How Do We Save Our Digital Lives (Presented at SXSW 2014)
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This document discusses the importance of preserving our personal digital histories and archives. It notes that we are creating the equivalent of over 500 miles of bookshelves worth of digital content every 10 minutes. However, if this content is not properly archived and saved, our personal histories and existence may disappear. The document advocates going through photos and documents regularly to select and preserve important memories on high quality paper with captions, so future generations can understand our lives and experiences.
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How Do We Save Our Digital Lives (Presented at SXSW 2014)
- 1. HOW DO WE SAVE OUR DIGITAL LIVES? BY MARY SNAUFFER @MARYSNAUFFER
- 2. LISTEN.
- 3. THIS IS WHERE I HAD MY FIRST KISS.
- 4. THIS IS WHERE MY FATHER DIED.
- 5. THIS IS WHERE MY FATHER FIRST SAW MY MOTHER.
- 6. THIS IS WHERE I STOOD WHEN I FOUGHT.
- 7. THIS IS WHERE I WAS WHEN I WAS A PART OF HISTORY.
- 8. THIS IS WHERE MY GRANDPA LIVED WHEN HE WAS A BOY.
- 11. “Facebook designers want users to remember and experience good interactions with friends—so much so that serotonin, our happiness hormone, has become a design guideline.” -SmartPlanet, 2012
- 12. “THE BROADCASTR APP IS SHUTTING DOWN”
- 16. WE BECOME WHAT WE BEHOLD. WE SHAPE OUR TOOLS, & THEREAFTER OUR TOOLS SHAPE US. MARSHALL MCLUHAN, 1964
- 17. I AM THIS PORTRAIT PICTURE.
- 18. I AM THIS PORTRAIT PICTURE.
- 19. IN ALL LIKELIHOOD YOU WOULD NEVER SEE YOUR FAMILY AGAIN. YOU GAVE THEM YOUR PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPH.
- 20. “THE ONLY CAMERA THAT ANYBODY CAN USE”
- 22. SUMMER VACATION PHOTO THE SUMMER VACATION PHOTOS
- 23. GRADUATION/BDAY PHOTO THE LIFE EVENTS PHOTOS
- 24. WE ARE ANCHORED BY OUR ANCESTORS.
- 25. “SHE HOLDS A PICTURE OF HER MOTHER SHE FOUND IN THE RUBBLE OF HER TORNADO- DESTROYED HOME.” OKLAHOMA, 2013
- 26. “I WAS JUST SO TOUCHED THAT SOMEBODY FOUND IT. IT WAS KIND OF LIKE GETTING A LITTLE PIECE OF OUR FAMILY BACK.”
- 27. A page from my “teenage archives.”
- 28. Me, in 8th grade.
- 30. TURKEY SANDWICH, THE SNOW, fancy dinner shots, ETC. ETC. Include turkey photo from my original presentation Point it too illustrate sheer mass
- 31. If you don’t save it you won’t exist.
- 32. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS 838 MILES OF BOOKSHELVES TODAY, WE CREATE AN EQUIVALENT AMOUNT OF CONTENT DIGITALLY EVERY 10 MINUTES
- 33. RIGHT NOW, WE HAVE OVER 500 MILLION* RECORDED PERSONAL HISTORIES *OVER 500 MILLION PEOPLE USE FACEBOOK
- 37. “Hi Barack, you made us proud! America, you have renewed my trust in humanity! I am South African and I marvel at the fact that my child will grow up in a world where the greatest nation has been led by a black person and see that as normal! Thank you America, and thank you Obama for living your dream and not suppressing it!” Posted at 4:06pm, December 12, 2008 I Am Voting For Change, Facebook Group
- 39. SALMAN RUSHDIE
- 40. IMAGINE HAVING A RECORD YOU REALLY WANT TO LISTEN TO…
- 43. INSIDE HERE ARE THE PIECES OF YOUR PERSONAL HISTORY
- 44. “… the impulse to preserve something to be remembered while leaving out something to be forgotten—is found in individual and collective minds, historically and fictionally.” Jacques Derrida, 1964 “The Concept of the Archive”
- 46. 1. EVERY MONTH GO THROUGH YOUR PHOTOS & DOCUMENTS 1. PICK JUST A FEW 1. PRINT THEM ON HIGH QUALITY PAPER, NOT CHEAPLY 1. CAPTION YOUR PHOTOS WITH A SOFT PENCIL
Editor's Notes
- That was Adrienne, a NYC firefighter recounting her experience of 9/11 for the geo-tag storytelling app, Broadcastr. Broadcastr was an app that gave people the opportunity to tell stories about their lives that were rooted in a specific place, and tag that location. This gave listeners of the app the wonderful experience of being able to walk or wander around a city or town while listening to an invisible narrative of the place. It was like when you get headphones at a museum to hear the history of the paintings as you explore, only the history of Broadcastr was the history of everyday people, a blend of the ordinary and of the extraordinary. Stories like… This is where I had my first kiss
- This is where I had my first kiss.
