A BIRD IN THE HAND: THE PERISHING PAPER TRAIL      

By Meera Subramanian

© 2005

The Conqueror of England wanted it all.  Well, he wanted it all on paper.  Over a thousand years ago, he commissioned the writing of the Domesday Book to record information about the land he, more formally known as King William I, had taken over in 1066.  Written in a laborious careful calligraphy, rumored to have been done by one solitary monk, the book is a testament to a time.  It remains today, in fine condition, at the United Kingdom’s Public Record Office in Kew, London. 

Inspired by the ancient book, BBC Television producer Peter Armstrong decided in 1983 to replicate the documenting of British life.  Three years later, through schools across the country, over one million people had taken part in producing a comprehensive database of how England looked to its inhabitants, complete with BBC video clips, 200,000 pictures and tens of thousands of maps.  The 1986 Domesday project used a state-of-the-art computer system and video disc player developed by Philips.  But, alas, there were financial failures and marketing mayhem and the Acorn computer, which all the Domesday information had been formatted to work on, just didn’t catch on. The great undertaking was dead before even reaching drinking age, frozen and inaccessible in a technological glacier.  A humble plea on the website describing the 1986 Domesday Project requests anyone who knows about a working Acorn computer available for use to kindly notify the Project.

There is a massive, pandemic loss that is occurring all around us.  Yes, we are in a digital age, a multimedia extravaganza, but most of it is floating disembodied on computers that will become obsolete in few years and on the invisible threads of a thing we call the Web.  It seems a bit precarious.  For what are historians, or even curious family members that have yet to be born, going to find when they return to our time seeking out tangible material evidence of our existence, the nitty gritty details of our everyday lives?  What will they be able to grasp in their hands, carefully unfold, hold to their noses to smell, their eyes closed dreamily? Leaping excitedly into a digital future, cell phone cameras silently snapping and ear buds dangling, we are neglecting to leave behind a cultural paper trail.

***

While most people are dancing giddily into the new age of transformative technology, a handful of people from diverse backgrounds around the world are responding to the silent call that emanates from the void created by something absent.  New technology has always lured us in with its siren call, the scented allure of the unknown.  With each new advancement, the realm of possibilities broadens and human nature finds it nearly impossible to resist leaping forward into the new tantalizing technology.   But only a few seem to care about what is being left behind.  They are a diverse group.  Museum curators are holding conferences to figure out how to preserve the collections that pass through their climate-controlled halls.  Young cyber entrepreneurs are embarking on a recreation of the ancient Library of Alexandria, digital style.  Library trade publications buzz with the cry for backup.  Science fiction writers are using lessons of lost media from the past to think about the future. The distinct turfs of librarians and lay philosophers, of computer scientists and copyright lawyers are merging in an attempt to rethink archiving in a digital age.

Bruce Sterling, cyber fiction writer and self-described “professional garage futurist,” was standing on the bridge that links past to future when he wrote the Dead Media Manifesto in 1998 as part of his Dead Media Project.  It was a plea to the masses for someone, anyone, to write a book about all the media that have come before, from Lady Murasaki’s love poems tucked into cleft sticks to the failed Baby Mark 1 computer.  He was frustrated with the endless Internet and accompanying books for dummies glutting the market, all of which ignored looking at new media within a greater historical context.  His vision, which he was too busy to carry out himself, would be entitled The Handbook of Dead Media, a tome dedicated to honoring and remembering all the antiquated forms of media that had come before and their irreplaceable, sometimes irreproducible content.

What if much of the history we are living in now disappears?  Sterling’s manifesto is a reminder that media has been eternally in flux, changing and transforming since the first smoke signal puff.  What he hopes is that we can learn from the “freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat.” It was George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Sterling, accompanied by fellow sci-fi writer, Richard Kadrey, author of The Covert Culture Sourcebook, made available on-line a compendium of their collective notes of media forms come and gone, categorized under enticing title headings: “magic-lantern and variants…Chaucer’s austrolabe manual…pigeons pigeons pigeons!…18th/19th century contrivances with foolish names (usually inventor ego-stroking).”  They offered the free use of their notes, and the working title of the book, but no one out there in cyber space took Sterling and Kadrey up on the offer to write the great book, despite the offer of a “CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL” to sweeten the deal, and within a few years Sterling himself moved on to other projects, including writing for this magazine. 

