Endangered Memories
Even without all the dates and names that terrify middle school students everywhere, history is still a very deep topic to consider. But when we attempt to understand the process by which history is actively created, we have pitted ourselves against the kind of herculean mental effort typically reserved for TED conferences and MENSA debates. To witness the terrifying phenomenon of history being written in millisecond chucks by the Internet Age is to experience an intellectual coup de grâce. And while there is a certain thanatotic pleasure in realizing that the stodgy history of the future is being randomly shuffled together in the present by our Great Distracted Masses, a catharsis awaits between every browser tab for those of us involved in a study of history from our keyboards:
The “history” of tomorrow will only be what we digitize today.
With every trip to the county archives, I find myself horrified when I witness what has been already been lost, and this despite our heroic attempts at preservation. Having already obsessed over the scant available images of my county’s vanishing rural communities, I know exactly where the missing pieces to the story of the people of Wilson County, Tennessee were supposed to fit. These missing pieces, known as lacunae to those in the library sciences, often come to be through a familiar series of events that unfolds around us still: We live our lives concerned with only that which involves our daily habits, choosing to place into safekeeping only those rare mementos of minutiae that we fancy as being extraordinary at the time, leaving the rest to fall away as the debris of everyday life. This is as true today as it ever was before. Regardless of how much we assume our contemporary existence to differ from the lives of the past, there is truly nothing new under the sun when it comes to how we abuse the very notion of posterity.
However much we treat with disregard the potential evidence of our everyday lives, the reason for this article is to illuminate the manner in which we mistreat those precious few souvenirs that we have actually bothered to save. In our attics, hope chests, photo albums and Sharpie-emblazoned cardboard boxes we all have our treasured family memories of the second half of the twentieth century rotting away into oblivion. The phenomenon of the early twenty-first century shoebox of forgotten photographs was caused by the widespread adoption of smartphones, which with their convenient multi-tool functionality have made obsolete the antiquated notion of memories that live only on developed film. Ironically, with the assistance of these same digital devices (along with new free software) we can now rectify the very issue that they have caused. By digitizing these endangered memories, we can absolve these refugee photographs of their sin of existing before the invention of the smartphone.
While peripheral photograph scanners have been around for decades, their cumbersome size, tedious operation and considerable expense have relegated them to the exclusive domain of the most ardent of the family archivists among us. Numerous scanning service companies looked to capitalize on the old shoebox (ScanCafe and GoPhoto ring a bell?), but somehow paying $20 to digitize a handful of the Ghosts of Haircuts Past never quite caught on either. The resulting void in realistic photo digitization options has only worked to allow another inch of dust to settle on our shoeboxes, all the while our I’ll-get-around-to-it-someday collections grow with the passing of each great aunt, grandparent or family reunion.
The risks of inevitable loss associated with the manner in which history is created are real, and contrary to what may seem intuitive of our technological advancement, these risks appear to be gaining in strength. While the persistent background threat of the Everyday Livin’ Mentality that we explored above is always at play, two insidious concepts have risen sharply in recent years, risks that the average shoebox memory-hoarder has little power to combat: revisionist cultural ideologies and an unusually steep curve of technological format change. With concern to the former, we would do well to recognize that this threat isn’t limited to the faraway sands of the Middle East, as the same types of nationalistic pride and religious zealotry that fuels the archaeological crimes of ISIS work to inform the undefined nostalgia that blinds a people bent on making anything “great again”. The small kinds of personal and community histories that we can save from the oblivion of the shoeboxes may seem less important than the ancient stone monuments that we cannot save from the militant bulldozers, but these small kinds of history are exactly the sort of evidence of a past and powerful people that can protect us from misleading grand narratives. A people that know without a doubt where they came from are immune to the sort of lies used to convince them to lock their own shackles out of fear.
The second rising threat to history is perhaps the most pernicious: an unusually steep curve of technological format change. When speaking of how we go about the act of engaging history, I often ask folks what we would do if the best piece of music ever composed somehow happened to exist on one lonely eight-track cassette. This little philosophical thought experiment may appear easy to answer, as the obvious solution involves a simple conversion of format. However, the real struggle comes in recognizing our lives’ short duration against the potentially endless process of human technological advance. When we speak of digitizing anything, we are actually invoking a specific technological format; with concerns to the digital audio file created from the hypothetical cassette, we’re probably talking about an MP3 file, for instance. As anyone that has labored to convert an old MS Office .doc file into something resembling a viable document can attest, file formats do change.
It is in exploration of this threat that we find the crux of the shoebox issue, seeing as though we are now a people that are accustomed to a convenient digital storage of an increasingly large amount of our shared cultural knowledge that seamlessly spans devices and format upgrades. An old Polaroid of our now-deceased childhood friend refuses to play along as it exists in it’s native format. What we’re dealing with isn’t some mythic transcendental leap from the analog to the digital as a one-time chore. What is actually happening in our shoebox is that we are recognizing our responsibility in the greater Historian’s Dilemma: information always comes in ephemeral forms. Languages mutate, the technologies of record change and the forces of nature apparently are making a game of slowly erasing our tracks behind us as we go.
The best advice those of us concerned with the future of history can offer is to think of these things as a relay race: each generation must receive the memories of all of those before and carry them safely with us, until the time comes when we must pass them on to the next generation in a format that they’ll understand. The primary obstacle we face in our current historical context comes in accepting the reality that the historians of our future will not be sorting through musty papers as we have; they will rarely, if ever, look further than their digital records. We carry the very real distinction of being the translators of all known human information, in a way that no previous generation has had to shoulder. For we digital immigrants sandwiched between our Baby Boomer parents and our digital native children, we face far more resistance from those behind us than from those ahead of us. While our parents and grandparents will need our prodding if they are to carry their generational load of memories across the digital divide, our children will at least glance at anything that’ll scroll past their screens, which for now is all that we ask of them.
Using our smartphones to digitize our rotting old chemical-coated paper photographs is only the first of many steps to come. In order to mitigate the risk of the loss of these endangered memories, we must liberate them from the confines of our devices’ notoriously sketchy hard drives by sharing among friends and family via social media services. We also need to horde these images of an analog past throughout all of our private cloud drive accounts. The stakes are unimaginably high, as the Rosetta Stone of the future may very well be lurking in your Google Drive as we speak, and if we are to learn anything from the burning of the Library of Alexandria, there is never a good reason to leave all of our scrolls on one shelf. By tucking our endangered memories into the racks of servers across the globe, we ensure that a single house fire doesn’t blind the historians that will be trying to figure us out. Given the rate of climate, ecological, technological and cultural change occurring around us during this brief interval in a much longer history, we have every reason to believe that they will indeed be trying very hard to understand us, if not in search for understanding and continuity, then out of a forensic attempt to condemn us for our crimes. At the very least, we owe it to them to take a few seconds out of our lives and wave our smartphones at a photograph or two now and then.