- This is where my father died.Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Street_(Manhattan)
- This is where my father first saw my mother.
- This is where I stood when I fought. Photo Source: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2046351_2235949,00.html
- This is where I was when I was a part of history.Photo Source: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2046351_2235949,00.html
- This is where my grandfather lived when he was a boy.The first thing I am going to do right now, is to explain to you the story of Broadcastr, and how it failed. And then I am going to tell you why that company’s story is so significant to you and represents a much larger threat. Which is the threat to our personal stories and to our personal histories. The story you listened to of Adrienne was just one of the more than 500,000 stories that people shared with Broadcastr.
- Beyond allowing people to share personal, every day stories about places that meant something to them, Broadcastr also had larger initiatives. The company worked with The Humans Rights Watch to collect stories from people on ground in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. Imagine in 50 years, people walking through this square listening to the stories of that revolution, from the mouths of the fathers and mothers and sons and daughters who were there, in that historical moment. Broadcastr also worked with The 9/11 Memorial to collect people’s stories of 9/11, what they saw, where they were standing, what they were thinking in that moment in time. Broadcastr launched their beta version in 2011. A few months ago I sat down with Andy Hunter, the co-founder of Broadcastr. He explained to me that when he was originally thinking about this app there was a clear archival motivation to it. The idea of stories of a place being housed, and piled over the years. Imagine for example, moving into an apartment in the lower east side of New York City and being able to hear the stories from the people who had lived in that apartment over decades. Or walking by where the Berlin wall once stood and hearing the stories of it coming down.
- Like most startups, Broadcastr was funded by investors who believed in the project. And believed that eventually it could be monetized. I think we all realize that it’s expensive to a run company. Even a small company, even a small company on a shoe-string budget. Andy Hunter told me to keep Broadcastr up and running, very modestly, it cost between $50,000 - $100,000 a month. This was all coming from investors, Broadcastr hadn’t figured out how to pull in a profit. Hunter estimated that it would have cost around $10 Million dollars to build a sustaining model, which is a lot of money to raise for something that doesn’t have a clear revenue attached to it. Now even though Broadcastr was having successes—In less than 2 years, they had over 250,000 active users, who had created more than 500,000 stories, they had several partnerships, including one with the History Channel…. The company did have some fundamental problems. For one, not everyone has mastered the art of storytelling. Though there were over 500,000 stories on the app, Hunter estimated there were only about 10,000 really great ones. The stories that were “liked” more would percolate up to the top—but this was all based on location. If you live in NYC there is lots to listen to, and therefore lots of reasons to keep coming back to the app. But if you live in Des Moines Iowa, there are probably only a couple of stories. And if the first story you hear isn’t a good one, doesn’t draw you in, you can have a bad experience. And you probably won’t come back to the app.