But in 2001, Sterling was invited to give the keynote address at “Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Based on the ideas of Guggenheim’s Associate Curator of Media Arts Jon Ippolito, the museum teamed up with the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology in Montreal to create the Variable Media Network Project.  The project includes a network of member organizations – including museums and archives - that are experimenting with ways to preserve non-traditional art forms such as performance, interactive and web-based art.  

Sterling’s speech, “Digital Decay,” revealed that he was still thinking intensely about what effects digital media were going to have on our culture, and recognizing their limitations.  He addressed the audience of “futurists and antiquarians,” united by their common interest in “the nature of time.”  To illustrate the limits of a digital medium, which is almost immaterial, but not quite, Sterling asks his audience to compare a high-end Apple iMac with those famous sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh.  He puts them through the tests of time: sunlight and water, microbes and dust, and makes the salient point that while the oil painting will invariably degrade over time, the computer is much more vulnerable to immediate and sudden breakdown.  When it does happen, the loss is irreversible, the information irretrievable.  The Domesday Book, 919 years old and counting, is still there in London while life in England in 1986, according to the Domesday Project, is lost.

***

But let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment.  Perhaps Andy Finney of the Domesday Project made a compelling point when he responded to a critical 2002 news article that emphasized the lost 1986 data in comparison to the intact ancient book by saying, “I can't avoid asking how many of the journalists making this comment have actually tried to read the original book, with its hand-written Latin.”  But he goes on to concede, “The underlying point is valid.”

While thousands pass before van Gogh’s sunflowers to marvel and be moved, others are equally drawn to the ephemeral work of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy.  The British artist is known for his creative use of natural materials: stones, leaves, flower petals, trees.  He constructed six-foot snowballs embedded with broken branches and placed them on city street corners to melt into time, passing dogs walking off with the wet sticks.  Or he created a human-sized “egg” from carefully placed pieces of slate on a beach, designed to be swept away by the incoming tide.  There is beauty in the transient, a Zen lesson in detachment.

Jeff Sharlet, author of Killing the Buddha and contributing editor for Harper’s, started and runs The Revealer, an NYU religion and media web zine.  He too is quite relaxed about the whole matter.  He shrugs his sloped shoulders and says something about kind of liking the fact that all the information he gathers and shares with his readers passes away after a time.  He likes to look at it in a “performative sense.”   He goes so far as to suggest that the world might be a much better place if certain, ahem, texts had just vanished instead of sticking around for thousands of years.  He shrugs again, and with an animated smile, jumps out of his chair to pull a book off the shelves that cover one full wall of his office.  “You have to read this,” he says.

Sharlet has placed in my open hands a thick collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges.  In 1941, the Argentinean writer penned the “The Library of Babel,” a short story about a geometric honeycomb that held every possible permutation of a finite alphabet.  “When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy.  All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret joy.  There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist – somewhere in some hexagon.”  As the story develops, we discover that  “the unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression.”  The suicides increase, librarians die off, but the library itself, goes on. 

Jeff Sharlet shrugs his shoulders again and shakes his head.  “The problem is that there’s always, always, too much information.”

***

Who, really, needs to worry about losing information?  All one needs to do is backup.  Always backup!  It’s the credo for the most basic computer user.  Really, isn’t backup enough?  Yet it is the thing we always mean to do but rarely get to.  And how shall we back up? Which backup and for how long will it last?  Floppy discs became un-floppy, then transformed into zips, got compact, and now they jump.  What next?  While fueling a consumer-driven, gadget-hungry economy, the common methods of backup are effective for short-term storage, but present an entirely more complex challenge when it comes to long-term archiving of the virtual reality of today’s world. 

Carol Hutchins heads Courant Library, NYU’s computer science library, and today has used her authority to secure us a talking room among the scholarly students and silent stacks of books, including some brown leather-bound relics from the 1800s.  Looking out from behind thick glasses, she pauses when asked about the loss of information happening in this digital age.  “It leaves us unsettled,” she says in an understated way, including librarians everywhere with her use of the first person plural.  Flipping through a copy of Library Connect, a promotional newsletter for the library community, Hutchins becomes more animated.  “Almost every piece in here addresses this topic.”   But she also immediately acknowledges the problems inherent in attempting to document everything.  She poses seemingly simple questions that are cloaked with philosophical undertones reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan- “Can it be transferred to paper effectively or does it change its content?” she asks.  How exactly, do we process information?  And then, more practically, the words of a woman in command of a solitary room and the information stored within its finite shelves: “Where would you put it all?”

