Digital containment and its discontents

ABSTRACT

This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices, and promises: the anxious exhaustion of digital housekeeping; the disorientation of self-archiving; and the annihilating sense of loss that strikes when digital containment fails.

KEYWORDS:

• Data compression
• container formats
• digital hoarding
• self-archiving
• data doubles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Digitization happens by 'sampling' a given analog entity. In the digitization of sound, a continuously variable electrical signal is sampled in time through a recording process, generating a non-continuous series of numbers that represent the original; the higher the rate of sampling, the higher the fidelity of the digital product. The digitization of an image involves sampling its surface through a scanning process; the higher the pixel resolution of the sampling, the truer the digital version will remain to the analog original.

2. There are various lossy methods of data compression. To compress sound, some codecs remove the less audible of two sounds that co-occur or overlap; some remove bits of information that are extremely high or low; some remove every other bit of information. Depending on the method used, the size of a digital file can be reduced by up to ninety percent. For a clear technical description of how information is eliminated to shrink a file’s size in the case of the popular mp3 codec, see Sterne (2006, 833).

3. The historian of technology Lewis Mumford ([1934] 1962) made a point to distinguish machines and tools from technologies of containment – including utensils like baskets and pots; apparatuses such as kilns and dye vats; public utilities like roads, reservoirs, and buildings; and power utilities such as railroad tracks and electric transmission lines – whose significance, he believed, had been underemphasized by scholars drawn to flashier, seemingly more active devices. The suite of digital containment media sketched above can be usefully regarded as technologies of containment rather than machines: they constitute a critical part of the 'background relations' (Ihde 1990) of our contemporary lifeworld.