Is our collective memory threatened? Our individual memories go, of course. But through the invention of writing, painting, film, audio and video recording we live on, civilization exists. Humans are ephemeral, but human knowledge can be close to eternal.
But it takes more than a village. Oral culture was unreliable. It takes libraries, archives, duplication, distribution, redundancy so that multiple copies in multiple formats of our fragile creations have a chance to cheat death.
Reminders of this truth have crossed my consciousness recently. The podcast “Film Week” has a rotating gaggle of film critics from Los Angeles reviewing current films that many of us will see and others that will never penetrate to the backwaters.
On a recent show, the host Larry Mantle and three other guests paused to mourn the passing of Vidiots, a Santa Monica video store that for three decades compiled over 50,000 films from all over the world and all eras and made itself the go-to reference library for local film crazies.
The saddened critics rightly compare the demise of Vidiot to that of great used bookstores all over the country. I grew up with Kay’s Books, a three story behemoth with towering, teetering stacks from cellar to rafters boasting over a million books, plus prehistoric girlie magazines and ancient mouldering piles of “Life” and “National Geographic” dating back to their inception. It was great, and it’s long gone.
Some argue that the internet, that sees all and knows all, has rendered such emporia redundant, but in fact there’s a bias toward the new, the current, the trending and the popular in most of the internet’s offerings. You can stream recent movies, if there’s a large enough audience for them. But good luck with the collected works of Mitchell Leisen, early Bergman, most of the silent era.
I tune in to the film critics on “Film Week” because they know lot about the vast canon of world film. Elsewhere, callow critics seem increasingly to regard as oldies or classics movies from the 1990s. Farther back than that, a blank.
Similarly, Amazon is amazing and so is Google Books, but once you get off the beaten track and into more specialized subject matter or obscure authors the pickings grow slimmer and slimmer. Without access to a big city public library or a first-rate university research library the searcher has a good chance of coming up empty.
God bless libraries and archives, long may they collect and catalog and be funded, but since that largely depends on voters and legislators their continued well-being is far from assured. Even more alarming is the news in a recent New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, “The Cobweb.”
We are inclined to suppose that on the internet nothing is ever lost or erased. We are regularly warned that our embarrassing Facebook posts or damning emails are immortal and will come back to haunt us. But that isn’t exactly accurate. It turns out that the vasty data of the digital universe is itself ephemeral. Not for nothing is the preferred storage option of the moment called a cloud.
Historians, archivists and scholars have begun to become alarmed that much of the material that records our lives is migrating from paper to bits and bytes. But these silicon annals do not last but seep away. Increasingly our footsteps really are imprinted on the sands of time, blown away moments after our passing.
Those who worry about these things imagine a not very distant time when the historical record that allows us to know so much about a Teddy Roosevelt, for example, from his letters, official papers, memos, the diaries of those who knew him will be nonexistent for a future luminary. T.R. may have written as many as 150,000 letters. They fill books. How many of the emails of a president today will survive? None?
Everything is being entrusted to an ever-changing technology that becomes obsolete, to media not designed to weather the passing of years, decades, centuries. When the moment comes to write the history of our time, it will be discovered that vast tracts of data have ceased to exist unless a gigantic effort is made to do more than just click either “save” or “delete.”
Lepore reports that a few clever people are working on it, but the oceans of data are a lot to keep intact or even to search and winnow. It is amusing (and saddening) to realize that these few preservationists resemble the monks of the Dark Ages who toiled in the scriptorium copying, copying, copying the crumbling, ancient texts. Without them, no Renaissance perhaps. Without somebody today taking the problem seriously, a new Dark Age to look forward to?