***

Where would we put it all?  Libraries used to be the esteemed institutions we went to in our search for historical information, the place to go if you wanted something tangible and material.  But they are running out of space too.  Within the great vaulted rooms and among the stacks, you could use a hushed voice to ask a librarian for a copy of the Chicago Tribune from, say, 1892.  Even if you were given a microfilm and directed to a machine that would slowly suck out your eyeballs, there was comfort in knowing that in some back room the original yellowing parchment existed.  Not so.  Nicholson Baker revealed in a New Yorker article and his book Double Fold, Libraries and the Assault on Paper, that some of our greatest institution such as the Library of Congress, Columbia University and New York Public Library have recorded newspaper archives from the nineteenth century on microfilm and then destroyed, sold, or given away the original copies. A quick search on the web can provide anyone with a variety of ways to preserve film, documents or photos by transferring them to a digital medium, but the advice is strewn with the warning: “Do not destroy the original.”  Libraries, stripped of funding and space, fall victim to the same unshakeable faith that leads many of us to believe that next new thing is really the best new thing.  Forever and ever, amen.  Baker’s book questions the presumptions behind such confidence, and photographs of original documents compared to their microfiched duplicates reveal the technological limitations of some forms of backup, such as the gray tones of graphics blurring together into a clouded indecipherable mass. 

***

Many don’t miss what the libraries have disposed of.  The university of Texas recently announced its plans to virtually eliminate its undergraduate library and replace it with a larger computer lab.  The Internet is quickly replacing printed publications for where people go to find the information that guides their lives.  High quality essays, criticisms, and musings on the world we live in can be found on such popular sites such as Salon, which claims three million readers.  The advantage of being on-line is that mistakes are easily correctable and information is perpetually up-to-date, as long as someone cares to update it. Salon’s backup is their on-line archives, and they are content with that.  “To store those on paper,” writes Max Garrone, Vice President of Operations for Salon.com in an e-mail, “would be a real waste of paper!”

Even Brewster Kahle and The Internet Archive (TIA) are not addressing this digital vulnerability.  Kahle, recently described in a Slate.com article as a “search-engine wiz and dot-com multimillionaire,” set out in 1996 to create a digital equivalent to the Library of Alexandria.  Since then, Kahle’s non-profit group has been building the collection, copying a good chunk of the Internet, and storing it in a data center tucked below the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco.  Back ups are also sent to the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

As of three years ago, the TIA collection was five times larger than the Library of Congress collection.  Today, it consists of 40 billion pages of information from 50 million sites, digitally preserved on a high-density, low-power data system designed by TIA and Capricorn Technologies.  The digital filing cabinet, called a petabox, resembles a stainless steel refrigerator, filled top to bottom with red computer units, woven together with a criss-cross of black and white wires.  Each computer has 512Mb of memory and can hold just over 1 Terabyte of data on ATA disks.  Using a system interface affectionately named the Wayback Machine (after the time travel device called the WABAC on the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon), any historians, scholars and inquisitive individuals with a computer have the ability to peruse the web as it once was.  In addition to websites showing the early days of Yahoo when Paula Jones and Clinton filled the headlines or CNN’s site declaring “America Under Attack,” before 9/11 was known as 9/11, the archives also include books, news reels from the forties to the recent tsunami, and audio files from FDR declaring war on Japan to Michael Franti’s latest album.

But even the ambitious project of TIA has limitations, going back to one word: obsolescence.  It’s low-powered, not no-powered, so if power were to be unavailable, so would the information.  The other issue is format.  They are making a digital library, with no guarantee that the petaboxes they are using to record the web life we’re experiencing today will be available in the future.  They are damning themselves to a fate of eternal transference, from medium to medium as the technology changes, each time with a collection larger than the last.  It seems, shall we say, problematic.  TIA has already done one transfer, from tapes to hard drives, since they began less than ten years ago.  Perhaps it is all in a day’s business, but all of their archiving work being done still lacks a non-digital result.  Remember, digital media is almost immaterial, but not completely, and in the words of Bruce Sterling: “If you don’t preserve it in some material form, you are not preserving immateriality: you are preserving nothing.”