- What investors want to see is habitual use. It’s why products like Facebook, Instagram, Snapcat and Gmail work right now. These products provoke endorphins. When you get a “like,” an email notification, a text, a comment—- it gives you a little endorphin rush. It’s why we get addicted to our apps and our smartphones. And it’s why those apps continue to be funded, because they are getting tons of monthly unique users. The more people that are using your product and the more regularly they are using it, the more money advertisers will want to spend on your product. This is what investors want, and this isn’t what Broadcastr was able to do. Source: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/decoding-design/facebooks-secret-design-sauce-its-serotonin/
- Broadcastr shut down in August 2013. When it did, I received an email from the company.It read: Dear Broadcastr user, We’ve had a great couple of years running Broadcastr, but the time has come to shut it down. While we’d love to keep Broadcastr alive, technology requires money, active development, and maintenance. We’re a small team, and sadly, don’t have the resources to continue development. In the meantime, if you are a Broadcastr content creator and would like us to send you the MP3s of your recordings, please reply to this email and we will send them along. When I sat down with Andy Hunter, he said they believed that by giving people the option to save their story, they were doing the right thing. And it’s something, he acknowledged that a lot of companies that fail, don’t do. Because it costs money. Right now, Broadcastr’s stories are being housed in a Google Data Store, and it costs a few thousand dollars a month to keep those stories there, which isn’t huge. But there are also no longer investors, and so out of pocket it is actually quite a lot of money. So far, only about 5% of the users have requested their stories. To retrieve each story, put it into an MP3, and email it out, takes time—which is also something they can’t afford. Andy Hunter knows this is not something they can keep doing for much longer. His hope is that he can open source it, so anyone can work on the project and so the stories can still live. But the problem is the investors. The people who had originally put in quite a bit of money because they thought something would monetarily come out of it. If the project is open sourced, then the investors could sue, because they originally funded the idea and they will never make money off of it. What is likely going to happen is that 95% of Broadcastr’s stories—475,000 stories that were important enough for people to sit down and record—will soon be lost. So,why is this important to you?
- Because we understand humanity by personal stories and personal artifacts, like photos and letters and diaries that were left behind and saved. Popular history will always be preserved—we will not lose President Obama’s memoirs, we will not lose the articles of the New York Times. But what is popular and deemed right within this space and time in human history, often changes with time and perspective. The collective history of everyday people is where, looking back, you find truth and depth and human complexities. This is the richness. This is what we are going to lose. But to really understand the value of the personal archive, we need to go back in time, way back in time.
- 99% of humans who have existed on this planet have left absolutely no trace of their existence behind. Zero. Before the invention of photography, the only people who left any sort of real evidence of their lives were the very elite.
- Having your portrait painted was expensive. This idea of capturing yourself to leave something behind for future generations or historians to find was seen as something that was only for the 1% of the 1%. For the ordinary person, there wasn’t a strong motive to do this, and there wasn’t really any accessible way to do it either. All that was easily passed down were a person’s stories, through word of mouth. Which would change and alter and, most likely, eventually be forgotten, as the story was passed along through time. But this all changed in 1839. Photo source: http://www.folkartmuseum.org/?p=folk&t=images&id=3563
- With the invention of photography. Philosopher and media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, famously wrote in 1964, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.” That is, invention and technology, can and does drastically alter and change our behaviors—it changes how we capture, create, and preserve our lives. With the invention of photography, suddenly, people were able to capture and preserve an image of their physical selves, their bodies and faces frozen in one moment in time. Early on the tools involved to take a photograph were too cumbersome and expensive for an ordinary person to take on—regular people didn’t own cameras, but they would pay to have their portraits taken. Photo source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/september-11-photos_n_3902818.html
- People believed that your true character came out in the photograph. The portrait was their identity.The way the light fell on their face, they thought it captured their true essence. Photo source: http://www.dewitzphotography.com/eau-claire-wi-photographer/unique-antique-cabinet-card-portraits/
- Which is actually the exact same as when we choose our profile picture. One picture, to sum up and represent our character, to tell the world—this is who I am… today.
