http://www.the-fleetingness-of-bits.de/
A nice little website by Melaine Wein in 2000 as part of her thesis project which questions the enormous quantities of digital information we store, and randomly lose each year, and weather the storage formats we are using to transfer our culture onto future generations are indeed adequate for doing so.
“Within the context of a webpage which naturally is also made up of bits and bytes a poetic documentation of the digital decay in and about our culture is presented.” (Wein)
“It is estimated that since 1945 we have created and stored one hundred times as much information as we did in all of human history up until that time!” (Doug Carlston)
Wein talks about the vast amount of digital storage space humanity fills each year — the Library of Congress alone preserves around 3,000 TB (3 Pentabytes) of collected human knowledge (in the year 1998). In 1998, the digital information humanity was producing each year was less than the total amount of storage media that was created. By 1998 12 EB (1 exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of storage media had been sold, and the annual production of digital information was around 4.6 EB.
She also relates and compares her thinking on digital information to human memory, giving Professor Tom Landauer’s estimation that “human beings have a long term life-span memory capacity of approximately 200 MB.” Wein further suggests that in a world of 6 billion people, this estimation means that the total global human memory amounts to 1,200 petabytes.
“But our brain does not consist of memory only. Vital functions of our brain include perception, filtering, reduction and evaluation. And forgetting is vital too, otherwise we would decline in our ability to retain information. These functions, as of yet, cannot by efficiently emulated by computer technologies.”
Wein suggests that in an age when it is so easy to store information, we inevitably, blindly, store everything. “It’s evident that the more information is available, the less is kept in mind. Islands of attention are built: The rest is ignored and disappears somewhere in the digital nirvana.”
She goes on to talk about the internet, and how, contrary to popular perception, it is a “fleeting and transient medium”. The internet’s data is continuously removed and replaced, in tandem with new information being added. “The average life expectancy of a normal webpage is approximately 75 days”.
The internet is indeed a relevant example to consider when thinking of digital decay. Wein explains “The world wide web is like a huge labyrinth, where routes leading once to something know can disappear and sometimes end in the dead end “404 File Not Found”. It is not unusual for the user to experience on average, that four of ten proposed hits can be ‘duds’, say 404 fault messages. This message is always an annoyance to the user but functions as a last hint that there had been something existing before. These documents are some of the few trails the online world carries in itself.”
Wein talks about the internet’s “forgotten and deserted web pages”. She likens visiting these sites, where very few of the links still work, to entering a ghost city. “You steadily come across not-functioning links, applications and broken images”. I envisage Chernobyl as she describes how “the date seems to be frozen, the updates stopped some time ago without a word of farewell”. Wein further hints at the comparison between the digital decay and its physical equivalence— “Now they are lying there: virtual ruins in the global network, being forgotten until they disappear one day without a trace, fallen out of conscience of the transient memory of the global brain.”
Wein quotes Andy Grove— “digital information is forever. It doesn’t deteriorate and requires little in the way of material media”. This is perfectly true. We know digital information ultimately consists of binary ones and zeros, and these ones and zeros themselves cannot decay/degrade. This, however, does not mean the data that they create cannot be lost. If the means to store the data suffers from physical decay, if a hard disk is broken, if a file format becomes obsolete then the data becomes useless. Wein goes on to compare this thought to that of human memory— “But the hard truth is that our digital storage media have a shorter life-span than an old man with an excellent memory”
On the one hand these thoughts have a striking similarity— one could compare digital data to human memory, compare the hard disk to the brain. Just as digital data becomes obsolete if its format is not transferred as technology advances, so do the old man’s memories if he does not share them with others before he dies. If he does not tell his stories, they die with him. If digital data isn’t backed up/transferred, it dies with the computer.
The discrepancy lies with the contrasting natures of digital data and human memory. Binary information exists is its original state up until the point at which the means to store or read it breaks down. At that point the data effectively ceases to exist. Its nature is polar in more than one sense. The human memory is different. It breaks down over time, parts are forgotten, lost forever, other parts are created to compensate. Stories become warped over time, memories become glamorized. The old man may still have his memories, but they will certainly be different now to the first time he experienced them.
What if there was a way of incorporating some of this entropic nature of the human memory into the digital world? What if a digital image taken a decade ago and left in a rarely opened archive file wasn’t quite as pristine as the day it was taken? What if a story written as a Word file became warped over time— parts became lost, altered, dramatized?
Wein compares modern, digital media storage with the more traditional forms of storage such as parchment and stone tablature carvings. Whereas optical storage media will last a maximum of 100 years (more usually only 4), the Rosetta Stone has lasted millenniums. She talks of the difficulty of detecting physical decay within digital storage media, which leads ultimately to the data being lost, and ability of a single faulty bit to corrupt a whole file.
“…from previous ages we have good raw data written on clay, on stone, on parchment and paper, but from the 1950s to the present recorded information increasingly disappears into a digital gap. Historians will consider this a dark age.” (Danny Hills)
There are huge problems with the way we are storing information. As file formats become obsolete, data needs to be transferred to updated formats. The more data we have, the more complicated and time consuming this conversion is. According to Wein’s research, it would take NASA around 4 years to transfer all of the data they store to the new generation of digital media storage format. The life-span of these new carriers however is only guaranteed for up to 6 years, so NASA would immediately have to begin transferring their data to the next generation of storage media. On top of all this is the incredible amount of new data which is added to the archives each year.
This piece of work is now 9 years old, and by its very nature, it will only become more and more pertinent with age. When links start breaking and decaying, the site will become one of the “forgotton and deserted” web pages Wein is talking about. Or Maybe that’s what she intended. I also notice that her own portfolio website hasn’t been updated for a good 4 years. Just look at this link to her last project. Hopefully she hasn’t decayed…
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