Digital Archaeology: Saving Our “Lost” Media
The British Library in Camden, London, recently got the go-ahead for a £500 million expansion, a project providing extra space for the site’s 170 million items. While exciting, this 12-story addition nevertheless highlights one of society’s biggest (yet quietest) problems – finding space for all our stuff.
Storage has always been a problem for the human race. The British Library reportedly has around 170 million different items cataloged, including Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a medieval (1392) script considered one of the finest examples of its type.
Also on-site are music from Mozart and Bach, an Enigma Machine from the Second World War, and the Lindisfarne Gospels (700AD), among plenty of other treasures. These are all physical things, requiring their own nook in space.
Further, the ISBNdb website reports that there are around 158,464,880 unique books in the world today, with a further 2.2 million published every year – and that’s just one copy of each. It’s easy to see why the British Library might need another 12 floors.
Storage Efforts
The internet, with all its digital media, has only accelerated the production of books, games, and music. A reported 1,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify and Apple Music (etc.) every hour, for instance, while the ability for people to self-publish on blogs and storefronts like Amazon means that content creation is an increasingly ordinary thing to do.
Much the same is true in gaming, where casino websites like PlayStar have a regularly updated carousel of slots. This New Jersey online casino has hundreds of these titles, including many based on pop culture franchises.
There’s also a seemingly infinite number of TikToks, YouTube videos, and Snapchats floating around the web, too.
Inevitably, all this data comes with its own set of challenges. Digital storage has evolved (middle-aged people will undoubtedly remember sub-1mb internet speeds and floppy discs that could hold next to nothing, even by the standards of the time) but there’s a certain amount of choice involved with exactly what gets saved.
Firstly, anything deemed worthwhile from the physical realm, such as a book, has to be digitized. Secondly, items with no real-world counterpart (like MP3s) now have a good chance of being lost forever.
An untold number of things could potentially fall into the latter category. Streaming sites like Netflix and Disney+ often carry series and films for brief periods only, meaning that, one day, they’re just not available to watch anymore.
Batgirl
The Scarlet, a newspaper of Clark University, points to HBO’s decision to remove 36 of its shows from its streaming platform as an example of how digital content is becoming the new lost media.
Author Jacob Goldman also touched on HBO Max’s scrapping of the movie Batgirl, even though it was finished. This not only rendered the film inaccessible to audiences forever, but it also destroyed any chance HBO had of recouping its budget.
Oddly enough, copyright laws have made things worse. A 2012 report from The Atlantic talks about a “missing” 20th century in literature, largely because Amazon can reprint public domain books (those whose author died 70 years ago) easily. Copyrighted material offers a thornier route to publication, however.
It’s almost inevitable that the same issue will befall HBO’s missing shows, as the rights holder simply wants nothing to do with them. Thus, from the public’s perspective, they might as well not exist at all.
This era of ephemeral, digital content has already caused its casualties. Were all those songs, shows, and games worth saving?
