#digital amnesia

I saw levels created for someone for their birthday, or featuring really innovative ways to play midi-esque snippets of songs or highly detailed pixel art made of nothing but Mario sprites. And now, at Nintendo’s whim (and no doubt ballooning server costs), that body of work will be gone forever... ...This article is going to be an attempt to make sense of my thoughts surrounding that, plus the ways we’ve generously placed our histories in the hands of private corporations and hoped like hell they wouldn’t just be arbitrarily erased, the more intentional disruptions of history various (typically marginalised) groups have suffered, and the fallout of that.

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Dr Maria Wimber believes that digital trends negatively impact human memory.  She states that the habit of “looking up information prevents the buildup of longterm memory.”  With access to instant information, “looking up the answer” has become many people’s first resort in attempting to answer a question or recall a memory.  This had led to “digital amnesia,” as people have become used to looking up phone numbers, addresses, and other vital pieces of everyday information.  With technological advances such as autocorrect and autocomplete, I feel like I rely on these much more than I did even a few years ago.  I catch myself forgetting how to spell words when handwriting sometimes because I have become accustomed to letting the computer fix my mistakes.        

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Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia? This VPRO Backlight documentary tracks down the amnesiac zeitgeist starting at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, whose world-famous 250-year old library was lost to budget cuts. The 400.000 Books were saved from the shredder by Ismail Serageldin, director of the world-famous Library of Alexandria, who is turning the legendary library of classical antiquity into a new knowledge hub for the digital world. Images as well as texts risk being lost in this ‘Digital Dark Age’. In an old McDonald’s restaurant in Mountain View, CA, retired NASA engineer Dennis Wingo is trying to retrieve the very first images of the moon. Upstate New York, Jason Scott has founded The Archive Team, a network of young activists that saves websites that are at risk of disappearing forever. In San Francisco, we visit Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive that’s going against the trend to destroy archives, and the Long Now Foundation, which has put the long-term back on the agenda by building a clock that only ticks once a year and should last 10,000 years, in an attempt to reconnect with generations thousands of years from now. Directed by Bregtje van der Haak / produced by VPRO Backlight, The Netherlands(source)

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