film or audiovisual material — is probably a lot less “incapable of transmitting noninformation” (139) than, say, paper. )

In “Saving Private Reels: Archival Practices and Digital Memories (Formerly Known as Home Movie) in the Digital Age,” Susan Aasman defines cinema as “the perfect instrument for making a record of fleeting moments, of time itself” and describes the movement from the archive’s pre-modern concern with evidence to its post-modern concern with collective memory (245, 247). This new digital archive, with a “‘democratic’ spirit” that reveals the “inner life of people,” can be seen today in social media applications such as Instagram and Vine. Through these two specific applications, individual users can post short videos (as well as photos), typically taken on their smart phones, to their network of “followers” and any public audience that they may allow to view their content. Each clip is a ‘digital memory’—of a home-cooked dinner with friends, a drunk night at the club, a Sunday hike with the dog, grandma’s 75^th birthday party, an ephemeral sign seen on a morning commute, or the most recent snow bank formed silently overnight. As an aggregate, these Instagram and Vine accounts are “keeping a record of our lives,” individually and collectively (253). But as Aasman points out, it’s more complicated than the good old days of storing our memories as we would have in a printed photo album or a home movie tape. Purely digital, Instagram and Vine are “fluid archives” (255). They’re open (changing and accumulating constantly), communal and diverse (accessible to many users who can ‘connect’), self-referential (hashtags can be seen as “finding aid[s] in the documents themselves”), and allow for simultaneous collection and reflection  (photos and videos are capture, shared to networks, repopulated on other devices, and stored as data in the same two exchanges) (Ernst 84). As Aasman and Ernst both point out, these “archives” are not designed for long-term storage and memory, but for “immediate reproduction and recycling” (95). The structure and function of Instagram and Vine carry the added goal of communication. In fact, Instagram’s tagline is “Capture and Share the World’s Moments.”

When considering the traditional intention of archives to keep documents as “proof” of events, the temporality of applications such as Instagram and Vine become problematic. If collected documents are always being reproduced (posts can be “re-grammed” or “re-posted” days, months, even years later and show up in today’s “news feed”) and don’t have clear origins (posts do not need to be credited with an original author or date/time—everything pretends real-time “news”), videos on these two applications cannot be trusted to authenticate an event with a specific time and location, especially a “live” event. This seems to be the “permanent broadcast” that Ernst speaks of (111). However, unlike the traditional home video, these digital posts capture the myriads of connections surrounding a particular “document.” The videos aren’t screened to an audience in a concrete location, they shared in cyberspace. Instagram and Vine both have data trails ( or data mazes maybe) that show who posted what when, who liked or commented on particular posts when, and who reproduced the images with their own accounts when. As Aasman describes, using these apps is a practice, each one “a democratized archive that embraces new methods of participatory and collaborative archival work” (255).

The libertarian socialist in me cannot help but think of the political implications of archiving data about networks of users instead of the documents themselves. On my Instagram, I have recently seen videos of organizations and individual activists unionizing adjunct professors, promoting the Fight for 15 campaigns to raise fast food workers’ wages, and celebrating MLK Day by protesting against police militarization. Historians and archivists may not always have the benefit of hunting down “original copies” of protest clips or the “first instance of instant replay” of a poet performing on the National Mall, but they may someday (legal and copyright ownership pending) have a list of usernames that connect to individual IP addresses and the timestamp for when those IP addresses connected . Using metadata, archivists may be able to track how the NAACP or Fight for 15 campaign shared information in 2015. Furthermore, Instagram and Vine as archives could include, similar to a record of written correspondences, the representational network of individuals who may have attended a protest. We can see who is responsible for archiving our cultural heritage, which may in fact be more valuable than what’s being collected.

While the videos of the real-life actions are a “performative form of memory,” the metadata from Instagram and Vine could provide pertinent information to an archivist or historian who would like to capture records of who was doing what with whom. If we embrace these new digital spaces as archives of transfer rather than storage, can’t we track the movement of discourse, even if the temporality and document ownership are wonky (Ernst 100)? If the goal of this digital video medium is different than analog media—based on participation in democracy, perhaps—the goal of the archive and the purpose of reviewing the archive itself must be different. The records may become less of a “he said, she said” and more about whose IP address was connecting to whom and why. Does a collected object’s temporal location really matter during an era when every reproduction is “news”?

While reading Aasamn’s Saving Private Reels, I’m interested in the four successive archival frameworks: archive relating to the state-an institution of power; archive representing a more historical perspective on the nature of records; archive reflecting society more than before in all its pluralism, diversity, contingent nature; archive collecting documents about the inner life of people. The archives, though evolving separately from raw materials to digital memories in these four different stages, reveal themselves in a way of embracing the four frameworks together with the help of modern technology. The definitions by UNESCO that explains the considerations about the moving images as an archiving tool impressed me a lot as well. The technology has made it possible for films and videos to establish the cultural identity of the public and to “form an integral part of a nation’s cultural heritage”. Storing the moving images, as an important part of digital memory, has reconstructed the way we record our history and culture and built up a new form to voice for the ideas and thoughts not only by professional archivists but also by ourselves, which seems like a victory of “democratic spirit”.

