Week #4 – MBA 6101 – A New Dark Age

 

Todd Kelsey’s Let’s Avoid the Digital Dark Ages, with Non-Toxic Social Media offers considerations for managing “personal and private notes, diaries and digital albums of pictures, [and] video and audio recordings” that are at risk of disappearing as digital media evolves leaving behind antiquated, unusable or inaccessible formats. I’ve wondered what future archaeologists will make of the millions of AOL trial software discs buried in our landfills (according to Vox, AOL sent over 1 billion CDs over the mid-90s to early 00s).  Will those glossy, scuffed rings bring a similar mystique as the purported Dropa stones?

I think this is especially important for those of us whose lives are divided between a purely analog and then digital (and perhaps now, post-digital) era.  As I’ve inherited boxes of family artifacts, mostly pictures, and have added to my own collections of personal memorabilia (physical and digital), I’ve considered different options for curation (and equally important, preservation).

My mom’s collection of vinyl and books always occupied prominent places in our home (not the case for my dad’s 8-track collection or books on business leadership).  My own collections of books, comics, CDs (500+), DVDs, videotapes, and cassettes that lined my childhood bedroom and then showcased in my home office, were relegated to bins in our basement and eventually moved to storage; replaced with Apple Music, Marvel Unlimited, a half dozen streaming services, and access to my local library’s digital holdings. 

While these real collections offer a sense of… permanence, they are not indestructible.  My mom lost a substantial part of her vinyl collection due to poor storage and a house fire (which claimed first issues of her Beatles and Led Zeppelin records).  I lost my collection of Stephen King first editions to a defective refrigerator waterline. 

Digital scrapbooking has a future.  I have not used Facebook or other social media platforms for the expressed purpose of curating my life, but I’ve experimented with programs like Evernote and OneNote that offer multi-media integration (I have not tried a purpose-built digital scrapbooking solution).  Of course, the obvious caveat to using these services (platform or program) is the risk that they could be discontinued. 

Another issue is the lack of tangibility of digital media. While digital copies offer “permanent” preservation, the “weight” of actual relics is different.  Pictures of my dad as a pre-teen in the “old country” were carried by my grandparents as they fled the West Bank for Amman during the first salvos of the Six-Day War.  Pictures of my mom’s dad (on the left) while he was at Stalag II-A survived a Nazi Arbeitslager, his prisoner of war identity card made the transatlantic journey when he (and my grandmother) abandoned Germany for the US.  For me, digital copies of tickets to punk shows stored in my iPhone’s wallet don’t have the same cache as the dog-eared, sweat-stained tickets from the shows I saw as a teen.