The end of decay time

The digital’s inexorable annexing of the past has finally caught the attention of policymakers. Article 17 of the European proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation seeks a ‘right to be forgotten and to erasure’ (see also Rosen, 2012). But this ambition fails to recognize that today life is lived through hyperconnectivity – copying, editing, posting, sharing, linking, liking – these are not subject to the rules of what I call ‘decay time’ (Hoskins, forthcoming).

Before the digital, the past was a rotting place. Its media yellowed, faded or flickered, susceptible to the obscuration of use and of age. And wherever it was collected and contained, the media archive concentrated emissions of volatile organic compounds: the fusty smell of a second-hand bookstore or library was a mark of age which accompanied the visible signs of use and decay. And the analogue recording and storage media, dominant for much of the late twentieth century – magnetic tape, film, vinyl records – stretched and scratched and wore out through physical contact with their capture and playback machines.

These media’s finite forms marked the past’s decline, holding a proper distance between what was and what is now: making visible and audible society’s dissipating memory. And this distance was mediated through the scarcity (and sometimes fragility) that comes with machinic and artefactual decay, degradation and loss. The result was familiar deterioration.

The passage of this decay time afforded value and made the past worthy of careful excavation, re-imagination and representation. And it was this media that reached its denouement of memorial power but also of decay in the late twentieth century with the mass market for the audio and video cassette recorder. It seems strange then to say that it was the media of deterioration, of decay time, that underpinned the contemporary ‘memory boom’ (Winter, 2000, 2006; Huyssen, 2003; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010), the archival tendencies of which were driven by the principles of scarcity and the bounding of space.

But today’s archive is a medium in its own right, liberated ‘from archival space into archival time’ (Ernst, 2004: 52). The avalanche of post-scarcity culture and the databasing of the multitude challenges decay time. Suddenly, the faded and fading past of old school friends, former lovers and all that could and should have been forgotten are returned to a single connected present via Google, Flickr, Ebay, YouTube and Facebook.

By the mid 2000s, the fragments of one’s past selves variously scattered by time and mobility were suddenly searchable and minable without the need of private detective agencies. As Kevin Kelly (2005) says, ‘Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real’.

Today, the digital drives the archive inwards as well as out as post-scarcity culture is increasingly being translated into the post-scarcity self. The individual has become a hybridized cipher of the past, sifting, tagging, managing the flux of media and communication content that marks the rise of the post-human. This is an environment where ‘settings’ become king: where new memory striations are made through Big Data’s swamping of self, politics and culture.

The latest turn in the living archive of affective media is the encroachment of ‘wearable tech’ and the march of the ‘quantified self movement’. Self-tracking and fast-developing technologies for data acquisition of daily life mark the latest trend in the shift ‘from the era of recorded memory to one of potential memory’ (Bowker, 2007: 26). Following on from the initial researcher exclusivity of Microsoft’s ‘SenseCam’, suddenly ‘lifelogging’ devices are affordable and wearable for the consumer market. ‘Relive your life like you remember it’ is the promise of digital memory according to ‘Memoto’, one of the latest global positioning system (GPS) digital cameras with tiny 36 × 36 × 9 mm³ dimensions that you clip on to automatically take photos wherever you go.

However, it is not the recording devices that transform the potential memory of the post-scarcity self; rather, it is the computers and networks the device connects to. Memory is made by and made vulnerable through a new risk culture and compulsion of hyperconnectivity (Hoskins and Tulloch, forthcoming). For example, ‘emergence’ is the massively increased potential for media data to literally ‘emerge’, to be ‘discovered’ and/or disseminated – instantaneously – at unprescribed and unpredictable times after the moment of its recording, archiving or loss, which can then potentially transcend and transform that which is known, or thought to be known, about a person, place or event (cf. Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010).

Thus, the quantified self adds to the profound uncertainty of a dormant connective memory through the often indiscriminate accumulating potential of the digital world to transform past personal, semi-public and public relations through the unforeseeable re-activation of latent and semi-latent connections of the living archive.

In these circumstances, the capacity for forgetting becomes an increasingly pressing concern for post-scarcity living and a prescient theme for Memory Studies. In fact, the most cited article to date in this journal is Paul Connerton’s (2008) ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, which has provoked a great deal of debate, including in these pages (Erdelyi, 2008; Singer and Conway, 2008; Wessel and Moulds, 2008). Connerton’s (2008) fifth type of forgetting, which ‘flows from a surfeit of information’, is ‘annulment’ and ‘discarding’. He argues, ‘the concept of discarding may come to occupy as central a role in the 21^st century as the concept of production did in the 19^th century’ (p. 65).

Of course, erasure of data doesn’t necessarily lead to forgetting in the same way that representation, storing and archiving doesn’t necessarily lead to increased prospects of remembering. But the challenge posed to remembering and forgetting for the hyperconnected self is not just a matter of surfeit. ‘Overload’, as Malcolm McCullough (2013) rightly states, is nothing new. Rather, it is the ‘spreadability’ (Jenkins et al., 2013), virality and contagion of the living archive that hostages future memory to the vagaries of the digital. This includes, paradoxically, exposure to a potentially new scale of vulnerability to instant decay: corruption, disconnection and deletion.

The European proposal for a right to be forgotten reveals a new ressentiment of the post-scarcity age: a loss of the confidence of steady decay time exposes memory to less certain prospects for erasure and for forgetting.