***

Bruce Sterling poses a nearly blasphemous question in the Dead Media Manifesto when he asks,  “How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interfaces itself into a dead medium?  And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet?”  I went to Ernie Davis to get some answers.   Davis looks the part of a university computer scientist.  Working in an NYU office overflowing with a disarray of papers, his hair is tousled and he seems at first to have a slight discomfort about talking face-to-face.  But he quickly warms up, and when asked about the potential loss of information, he first brings up the example of software.  “A lot has been lost already.  There’s a lot of information from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s that might as well be in Mayan script because the software that was used to read it no longer exists.”

But overall, scientists like Davis aren’t worried. “The web is quite amorphous,” he says, but then, as though the internet weren’t already mysterious enough to those who are not computer scientists, he off-handedly drops this: “And then there’s this whole question of the invisible web.”  Invisible Web?  He’s referring to databases, places that have mass amounts of information about things like the weather, but are not indexed by the major search engines.  “People estimate that there’s more invisible info than readable info,” he says with an elfin smile.

 “Assuming that civilization continues stable over the next however long, it seems like [the Web] should be a reasonable plan, but of course if we go through some catastrophe and the stuff has to be dug up by archeologists a thousand years from now, it’s going to be a lot harder to read than the records we have from 5000 years ago.”

Scientists like Ernie Davis and librarians like Carol Hutchins disregard the potential loss of the Internet as our main source for information.  If a new technology we have yet to create emerges, they feel that the change will be gradual enough that all won’t be lost in one cataclysmic moment.  Yes, transference will be an issue.  Yes, some information will disappear in the process.  “Probably it will be ok for it to be lost,” says Hutchins with a wave of her hand. 

***

The major endeavors of the Guggenheim and others are getting the famous folks documented.  Once they’re famous.  What about the little guys?  What about your grandma?  Only a very small percentage of people will reach a position of celebrity fame, whether through intellectual, artistic, or less respectable accomplishments.  But throughout history, we have gone back to individuals, often nameless, insignificant humans who have lived quiet lives, to provide a more accurate lens of what was happening in a certain era.  Or information is sought out on someone who is now famous, but once was not. Historical biographies are a popular genre and non-fiction writers recreate scenes from information they’ve gleaned from a variety of documents: legal documents, correspondence, census, genealogy, letters (remember those?).  What are the details of an individual’s life that led them to such a position is remarkable, in retrospect, and only by retracing steps down a paper trail is the genesis of a person to be discovered.  

What can we show of our lives that doesn’t require an AC current? Many of us with Internet connections have tossed our phone books, dictionaries, let our address books lie fallow in a drawer.  Free from all the clutter of that mashed up paper pulp and dirty ink, we rely on our computers, cell phones, our PDAs (remember when that used to reference making out on the street?).  It is easy and clean and handy and all that good stuff.  Until it doesn’t work.  Until you drop your phone in the toilet (it happens more than you’d think) and you have no idea what your boyfriend’s phone number is.  Until you have many more “hand-held devices” than you do hands.

Take the prevalence of digital cameras as an example.  We can snap away to excess, we can delete, manipulate, crop, pick and choose.  We can also print up archival quality photos right at home.  But how many do?  The images, the hundreds, then thousands of images, we take and receive from friends and family, stay on the computer.  The question is, and then what?  The market-driven answer is to create a new gizmo, to tote around in our ever-burgeoning bags. 

Even for those who print up their photos, I grant that making photo albums is a laborious process few have time for these days.  Some assembly required. But once made, batteries are not required.  Anyone with a set of working eyes has access to them in the future, as in generations in the future.  Even just throwing them in a box, random and uncensored, (including those blurry photos of Aunt Judy’s backside with the finger in front of the lens) leaves something that someone can sift through later on down the road.  It is, as they say, a bird in hand. 