What Ernst has discussed is thought-provoking for me: “…the technology is not an archive”, for “Net archives are a function of their software and transmission protocols rather than of content, to which technology is indifferent” (Ernst). Actually, Aasam also comes up with the similar idea that“…further consideration should be given to recent shifts in memory recording practice and memory archiving practice”. On social network, like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, people prefer to upload audio or video record to track their lives, which are much more vivid and direct than texts, but not all of these records, in my opinion, can’t be regarded as archive, for a certain number of videos are uploaded just out of personal preference and interest. Only by collecting in a logical and technological way, can these self-made multimedia become a rich resource for researchers.

Aasman argues that films go through a long time shifting from collectible items to archives, during which people need to “be willing to hand over their personal material, and archives” and “be willing to accept intimate images that may directly represent public historical events”. It is true that we have to face these problems, while posting the videos of ourselves. Basic historical perspectives on archives and technology skills are both needed in order to better archive the history we live through. My understanding is that it seems that there is still a long way to go to achieve the goal of “archive now makes itself responsible for safekeeping our culture and identity ‘and personal and collective memory” by Aasman, which is presumed to be a whole new dynamic concept of archives.

I’m curious about Ernst’s words “the archival regime is being extended from text to audiovisual data…this extension changes and dissolves the very nature of the archival regime”, which inspires me to reconsider the “nature of archival regime”: namely, does this kind of nature really exist in spite of the developing method of archive? Or the nature of archival regime change itself as time goes by?

There are a number of issues related to “current” digital formats because technology changes so rapidly. When technology is advancing so rapidly and “entire generations of data carriers are made obsolete by hardware developments” (90), how will future generations access these types of digital media? I think this is part of why Ernst believes that the Internet is not, in fact, an archive. “The archive is defined as a given, preselected quantity of documents evaluated according to their worth for being handed down,” he says. “The Internet, on the other hand, is an aggregate of unpredictable texts, sounds, images, data, and programs” (86). If our society is shifting toward a primarily digital interface for communication, however, this raises a lot of questions about the status of “archives” in our society what will happen to the “traditional” archive in the future. It indicates that a number of changes will be necessary in archival procedures/standards in the future if archives are to successfully adapt and evolve significantly in order to remain relevant in the future.

Ernst noted that “it is not the data here, however, but their metadata that are the archival elements” (89). The random assortment of material on the Internet is not organized in any way to construe meaning. It is simply collecting items, but “cyberspace has no meaning” (138). The metadata is required to introduce meaning and context for the assortment of materials on the web. Through the metadata, one can learn far more about the multimedia, why it was shared, who shared it, why it was important to them or why they felt it may be important to others. The metadata proves crucial to defining and “cataloging” the Internet’s contents. I personally am finding writing succinct and informative metadata for digital objects a challenge, in trying to find the best way to both describe the digital item and also explain its digital provenance. In describing the provenance of digital items I’ve been archiving I have certainly found myself contributing to hyperlinkability. While collecting images from the web, in describing them I try to link back to the original source page or to other descriptive media, thus contributing to the “interconnectivity of different media” (119) on my own inconsequential blog. I can see now that in doing this, the emphasis on this digital archiving has indeed shifted to regeneration and I am “(co)producing” by using these materials for my own needs (95). Do my references and descriptions now make this collection of random multimedia “self-operant and self-aware” and does this Tumblr page now constitute “a self-referent archive” (84)?

Ernst argues “the so-called cyberspace is not primarily about memory as a cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication” (99). On sites like Facebook users are not recording memory on their pages for the sake of recording memory. They do so in order to share and communicate their memory and experience to others. Your Facebook friends were not on that vacation with you, but you attempt to document and thus communicate your own memories through your photos, posts, etc. These repositories of one’s personal life experiences are not “final destinations” for memory storage like traditional archives, but are “frequently accessed sites” (99) of communicated memory. If “memory is literally permanently in transition” (97) and constantly being constructed in our digital world, what can accurately be identified as “memory,” and what does this mean for collective memory and the historical cultural record as well? Maybe Ernst is right and the internet “will turn memory itself into an ephemeral, passing drama” (117).

We consider our personal computers, or at least I know I do, as safe and permanent storage for documents, photographs, etc. A lot of Ernst’s arguments made me entirely reevaluate that view, and wonder about the inherent impermanence of digitized items I consider important and worth saving. Ernst says that “your own private computer as a mere temporary holding tank for data, not as a permanent file cabinet” (120). If “cyberspace has no memory” (138) and your personal computer is a “mere temporary holding tank” and a media machine that will soon be obsolete, what would be an actual safe and “permanent file cabinet” or “memory spaces geared to eternity” (86) for these digital materials? Do we need to in fact, archive the protocols and algorithms that make our digital memory creation possible in order for future generations to access these? I wished Ernst would discuss and explore the specific protocols and formats he frequently mentioned in more detail in these chapters, and he did not really explore the fact that these formats and protocols are themselves the products of social, political, and economic factors that speak about our current culture. I was hung up on Doron Swade’s observation that “the operational continuity of contemporary culture cannot be assured” (93) any longer, and wondered what others’ thoughts were about this in relation to constantly changing technologies, protocols, and formats.