mobsolete

Acto I

Para criar é preciso… destruir?

Coincidências, o actual momento de registo de registos estende-se à imprensa e não apenas "pela imprensa": o CJR publica uma story em parceria com o longreads.com no tópico de tecnologias obsoletas dentro do seu dossier de "ameaças ao jornalismo". A nossa deixa :)

Rothenberg’s Law: "Digital data lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first"

We have to choose what to save. But we can’t save everything, and we can’t know that what we’re saving will last long.

For years, our most important records have been committed to specialized materials and technologies. For archivists, 1870 is the year everything begins to turn to dust. That was the year American newspaper mills began phasing out rag-based paper with wood pulp, ensuring that newspapers printed after would be known to future generations as delicate things, brittle at the edges, yellowing with the slightest exposure to air. In the late 1920s, the Kodak company suggested microfilm was the solution, neatly compacting an entire newspaper onto a few inches of thin, flexible film. In the second half of the century, entire libraries were transferred to microform, spun on microfilm reels, or served on tiny microfiche platters, while the crumbling originals were thrown away or pulped. To save newspapers, we first had to destroy them. Then came digital media, which is even more compact than microfilm, giving way, initially at least, to fantasies of whole libraries preserved on the head of a pin. In the event, the new digital records degraded even more quickly than did newsprint. In the 21st century, more and more information is "born digital" and will stay that way, prone to decay or disappearance as servers, software, Web technologies, and computer languages break down.
in "The Internet Isn’t Forever" ^{fev 2018}

Algures, a ref ao Wayback Machine.

Not infrequently, the Wayback Machine and other large digital archives, such as those in the care of the great national and academic libraries, find themselves holding the only extant copy of a given work on the public internet.
in "The Internet Isn’t Forever" ^{fev 2018}

Acto II

Para ouvir… o ruído

Exemplo para o áudio, onde já estivemos a prop de tech à frente do seu tempo.

"Listen", on display in the Library’s Entrance Hall gallery, charts 140 years of sound recording, from Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the present day’s streaming audio and portable digital players. Its vitrines are jam-packed with the embalmed corpses of so many dead media, a near century and a half of audio curiosities: from wax cylinders and little dolls’ house discs, brightly coloured ‘playable stamps’ from Bhutan, and record-your-own souvenir records, all the way up to more recent missteps in format history, like the minidisc player and portable tape machine - [e] many more extinct formats than the ones on display here: dictabelts and wire recorders, ADATs and sound mirrors.
in "From ‘playable stamps’ to minidiscs – the joys of dead media" ^{24 fev 2018}

Ie, esta não é uma história nova - mas porque temos tanta resistência a aprender com o passado?

The analogue-digital debate is as old as digital recording itself. But few then - and fewer now - recognise that since its inception, the terms of that debate have echoed a much earlier one. The disputes between acoustic recording and electric were the analogue vs digital of the Edison era. It pitched the supposedly more direct, unmediated presence of the phonograph’s mechanical recording process against the electric microphones and amplification that produced what some - including Edison himself - would decry as a mere ‘volume fad’. But the electrification of sound proved to be no fad. And listening to two different recordings of the same symphony, no contest. The ‘artificial’ enhancement just sounds better.
in "From ‘playable stamps’ to minidiscs – the joys of dead media" ^{24 fev 2018}

Mas se as novas tecnologias soam sempre melhor que as anteriores, não nos podemos esquecer que também as actuais são passageiras até se verem ultrapassadas por novos processos. E de processos concluímos.

Acto III

Com... cluímos?

O papel é uma tecnologia cuja relação a "processos" a distingue das demais. Independentemente do seu meio de produção, o seu uso final parece fixado desde que inventaram a imprensa. Ao contrário deste, no realm do digital tudo está ainda up for grabs, e uma forma de o determinar é olhar para o que ficou pelo caminho. Ou, seguindo uma metáfora poética com imagens de som:

Digital formats, with their perfect, crisp silences, their smooth sonic surfaces, erase [noise] traces and in the process erase their own production history. Presenting itself as a kind of pure, unmediated signal, digital, truly, is the format that is both there and not there.

As machines and expertise keep dying it’s not only the recordings themselves that deserve preservation. Sometimes the noise - with or without artificial enhancements - can be as significant as the signal.
in "From ‘playable stamps’ to minidiscs – the joys of dead media" ^{24 fev 2018}

OS POSITIVOS, keep makin' noise.

Próximo: processos e formatos em digital, comic wise.