Dreaming the Future Closer

The more I think about it, the less I feel like the world has qualitatively changed in the so-called digital revolution.  More than anything else, I feel like the rapid development of technologies just reveals more clearly the fundamental character of the world of social production. 

It seems that as soon as you zoom in on some feature of digital production (say the reproducibility of the photograph, the ease with which it can be manipulated, its separation, even, from an ‘original’ negative or print from which all others derive), that feature ends up being a more basic feature that has always been present just not so clearly seen. 

It feels sort of like the technological changes reveal properties of social ‘matter’ akin to the way a particle accelerator reveals properties of physical matter.  There’s a real change, but it’s a matter of degree rather than kind.

I have more than once encountered people who seem to think that the growing presence of documents on the internet will lead to the disappearance, or at least decline, of the modern library.  They gladly welcome an era in which all written text will be digitized, archived in cyberspace.

Of course, those in the know get pretty tired of this.  It takes an obscene amount of time and money to digitize old works and even more time and money to maintain them.  Questions of file types becoming obsolete, of the need for migrating files, of the care required to prepare and actually scan old works, all come into play. 

It seems both responses miss something important: namely, that digitization isn’t really about archiving and storing files.  It’s about providing access to them.  The two concerns, while overlapping, are not identical and may even oppose each other.  In the more extreme cases, you find archivists rigorously limiting access to fragile manuscripts in order to maintain the text.

There is something quite interesting about digital access which provides clear advantages over ‘hardcopy’ access.  First and foremost of these is that a digital copy of a work is far more reproducible than a hardcopy work.  Moreover, that digital copy itself is easier to convert into a new hardcopy version of what it mimics.  This feeds back into archiving in an interesting way, multiplying the locations where the material can be found.

Let’s imagine a rare manuscript that can only be accessed by going to Oxford University with your list of credentials and letters of introduction.  Digitize it.  Now, the original remains quite important in itself for a number of studies that just require the material object itself.  However, if made accessible through the internet, it can now be reproduced, in content, at hundreds of different locations. 

Individuals don’t just access it, but occasionally copy and store it themselves.  If this habit gets cultivated, then you begin to create the groundwork for a second order, distributed, back up archive.  Moreover, the individuals accessing have the option to reproduce it.  All they need is a good printer, some ink, and paper to create an alternative hardcopy of the text.

This also makes it easier for those with more resources (like large publishers) to engage in high quality republications of major works that are rarely seen.  Which in turn find their ways back to the libraries…

Digitization isn’t a replacement for traditional archiving, but it is a powerful supplement to it.  It creates a more accessible double of the original archive.  Consider Walter Benjamin’s famous observations about the aura of a work of art.  Then consider that the actual situation is more complicated, that the aura is not always lost but sometimes intensified, the original becoming more valuable for its distinctive material uniqueness which the copies do not capture.

In the case of texts, their pure materiality comes into question.  Some studies depend not upon the content of the book, but on its substance and form.  They raise questions about how the book was made, what materials went into it.  They also depend upon the original to underwrite the copies.  For example, the age of a text can often only be firmly established by a physical analysis of the original itself. 

The primary archive then becomes something like Fort Knox, the place where the ‘real’ money is.   With more and more people accessing the content through the reproduction, the originals are in turn less likely to be exposed to the sorts of access which degrade them.