- For people leaving Europe for “the New World.” You embarked on a ship to go across the Atlantic knowing that you in all likelihood, your family would never see you again. But now they could have your photograph. The photograph allowed you to leave behind evidence of who you were. Photo credit: http://www.dewitzphotography.com/eau-claire-wi-photographer/unique-antique-cabinet-card-portraits/
- We become we what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us. Enter Kodak. 1888. The first model of the Kodak camera appeared. This invention allowed ordinary people to purchase cameras themselves—for the first time, everyday families were able to take photographs of their lives more freely. A Kodak camera was preloaded with 100 images. After you eventually took the 100 images you would mail it back to Kodak in Rochester, New York. A few weeks later, Kodak would mail your photos to you mounted on boards. Before digital, money always censored us. It censored what we captured and what we created. Buying film cost money. Developing film cost money.
- Fast forward to our more recent history, the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s. The typical American family would buy 3 rolls of film a year. They would take one roll during Christmas
- One roll during their summer vacation
- And one roll throughout the year— graduations, birthdays.Some families would catalogue these photos in albums and scrapbooks, some more meticulously than others—other families would just throw the photos in shoeboxes. Some boxes were lost, others were saved. During the full of the 20th century, most families didn’t really have to consider the idea of preserving their photographs. They just had to not throw themaway—which most people don’t intentionally do. Because that’s the thing, it just so happens that paper conservation overlaps with film. Though photographs have different chemical properties, it’s more or less the same as paper. A document or a photograph on good quality paper can last for 200 years or more.
- So, why do these photographs matter? Because we are anchored by our ancestors. Recently, over one million Syrians have been forced to leave their homes to escape the war, crossing the borders to Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. Theyfear that they will be stopped if they appear to be on the run, so they can only bring very little with them. Only what can fit in their pockets and the folds in their clothes. So they bring only the most important things.. This is a picture of a Syrian man, who is a doctor, holding what he brought with him when he fled. A picture of his late wife. News story & photo credit: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2292837/If-flee-home-Poignant-pictures-Syrian-refugees-posing-treasured-possessions.html
- Think about the images in the news of after a disaster– a fire, flood, earthquake--people searching the rubble for their photographs, their documents—their lives. In these sorts of disasters, you realize that after life, family photographs can be one of the most important things you desperately try to save. Photo source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/20/us/severe-weather/
- A news story last year… A man found photographs blown 105 miles away from a family’s home that was destroyed in a tornado. He posted the photographs on Facebook, and miraculously a few weeks later, they were discovered by the family who had lost them. “I was just so touched that somebody found the pictures,” the mother of the family said, “It’s like getting a little piece of our family back.”News story & photo credit: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/14/250569699/tornado-victims-find-snapshots-of-solace-in-far-flung-photos
- When I was younger, I was obsessed with archiving. Only I didn’t realize it. I didn’t know what the word “archiving” meant, I didn’t have the words to explain what I was spending so much time doing. In 3rd grade I started my first diary and I continued to write daily in diaries until my early twenties. But it was more than just writing in my diary. I archived, and catalogued and indexed my life—which during, especially my teenage years, I thought was incredibly interesting. I printed out AOL emails and bound them. I have a box with files of the names of my friends labeled on folders, in each folder includes paper notes we would pass in class. I remember why I did this—what my motivation was. I was doing this because I thought when I was old and had lost my mind, I imagined myself sitting in a nursing home alone and having a nurse read my life back to me. From 3rd grade on. I remarked about this through my early journals. I noted the “good entries,” when something juicy happened – I kissed a boy, I drank stolen beers with friends. I thought my old, senile self would enjoy these chapters. I was intentionally writing to my old, elderly future self. I am 31 years old now. And as it turns out, there is a great deal of my early life that I catalogued that I don’t remember at all. I didn’t have to wait until I was 102.
- Sometimes when I visit my parents’ house, I’ll get lost in this. Picking up a journal from the 6th grade. I’ll laugh at a diary entry and will be embarrassed, but then I’ll turn the page and read a new entry and will become really proud of this girl.Who isthis person? I wonder this all the time. This young girl with braces and bangs who wrote her entire life down? I know I am her, but I’m not really her, not in a way I can understand. That girl is gone. And all that exists of her, all that I or you or anyone will ever know about her, is what she left behind. The things she saved.
