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Memory and Media
Old Habits Die Hard
Archival Tasks in the Age of Algorithms
Eivind Rossaak
Indeed, archives are in a crisis. Rather than lamenting it, we
should explore the emancipatory potential of this crisis and
assess how it is anchored in technological changes. Institutions
like archives, libraries, museums and galleries (the GLAM-sector)
were not built for new media. Yet, as concepts they are on
everybody's lips. Whenever we talk about how new media can
store and display information, these concepts reappear as
metaphors. Can the institutions themselves live up to their
conceptual and metaphorical mobilizations? Can modern media
ultimately make the sector bolder in terms of innovation,
research, articulation and curation as well as consolidate a new
type of public service model strengthening artistic creativity and
sharing? To do this, we need to change some of our habits of
thinking.
A few years back I was part of an international research project
called Habits of Living, directed by Professor Wendy Chun. It
made me aware of the usefulness of revisiting the notion of
habits. Some of our habits we are aware of, others we are not.
Habits tend to become invisible for ourselves, and interestingly,
new media follows the same logic. That is why new media for
many of us remain enigmatic, unexplored, and meagerly utilized.
We tend to think of new media as tools helping us to do what
Eivind Rossaak tijdens KVAN lezing op
11 november in het Nationaal Archief, Den Haag
Foto: Angeline Swinkels, Den Bosch
we already do well, without realizing that they have changed
our raison d'etre.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argued in their influential
book, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), that new
media tend to hide their operative principles to avoid scaring
away new users. The new technology becomes the cultural
unconscious. Habits do not like to be challenged. New media
become media only to the extent they appear to do better
(i.e. "re-represent" or "remediate") what old media did. The
content of new media is in a way old media plus something else.
The book re-represents the storyteller, the radio re-represents
the voice, sounds, the film remediates all these functions and
adds the moving image, television enhances liveness and adds
the principle of selection, and the computer tend to become a
new master-medium remediating aspects of many old media.
Each medium remediate not only one medium, but two or
several old modes of communication and representation. The
computer grasps and remediates the radio, the book, the movie,
television and many of our old writing habits at the same time. It
even recreates old fashion environments like waste baskets,
desktops, documents, fonts, folders and files, notepads and
moviemakers - even a garage band (Apple's software for music
making). New media pretend they are the good old stuff in new
and better versions, and in this way they smoothly replace old
habits as if nothing new had happened. This is the science of
human-computer-interaction. Its greatest success is the GUI
(graphic user interface) famously promoted by Apple, which
made us think that machines were not really machines.
Why do I rehearse this primer in new media theory? As long
as computers appear as nothing new, the GLAM-sector and its
