Archiving Ephemera

The archive is a looming figure in both Sterne and Gitleman's histories of new media. So I hope I'm you don't think I'm being to presentist in trying to overlap their methodological concerns onto a current artifact: YouTomb. You've all, no doubt, heard of/visited YouTube, and in doing watching their videos, there's a good chance you've violated the copyright of someone or another. As much as YouTube promotes DIY culture, it also serves as a reservoir of free videos from larger copyrighted works. Not to get too mired in the legal questions surrounding this site, suffice it to say that, there is enough corporate pressure put on YouTube, which, by the way, is owned by Google, to require thousands of video's removal each day to prevent lawsuits. A group of concerned users at MIT have created an archive of these excised videos at the website YouTomb, http://youtomb.mit.edu/. While not all these examples are copyright related (there is also the question of decency, mind you) rest assured that plenty are.

Sterne positions his reading of sound recording in terms of tropes of morbidity and "bourgeois modernity." While I think you could critique him for getting a little "save the rainforest" preachy by the end of his chapter, nonetheless, the stakes are apparent, and intriguing, in his dual reading of death of "other" cultures alongside the material aspects of the machine itself. When we couple this with Gitelman's claim of Victorian fascination with originality and "presence" we see that the question of the fleetingness of both cultural material and archives themselves is a central question for cultural studies, and the academy more generally.

This brings us back to the Internet, the supposed harbinger of ephemeral times, reality here for one click only. While people are trying to refute this notion, convincingly showing that "every click leaves a trace," the sheer number of videos on YouTomb suggests that our culture(s), taking place more and more online are going to be/are an archive we need to start, well, archiving in a serious way. To steal a telling example: When scholars of Salman Rushdie return to his writing after his death what do they count as "work"? Are his text messages worthy of authorial correspondence? Is his Internet history worthy of "creative inspiration"? His iPod playlist? You get the gist. The point here is twofold: first, the Internet is not as temporary as commonly believed, but if we don't start asking and answering questions about the nature of the digital archive we will not be able to reconstruct the terabytes of data we are cleansing, deleting, spilling coffee on, etc. in order to write cultural history or ethnographgies of our textually rich, copyrighted cultures of today.