- We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us. Today, we are in a time in history where technology allows us to create and capture content in mass. It doesn’t cost us a dime to take 15 pictures of the way the snow looks on a tree branch.
- Or the picture of the turkey sandwich we ate for lunch. And not only are we capturing more content than ever before, we are sharing more content than ever before. On Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter, and Snapchat, and Vine, and etc. and etc. On Twitter, for example, we tweet approximately 58 MILLION tweets every day. All of those tweets are being automatically archived with the Library of Congress. There is this mentality if you don’t share it, it doesn’t exist. If you don’t share the picture of you in the cute stilettos what was the point of buying them? If you don’t share the picture of you at the fancy restaurant, how will anyone know you went?
- The thing with personal archives, what I can’t stop thinking about, why I think this is so important and why I am here today is that, No, it’s not about “If you don’t share it…” It’s about “If you don’t save it.” If you don’t save it, you won’t exist. With the rise of digital media, and with the rise of the companies that give us the technology that allow us to create and capture our lives—There comes a whole new host of complications and complexities to preserve your personal artifacts—and your personal history. The stories people created for Broadcastr will be lost. Today we trust companies like Google and Facebook with infinite amounts of our personal archives and we trust—against all common sense that these companies will be around forever to preserve our photos, our videos, our emails—our digital lives. I am now going to explain to you why today, your personal historiesare very much at risk. And I’m going to tell you what you can do about it.
- There is a great juxtaposition happening right now. On one hand, we are documenting our lives and creating more personal archives than we ever have before in human history. It took 2 centuries to fill the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. with more than 30 million books, 3 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 5 million maps and 60 million manuscripts. Today it takes 10 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so more than 100 times every day. BUT, on the other hand, we have no good way to preserve this content. That is because, in part, the idea of a one-dimensional document, like a paper document, or a photograph, no longer exists. Lets go back to the Broadcastr example. As we talked about, right now Broadcastr is giving people the option to get their stories back via an MP3. But without the technology format of the app itself, these stories by themselves have lost their context. The audio files aren’t tagged to a location, they can’t be compared to other stories from the same location over different time periods. This doesn’t allow someone looking back on these stories—archivists for example—the full context that they would need to fully understand them. It’s because with digital media, we are no longer simply talking about one-dimensional documents that can sit alone, like a letter or a scrapbook. We are talking about documents that are interconnected and fluid in nature. Digital, online documents have links to other documents, photographs have likes and comments and shares. Many online personal artifacts click out to different artifacts owned by different companies—likea Facebook post that drives to a YouTube video you uploaded of your child’s first steps. For archivists, historians or future generations to understand our personal archivethey need to understand the context it lives in.
- We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. Enter social networking sites. Friendster, MySpace, now Facebook. From an archival perspective, social networking sites are both a blessing and a curse. In one sense, archivists and historians crave what social networking sites like Facebook are allowing people to do in mass. And that’s record their own histories, all 500 million of them. Facebook is a wealth of personal artifacts. It allows people to visualize and map their daily lives. Start from the beginning of my Facebook Timeline and you can scan through snapshots and highlights of my life. All the big milestones are there: My life in college, grad school, getting a real job, getting married. But you will also see all of the everyday things in between. Photos of me at a party, status updates with my thoughts and nonsense, video clips and old articles I thought were funny. You will see the trips I went on, the blog posts I wrote, the restaurants where I ate dinner. With a good internet connection it is extremely easy to do this. With a smartphone, even more so. What social networking sites and this kind of technology have resulted in over the last ten years, is allowing people who may not have necessarily been inclined to keep a diary or scrapbook to create the equivalent of such just by being an active Facebook user.
