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Making Mountains into Molehills

How do we begin to negotiate the clutter of the digital in the current of non-stop content?

Emma Barlow, Student Intern

In the internet age, the production of new digital content is never ending. We spend hours every day refreshing and refreshing the screens on our devices, only to find that each time we do, there’s a wealth of new information, new images, memes, tweets, posts, for our attention.

Increasingly, the apps we use provide us with options to declutter our online spaces, or at least the way they appear to other users. Most of these use the word ‘archive’, where they simply mean ‘hide’. Apps such as Instagram allow us to ‘archive’ our posts purposefully, or they do it for us once the twenty four hour period of a ‘story’ has expired. However, beyond hiding these posts from the public spaces of our internet personas, archiving in this sense serves no wider purpose.

Beyond the digital, archiving almost certainly serves a specific function within society, and in most cases these archives are designed to be interacted with rather than hidden away. They provide historical background, for those who are merely interested to those who are researching academically, and everyone in between. So why can’t our digital archives also perform these same functions? 

The question of curation

While it’s true that the benefits of digital archiving may be great, the implementation of such an archive certainly doesn’t come easily. The main issue is the problem of curation, or put simply, choice. While the Instagram model allows us to choose the posts we wish to archive, it doesn’t allow us to sort these posts into collections. As the ‘archive’, in this case, also isn’t visible to anyone but the primary user, the curation of the archive isn’t a necessity in the same way as, say, a physical library. If we were to make our digital archives open and accessible, to serve the functions we want it to, surely we would need to organise our collections. However, by picking and choosing which sections of content to archive, and which to simply discard, are we not assigning value ourselves? Value judgements like these are incredibly subjective, as they would change from curator to curator, and can’t be programmed reliably into an algorithm. If, at some point in the future, the material we discarded may be needed for reasons we can’t possibly predict, what authority do we have to discard it at all? 

But surely we can’t archive everything. The sheer amount of new material every minute makes that virtually impossible. That is also not accounting for sensitive material which may not be able to be shared freely, for various reasons. Curation must be part of the process. The question becomes, then, how can we limit the negative effects of the value judgements we make? One solution could be to create more committee-style groups of curators, who have differing opinions or backgrounds, and who may be able to balance the weight of authority between them. If each group had varied interests amongst its members, compromises would need to be made, and perhaps these would shift the balance of power away from the individual. 

But how likely is it that these groups of people could be formed? Almost every business will need an archive for one reason or another – whether that is to simply organise and collate materials for internal staff and use, or to create an interactive, public-facing system similar to those in use by museums and libraries. However, where a museum or library is able to acquire funding to build these systems, it’s not always the case for smaller businesses. The costs of hiring outside curation experts is a major obstacle to a company’s ability to create and sustain an archive of any size.

The question of storage

The ability to sustain the archive is also another issue for companies. With the large amounts of data being generated every day, even with curation, it would take an astonishing amount of space to store it. While physical archives can manipulate and visibly audit their spaces, digital archives normally rely upon cloud storage. This can often be expensive, with many services offering a rolling subscription monthly price just to retain access to your data. With the large amount of storage space needed, it can become a large drain on resources. Recently, however, some providers have reduced their prices for cloud storage, making archiving that bit more accessible.

So you have your cloud storage space for your archive, with an affordable rolling subscription to keep it available. You can rest easy knowing that everything is sorted. However, that’s not quite the case. While cloud storage is generally a reliable solution to space issues, it remains that this data is at the mercy of another system. This means that sustainability is not always a guarantee. This can be seen within the past year as Flickr announced that, without a paid subscription, users will only be able to store up to 1,000 images on the site. Any images above this cap would be available for download by the user until a deadline, and then deleted by Flickr.  This is just one example, but it remains a possibility for a number of systems. The need for sustainability is also a need for preservation, and this relies on keeping items and data safe in numerous places. In other words, not putting all your data eggs into one cloud storage basket.

While all of these things remain issues within digital archiving, this post is not designed to deter anyone from beginning one. The digital archive can have a great number of useful applications, simply from organising and collating data, to being able to create something new from these collections. But we shouldn’t ignore the fact that creating an archive, and sustaining it, is a monumental task. Whether the heart of your issue lies with curation or preservation, there are solutions to the major problems of digital archiving. While apps like Instagram want us to declutter our online personas by hiding those older, less relevant posts, we can choose to cease our data and control its potential, rather than discarding it. 

Emma Barlow interned with the team in Summer 2019. She’s just finished her MA in Film Studies with the University of Manchester. Connect with Emma on LinkedIn.