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The world’s digital memory is at risk
Digital archives are humanity’s collective memory. Who should control them, and how, is a major problem for digital societies.
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Some politicians – including ones overseeing funding for digital archives – have dubious relationships with record-keeping best practices.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PIXABAY
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
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A constant hum drones out of a former church in San Francisco. It is the sound, from hundreds of fans cooling hundreds of computer servers, of the digital past being kept alive. This is the Internet Archive, the largest collection of archived webpages in the world and a constant reminder of the fragility of our digital past. It is also, thanks to a March ruling in a United States federal court, which found that the archive’s lending practices violate publishers’ rights, just one battlefield in a growing struggle that will define how humanity’s collective digital memory is owned, shared and preserved – or lost forever.
As a scholar of digital data, I know that not all data loss – the corrosion and destruction of our digital past – is tragic. But much data loss today occurs in ways that are deeply unjust and that have monumental implications for both culture and politics. Few non-profit organisations or publicly backed digital libraries are able to operate at the scale needed to truly democratise control of digital knowledge. Which means important decisions about how these issues play out are left to powerful, profit-driven corporations or political leaders with agendas. Understanding these forces is a critical step towards managing, mitigating and ultimately controlling data loss and, with it, the conditions under which our societies remember and forget.
