More miscellaneous details

Tag: memory

  • In search of logged time – Public Books

    Now, the carefully curated caches of our digital histories—and, therefore, almost all of our histories—face an existential threat. The creators of internet content—that is, us—believe they own their digital material, whether it’s a blog started at age 15 or a carefully backed-up Google Drive. This notion is proving to be a lie. The “digital dark age” is a term that was popularized in 2013 among archivists, who noticed that much of Web 2.0—the space that characterized the internet from the 2000s to now—faces complete obsolescence. Link-rot (dead URLs) and bit-rot (corrupted data) metastasized blog servers, video players, and chat forums. In 2019, 50 million tracks from 12 million artists on MySpace disappeared. This year, Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro warned film buffs to own DVDs as an archive source in a world where you don’t own many physical things, let alone the films you watch on streamers.

    , , , ,

  • My machine and me – Los Angeles Review of Books

    Mark Fisher described his millennial students as “a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” For the next generation, the concept of time is segmented into even shorter media blocks. When is there the opportunity to feel sentimental? Should I feel sentimental about screen time? It is odd to be grateful to the laptop you paid $2,499 for, in 12 monthly installments, for reminding you of your physicality. I doubt Fisher would approve. The laptop gives the illusion of control over work-time when in fact it facilitates the erosion of a distinction between work and life. Still, I will take the help applying pressure to the hemorrhage. I want to be startled out of the trance, to pull my shoulders back and heave myself from bed. I want to remember that I am a body.

    , , , ,

Tags

AI Amazon Apple archives art book reviews books chatbots children China classical commerce computing copyright culture data design Donald Trump economics education Elon Musk environment ethics fakes future gadgets galleries Google health history history of technology humour illustration internet jobs journalism Leeds LLM mental health metaverse mobile phones movies music NASA painting photography politics productivity psychology robots satire schools science sculpture search Second Life social media society software space standards technology television time truth video video games VR watches writing

Archives