- This is incredible if you think about it. A few years ago for my Master’s thesis I interviewed hundreds of people who used social networking sites. I remember talking to one guy from California, he was 26-years old and used Facebook regularly. “Facebook is pretty powerful,” he told me. “Seriously. And here’s the kicker,” he said. “In all seriousness, the coolest thing about it, assuming it’s not a trend that doesn’t last, which I don’t think it is, is that these pictures you put up are going to be there for the rest of your life. You can show your kids these pictures, your grandkids! It’s a montage of your life.” I think back on this conversation a lot. Because this guy was so excited about the promise of having Facebook record the history of his life—and how he could then share this with his future kids. But for this to happen, he is assuming that Facebook is going to be around for, at the very least, a few more decades. And there is absolutely no rationale reason to believe this will happen.
- I also talked to a 32-year old mother from Oregon. She told me that the most beneficial aspect of social networking sites for her is allowing her the ability to post pictures and updates about her first-born baby to her friends and family who live on the other side of the country. Yet this poses a problem. How, if shedecided to extract and preserve her Facebookcontent,would she go about it? Would she print out each photograph? Paste the photo’s comments to a Word document and print that also? Or would she just select the pictures she wanted and make a Shutterfly album and forgo the social context?? And what about the friends who shared other media like YouTube videos and online cards? Would she leave those behind, too? This kind of task is fairly extensive, making it pretty unrealistic that most people would even bother with it.
- Google at least, has a more user friendly option that allows you to extract your documents, emails, and photos that are housed within your Google account. However, though it’s easier to extract your documents, they will still be inevitably incomplete as you forgo the full digital context. Because that’s the thing, you cannot transfer the web offline. You cannot make something that is fluid and multi-dimensional in nature, flat and one-dimensional.
- Social networking sites also do a fantastic job of making visible social trends. Now, years after President Obama won his first presidential campaign in 2008, many people probably have cleaned up their Facebook profile. Maybe, for example, deleting their memberships to Facebook Groups like, “I am Voting for Change.” But shouldn’t it be recorded that for a few months 10’s of millions of Facebook users showed their support during this historical election? Isn’t some of the commentary on this Group’s Facebook Wall valuable for future historians to illustratethe political passion that fueled the “digital” air in the fall of 2008?Comments like this one: Hi Barak! You made us proud! America, you have renewed my trust in humanity! I am South African and I marvel at the fact that my child will grow up in a world where the greatest nation has been led by a black person, and see that as normal! Thank you America, and thank you Obama for living your dream and not surpressing it!
- Or, last March, when the Supreme Court deemed a ban on marriage equality illegal, and we watched as our Facebook news feed turned red with people in support of marriage equality. This was just one moment—a few days—and after this moment people began to change their profile pictures back to their faces. But was this something historians or archivists were able the capture? The sheer mass of it? The velocity? Was preserving that moment, truthfully as it was, even a possibility? Moments like these are the marrow of our society’s collective memory.
- Now I don’t want you to think it’s as if no one is considering these problems. Emory University has a very ambitious digital archive, which includes the archive of the author, Salman Rushdie. Mr. Rushdie donated both his handwritten journals to Emory and also 4 outdated Apple computers . The University was particularly interested in the impact technology had on the creative process. So theyattempted to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience with the original computer environment. This allowed researchers and students the opportunity to log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw it, search his computer file folders, click and move within the computer experience, see the applications he used. As it turned out, Mac Stickie Notes were a favorite. To the archivists at Emory, stimulating the author’s electronic universe is the same as making a reproduction of the desk, chair and fountain pen that Jane Austin used, for example, and then allowing researchers to interact and understand that experience. But this level of sophistication for an archive is rare. For one, it’s a very expensive. It requires libraries to hire computer-savvy archivists to catalog material, but even more challenging, the libraries need to acquire and maintain obsolete technologies like outdated computers and floppy disks. NYTimes article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
- Imagine holding in your hands a record you really want to listen to. But you have no record player. In 2010 shortly before his death, John Updike sent Harvard his archive—50 5 ¼ in. floppy disks. The curator of the library admitted that Harvard didn’t really have any methodology to process “born digital material.” She said, “we just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks and hope for some kind of universal Harvard guideline to come through.” Rewind back to 1975. The Census Bureau discovers that only two computers on earth can still read the 1960 Census. This included the computerized index of over a million Vietnam War records that were entered on a hybrid motion picture film carrier that now, cannot be read.
