Shedding Light on a Digital Dark Age

An article relating to my MA research has just been published by the Victoria & Albert Museum

In the article I discuss issues surrounding digital archiving and the impact for museums. Digital technology appears to offer the potential of perfect and infinite memory and, as such, provide a great service to the museum, one of the common custodians of national memory. ‘The more memory we store on databanks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen'.1 This digital memory capacity presents a new type of history, but one in which we are in danger of information overload. In order for us to deal with the past in the present, we need to discard some of that past to make it comprehensible, digestible and useful.

Paradoxically, this capacity is threatened by what some have called the prospect of a ‘digital dark age’, an uncertain era in which many contemporary digital artifacts have been rendered inaccessible by the swift obsolescence of the software with which they were created. For museums hoping to preserve digital relics, such a ‘digital dark age’ presents major challenges, but it does imply a more traditional historical trajectory, a history that is very flawed. Some pieces are left out by accident and some are left out by design – this is the history that has been plotted up until now.

To read the full article, please visit the V&A online journal.

1. Lévy, Pierre. 'Building a Universal Digital Memory', in Museums in a Digital Age, edited by Ross Parry. London: Routledge, 2010: 2.

Image caption from previous page: Mark Hansen and Ben Ruben, 'The Listening Post', 2001-2003. The Science Museum, London. Photograph courtesy of David Alison