Digital Archives, Clouds, and Dust
We have seen steps taken further in recent years to engage us with the idea of outsourced memory with the introduction of cloud computing. Outsourced to major corporations, our personal data will now be protected by those most capable to do so. And if we choose to do so we can share as much of it as we like with our family, our friends, and even the public. Here then, we finally have the infallible archive that is an endless untapped resource for nostalgia.
These safe and secure off-site memory banks promise to hold indefinitely our precious photographs and music; our memories! But where is the assurance, let alone the insurance, that calamity will not strike. For anyone who has ever owned a computer, the paralyzing fear of data loss must surely have been faced at one point or another. The blank screen, the whirring drive, the gut-wrenching sense of loss when an irrecoverable amount of data(memories) has been lost due to some technical malfunction or other. Why do we believe that clouds are any more capable of indefinite storage ad infinitum than our own devices? For what are clouds but dust and water, two of the very enemies of the electronic circuit. In all seriousness though, these massive servers that house the clouds are equally susceptible to physical damage, power loss, and overheating, not to mention obsolescence (a sort of technological equivalent to senescence).
Nostalgia requires that we imperfectly remember our past and to this end the Internet as the archive of our age is an improper one. It is praised for its boundlessness, but it is actually just as fallible and capable of forgetting.[1] For Derrida, it is a precondition of the archive to destroy its contents.[2] To forget completely does not serve nostalgia, but to remember imperfectly does. The distance created by this imperfection, whether it be degradation, corruption, loss, deletion, erasure, or simply the timestamp imparted by the pixilated quality of the compressed archival methods, these are the hallmarks of nostalgic recollection and they remain very much a part of nostalgia’s transition to the digital.
[1] “Some have turned to the idea of the archive as counterweight to the ever-increasing pace of change, as a site of temporal and spatial preservation. From the point of view of the archive, forgetting is the ultimate transgression. But how reliable or foolproof are our digitalized archives? Computers are barely fifty years old and already we need “data archaeologists” to unlock the mysteries of early programming: just think of the notorious Y2K problem that recently haunted our computerized bureaucracies.” – Andreas Huyssen. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 26.
[2] “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.” -Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”. Diacritics. 25 (2) (1995), 9-63, pp. 9.
“But the point must be stressed, this archiviolithic force leaves nothing of its own behind. As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction(Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced tomneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus ashypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesisas spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.”. Ibid, p.14.
