The Costs of Digital Technology

A few days ago, Michael Cieply of the New York Times reported on the literal rise in costs for film preservation through the constant changes in digital technology:

The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.

It gets even worse. He goes on to report that the digital storage of film can can become completely unreadable, often in less than a decade. Compare this to the costs and efforts required to remove the scratches from traditional film stock.

This doesn't come as a huge shock to me. I've always attempted to temper the utopianism of technological advancement with a healthy understanding of the materiality of these technologies. After all, many people mistakenly believe (or at least tend to ignore) that the digital information that floats around online doesn't simply drift in the ether: it has to be kept someplace, stored in massive server somewhere. Anyone who has ever lost an important piece of writing due to a computer crash the night before a deadline knows all too well the dangers associated with the materiality of information.

But I have to admit that I didn't quite see this coming. The disparity in costs and the dangers of the loss of important cultural artifacts is shocking even to someone as pragmatic as me about technological matters.

Even so, I think this poses an important question: where exactly do we go from here? Should we attempt to continue the convergence of our digital technologies (distributing film in various digital media formats, turning television into digital code that can be downloaded onto a cell phone, etc.), or do we find an alternative route? Clearly traditional analogue film stocks had their problems, which we attempted to address with digital. And despite being relatively new as a dominant cultural technology, digitization is dominant enough that it is creeping into scientific discourses as the paradigm for explaining how the universe itself operates. Whatever comes next, will it be as alien to us 21st-century digital boys and girls as digital was to 20th-century analogue types? Thoughts?