- Recently, I talked to Professor Lori Emerson, who is the Director of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Boulder. She believes it is extremely important to keep obsolete technologies, alive. This lab is an open space for hands-on research and teaching using now-obsolete hardware and software. Everything in the lab functions—from their 1990 NEXT Cube to a Gaming Console from 1982, to a number of Apple computer—Apple Macintoshes, an Apple Lisa. She, like many archivists and historians, are becoming increasingly concerned that as the pace of hardware and software evolve—think about how many iPhone versions you have owned—there is not a good plan in place, at scale, to keep up.To make sure our documents aren’t becoming obsolete right alongside the technology that can read them. I was talking to someone who works at Google about hardware and software and how quickly our media formats change and go extinct. How the computers we used growing up, used in college, are now all giant, dusty dinosaurs we probably can’t turn on anymore. He told me that this is the beauty of the cloud!When he takes a picture or video with his phoneit doesn’t just live on my phone. It goes directly to the cloud. So he doesn’t have to trust hisphone’s software, or that he won’t lose my phone drunk in a cab. His documents are saved everywhere hego. And he can access them on all different sorts of devices.
- Okay…. So the Cloud. For a whileI would listen to people talk about “The Cloud” and I would nod along and pretend I knew what they were talking about while thinking to myself, Okay, maybe the cloud is the solution here. But then I Google’d the cloud. Do you know what the cloud is? The Cloud is a server farm. And do know what a server farm is? A server farm is a company.
- There is a paradox going on here. In this moment in history, Google, Facebook, Twitter—they are all mammoth companies. All of your personal archives—your photos, your videos, your Vines, your YouTubes, your emails—they are all being preserved with more security than ever before. Their company’s server farms are extremely protected. Much more protected than that shoebox where, just two decades before, you tossed in all that stuff you weren’t quite sure what to do with—but you felt, for some reason, you ought to save. But in another sense, your personal archives—your personal history—is more at risk than ever before. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is 40 years. What I am trying to do today is take you outside of this moment in history. I want you to zoom out. Spotted throughout modern history are companies that came along and changed everything. Companies that gave us tools or a service, and with those tools, what we were able to do, create, or capturetransformed. Kodak. PanAm. Lehman Brothers. TWA. Standard Oil. Blockbuster. The Pullman Company. Enron. GeoCities. Compaq. Friendster. There is no rationale reason to believe that the companies that are changing culture right now, in this particular moment in history, will last “forever.” Will last for more than a few more decades. This is where I remind you of Broadcastr. And of the thousands of companies that are just like Broadcastr. And the companies that, right now, are bigger than Broadcastr and are holding within them, a larger volume of our personal records than have ever existed before in human history. And I want to remind you that these are corporations own and archive your personal records, your documents and pictures and videos. Your archives will always be accessible to the corporation, but not necessarily to you. And these companies owe you nothing. While there is no reason to distrust a Facebook or a Google, there is no reason to trust them either. The cloud is a company, and companies, like your favorite devices and technologies of the moment—are all fleetingly temporary. And these are the places where we are trusting the digital stories of our lives. And we have no idea how to preserve any of it. This is a google data center in BelgiumPhoto Source: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/places/11
- This presentation is called, “How Do We Save Our Digital Lives?” So then, how do we save our digital lives? In 1964, a French philosopher wrote lecture called, “The Concept of the Archive.” He noted: “the impulse to preserve something to be remembered while leaving out something to be forgotten—is found in individual and collective minds, historically and fictionally.” What do we choose to leave behind? What parts of our lives do we choose to preserve and what partsdo we decide to let go of, to be forgotten? If I was actually an archivist—and not just someone who is obsessed with archiving—I would say people should not really have this choice. The beauty of archives is that their value changes with time. You don’t know what is going to be important, until it is. And this could be generations later. I spoke with several professional archivists for this presentation and would end each conversation with a question: So what can we do? How do we save our digital lives?
