The Unbearable Ephemerality of Digital Media

frontpage photo by Electron, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

“All I see is fireworks” – Drake

After spending much of the last year working as Global Comment’s music reviewer,  I had an oddly discomforting experience of the ephemerality of digital media over the New Year.  My partner and I had headed out in the late morning of December 31st, visiting a bookstore to redeem some Christmas vouchers and then on to lunch at the Mexican restaurant we had visited on our first date (I had embarrassed myself by pronouncing the Ls in “quesadilla,” thus dooming myself to immortal mockery).

When we arrived home, our apartment had been broken into.  Our laptop had been stolen, along with jewellery, mp3 player and, bizarrely, toilet paper.  It was at that moment that I discovered how much of my life I had been keeping on the laptop – most of a draft of a book I’d been working on, various academic articles, bookmarks of interesting websites, and last but by no means least, an astonishing amount of mp3s that I’d accumulated over the last couple years.  Oddly enough, however, our small CD player and booklet of CDs was left untouched.

It wasn’t until I was faced with doing without that all that material that I realised exactly how reliant upon my computer I am nowadays – how much of my listening time had been taken over by the constant stream of high quality dj mix podcasts posted on sites like Fact and XLR8 magazine, album downloads from emusic, as well as the legit advance goodies given away by labels like Neon Golden.  And none of these – I repeat, none – had been backed up on CD or DVD-R, leaving me with only the last batch of CDs I had purchased, back when there still was stores that sold solid objects that reproduce music for your auditory pleasure amd snooty clerks to subtly deride your choices in those objects.  As far as my CD player is concerned, it’s still 2003. At the latest.

What I became suddenly keenly aware of, as I contemplated the loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of data files (and who knows how much time and bandwidth), is how precarious digital media really is.  We often tend to think of digital media as though it still maintains a relationship to the material, as though one mp3 is equivalent to one track on a CD or a record–this is, after all, the equation the RIAA relies upon to prosecute downloads, as lost income.  Digital media, as with the online version of the New York Times, is sometimes thought of as a secondary representation, a copy of a real, material original.

Yet the solely digital medium has a rather different relationship to materiality.  The French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard used to talk about “simulacra”–copies for which there were no originals.  Where the record used to be limited by the amount of money the producer had to press up, the mp3 is potentially infinitely reproducable without any degradation of quality.  Click and paste, spread across networks by millions of users, requiring only a tiny fraction of server space to be shared.  Digital media demands very little from any one person.

But if this is the strength of the digital, then it is sometimes strangely brittle.  In 2009, Amazon accidentally deleted the copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from every single one of the Kindle users who had downloaded it.  Though the mistake was quickly remedied, what it exposed was rather more damning – the ephemerality of the medium itself was exposed.  Sure, my apartment building might be burnt down and take my bookshelf and vinyl with it, or maybe I might be robbed by super-literate jazz thieves, but systems like the Kindle demonstrate a much wider potential for instant mass disappearance.  Servers may go down, companies go broke, or even censorship from above; as Maria Bustillos put it at The Awl: “I got a Kindle and I love it but I’m scaring of fascism.”

Even without such alarming political implications, with digital media I’m limited by myself, my ability to remember what it is that I had downloaded.  Even though it will be relatively easy to replace most of the important bits, I can’t possibly remember every album I’ve downloaded.  After racking my brain, there were only about 5 albums I’d downloaded over the last year that I’d really loved enough to bother replacing.

And sadly, that may itself be a measure of the shallowness of engaging with culture through digital media, where there is always another new buzz single, another new dj mix or album being hyped, and our (or at least, my) ability to genuinely engage with each new release may be progressively shortened, or the strange phenomenon of accumulating material only to never listen to, watch or read it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love digital media.  I am, after all, writing on this here website.  And I love how easily available media is, how you can access things from across the world instantly.  But there is something about the stubborn materiality of objects themselves that remains, in times of loss, oddly comforting.

Forced to only listen to my old CDs, I found my sudden lack of choice strangely relaxing. Rather than flicking through each mp3 searching for the quickest route to the musical pleasure centres, I greeted each CD like an old friend I had lost touch with, and sat down and listened to each album slowly and thoughtfully.