Then there is the lost art of letter writing.  To write a letter, one is committed to thinking out one’s thoughts before putting pen to paper.  The process of writing a letter is transparent.  One can scribble out words that didn’t come out right, but the marred splash of ink on tree pulp can be more incriminating than the original censored thought itself.  No matter, the entire act of writing a letter is a procedure involving steps of thought and conscience.  There is the paper, the pen, the thoughts into words, an envelope, an address, a stamp.  There is the postbox to be found.  There is time to hesitate, to rethink, to retract, even.  Today, all this is called snail mail, and we all know that those mollusks are slow, dumb creatures.

At the other end of the spectrum of personal communication, there is e-mail.  In some ways, e-mails created a record where there was none by replacing the use of phones, in which all that transpired disappeared into an ether as soon as the receiver touched the cradle. E-mail has the instant, easy, fast aspects of modern communication, like the phone, but is bereft of tone or expression.  It has a benign neutrality that can turn malignant when misunderstood. No matter how littered with emoticons, there is only a limited amount of expression that can happen in Times New Roman font 12.  Unlike letters, there is no mulling over the hasty diatribes we write in the wee hours until the sensible light of day has an opportunity to shine on them.

But even the good e-mails, that say something valuable, where do they end up?  I feel like a relic at age thirty-five because I still have a bundle of letters from an old lover bound with a ribbon, marked with foreign and domestic stamps and bearing postmarks from the early ‘90s. I keep them in a shoebox. 

Film and its four perforations per frame have managed to remain in a fairly continuous form since Thomas Edison first created 35 mm film in 1889.  Even when sound was introduced in the late 1920s, the film itself remained uniform.  But Kodak is now the only maker of 35 mm movie film these days, and their commitment to celluloid film is dubious as their market dwindles, according to Andrew Lampert, archivist with Anthology Film Archives in New York.  He sees transferring films to digital formats as nothing more than a “stop-gap” means of creating a record, but not replicating a film.  Lampert points to Phil Niblack’s 1968 “The Magic Sun,” to show the nuances that a filmmaker can create on film, depending on the quality and type of film s/he uses. In the film, the musician Sun Ra is beautifully backlit and these fine gradations simply can’t be replicated when transferred to a digital medium.  As manufacturers of film limit the types they have available, filmmakers lose colors from their palette.  Lampert predicts that there will be no film in twenty years.  Last year, Elmo produced the very last 16 mm projector.

Some film archivists recognized the loss of personal history with the extinction of small projectors and created Home Movie Day in 2002.  Now celebrated in Canada, Italy, Japan, Mexico, England and the US, local film centers provide the projectors for 16mm and Super 8, and have a viewing night where people can come in and watch the home movies that are collecting dust in their closets.  Lampert says it’s not considered a successful event unless someone breaks down into a “burbling mess of tears.”  Last year, archivists spent an hour making sure the unmarked home film an eighty-year old couple brought in was intact and able to be shown.  The forgotten footage that appeared on the screen was of the couple on their honeymoon in 1949, in San Francisco.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

***

Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive stated, “If we don’t have a memory, we’re living in an Orwellian world of our own making.”  While we risk becoming obsessed with documenting everything, and becoming lost in Borges’s honeycomb of hexagons if we print up every web page and bind it between leather-bound covers, we can’t rely only on this instantaneous form of communication. For the oral cultures of the past, the sense of history was passed down from elder to the younger through the stories told, over and over, that conveyed their place in the world.  Now, the oral culture is gone, and the material culture is vanishing. 

We don’t need to start building hope chests, nor make our young virgins embroider handmade doilies.  But it would be good to leave something accessible for our heirs, something other than a shiny round disk made of something that looks like metal but feels like plastic and reflects pretty rainbows when pointed at the sun.  Archivists will continue to think about the preserving museum exhibits, and you and I will have to decide what to do with our next batch of family photos.  But it is the responsibility of those in the present to create something tangible for those who will come later, the stories of our lives, how we think, what we look like, what concerns keep us up at night. Both digital and material have their limitations.  The fear is that we have come to idolize the former while dismissing the latter.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that no one has taken Bruce Sterling up on his offer to write a tome based on the information he’s compiled.  The four-letter word, tome, is admittedly a bit daunting.  But in order to preserve a collective culture, there is the need to act collectively.  To quote Bruce Sterling once last time, “As a net.person, doesn’t this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, …a sense of the pathos of lost things?  If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it?  It ought to.”