Macdonald-Kelce Library Blog

Dead (and Dying) Media

The library is currently removing a substantial number of microfiche* from its collection. These are mostly old government documents that are now available online. However, as we enter the spooky season of Halloween and Día de los Muertos, it's a reminder that even media dies.

Humans have fixed their communication to tangible objects for thousands of years. From wall paintings, to carving in clay tablets, to tying knots in string (quipu) we've found ways to record information.

Long before 'moving pictures' referred to 'the movies' it might mean the kinesigraph, the phenakistiscope, or the kinora. Before we streamed music we listened to it on CDs, cassettes, 8-track tapes, vinyl, or phonograph cylinders.

Hardly anyone uses floppy disks to save work they do on their computer, but it remains the most common icon for 'saving' your work.

The benefits to these changes in media are often readily apparent. It can lead to improved ease of creating, dispersing, and acquiring information. The disadvantage of these changes is that with every change of platform some information is lost. Most vinyl albums were never re-recorded on tape or CD. The majority of CDs were never digitized. Most VHS tapes never became DVDs and most recordings on DVD are not available through a streaming source. Additionally, having fixed media is useless if we don't have the tools to translate it. Microfiche needs a microfiche reader, an album needs a turntable, a floppy disk needs a particular kind of reader, and particular types of translation software.

Knowing this history of media can guide our decisions about the internet. The Internet Archive is a private effort to record what is stored on the web in its Wayback Machine (which archives old websites), but will historians a hundred years from now be able to access the abundant information, entertainment, and knowledge being produced today?

My introduction to dead media came through an email list I joined in the 1990s -- the Dead Media Project. The Dead Media Project was an open-source collaborative effort. Drawing from this research artist Garnet Hertz produced A Collection of Many Problems (In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook) in 2009.

*a rectangular piece of film containing extremely tiny images of the pages of a newspapers, books, journals, and other documents.