- Peter Wosh, the director of NYU’s archives, said that printing out documents you want to save is problematic because you choose what is important to save, so it makes you self-selective. And also because the people who find these archives in the future won’t have the full digital context to understand them. Where does it click to? What were the comments? He, and all of the professional archivists I spoke to, said that though there isn’t a complete solution, the best recommendation is the Library of Congress. They recommend: Create an “Archive Folder.” Select the images, emails, videos and documents that you want to save. Make at least 2 copies of your archive folder, the more the better. Have at least one copy saved on external media such as DVDs or a portable hard drive. Be sure to check your files at least once a year to make sure you can still read them. And migrate your archives at least every 10 years to a new computer or storage system to ensure the technology does not become obsolete. I think this is a really tall order. This is a lot harder to do than justtossing a few things into a shoebox every once and a while and hoping for the best. And it’s an incomplete-solution. Self-selecting what you deem is important at the time limits what might be important later. And migrating your media every few years doesn’t really solve the problem of understanding the the full digital context of your documents. The most user-friendly advice I did receive however, did by no means solve all of our problems—but it was a simple, realistic solution that is a good place to start. Something I could see myself actually doing. This advice wasn’t from an archivist, it was from a photo historian. It’s the same advice she tells her children.
- Every month go through your pictures and documents. Pick just a few. Print them out. Use high-quality paper, don’t do it cheaply. Caption your photos or documents. You think you will remember but you never do. Use a soft pencil. This, at least, gives people the chance to preserve and own their personal histories and documents, in a way that isn’t controlled by a third party corporation, devices or software. The idea of a person self-selecting what they want to preserve and what they would rather leave behind doesn’t bother me as much. I just want people to have the chance to save something.
- Because what is saved and left behind is cherished by the people who love them. Throughout this research, I became obsessed with thinking about people who, because of what they saved and left behind, in their death have become historical icons. Bigger than a person, pieces of humanity. The big ones that come to mind are Anne Frank, Vincent Van Gogh, and more recently, John Kennedy Toole.
- A writer of a diary during a war, a painter with a crooked mind, a writer of a Pulitzer Prize winning book nobody wanted to publish. There is one thing all of these people have in common.
- Somebody fiercely loved them, somebody fiercely wanted to keep them alive. Her father, his brother, his mother. Saving personal archives can be a happy accident—tossing photos in a shoebox, printing out emails. But finding an archive andpreserving it is an act of love. Because that’s the thing, generally, ordinary people aren’t thinking about their own archives. It forces them to face their own mortality and most people are uncomfortable with this. Generally, what is saved is an accident. It just happened to be a lot easier to accidently save something made of paper. So how do you save your digital lives? How do we save our personal histories so they can be found? I don’t know. My only hope for you today is to inspire you to be mindful of this. To take the time and effort to pull out and preserve pieces of your life that you feel, for some reason, you ought to save. And I encourage you to try to save it—whether by simply printing it out on high quality paper, making a digital archive folder, or migrating your media regularly.
- So that, maybe, one day in the future…Photo credit: http://indulgd.com/26-of-the-most-thought-provoking-photographs-of-all-time/
- somebody can find it. Photo credit: http://indulgd.com/26-of-the-most-thought-provoking-photographs-of-all-time/
- And treasure it. Photo credit: http://www.agencevu.com/stories/index.php?id=213&p=139
- Because this is…Photo credit: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/rock_and_roll/
- after all,Photo credit: http://indulgd.com/26-of-the-most-thought-provoking-photographs-of-all-time/
- your personal history….Photo credit: http://photoarts.com/haviv/bosnia/crying.html
- And your personal history…Photo credit: http://indulgd.com/26-of-the-most-thought-provoking-photographs-of-all-time/
- Is just as important…Photo credit: http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/most-powerful-photographs-ever-taken
- As any history in the world.
- Thank you.There are some companies thinking about this, like Backupify – though this is a more of a corporate solution that costs money to back up your files, photos, emails, etc. But it’s the same issue, it’s a company, and you have to trust that company will be around