The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory

New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards what we might call the bleeding edge of obsolescence.Indeed, rather than asking, What is new media?we might want to ask what seem to be the more important questions: what was new media?and what will it be?To some extent the phenomenon stems from the modifier new: to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old.The slipperiness of new media-the difficulty of engaging it in the present-is also linked to the speed of its dissemination.Neither the aging nor the speed of the digital, however, explains how or why it has become the new or why the yesterday and tomorrow of new media are often the same thing.Consider concepts such as social networking (MUDS to Second Life), or hot YouTube videos that are already old and old email messages forever circulated and rediscovered as new.This constant repetition, tied to an inhumanly precise and unrelenting clock, points to a factor more important than speed-a nonsimultaneousness of the new, which I argue sustains new media as such.Also key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media's archival promise.Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.As I explain in more detail later, this conflation of memory with storage is not due to Final version published in Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008).148-171.some inherent technological feature, but rather due to how everyday usage and parlance arrests memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of superhuman digital programmability.Unpacking the theoretical implications of constantly disseminated and regenerated digital content, this paper argues these dreams create, rather than solve, archival nightmares.They proliferate nonsimultaneous enduring ephemerals.The Future, This Time Around Prophesying the future of digital media is, once more, in fashion.With the now-embarrassing utopian and dystopian hype around the internet and Y2K comfortably behind us (or at least archived), there is a growing impatience with the so-called critical hindsight that flourished after the dotbombs and 9/11.Rather than the sobering if banal reassessments of internet communications as a "double-edged sword," the main strain of digital media analysis-popular and scholarly-is on future possibilities. 1 Howard Rheingold, who helped popularize virtual reality and virtual communities, has written a book on the next social revolution, smart mobs; everyone is now speculating about the web 3.0, the semantic web in which 1.After 9/11, the discourse of the internet as inherently good came under attack.Steven Levy, among other authors, who fought against the Communications Decency Act, suddenly "discovered" the dark side of the internet, writing, "modern technologies that add efficiency, power and wonder to our lives inevitably deliver the same benefits to evildoers.The Internet is no exception" (Steven Levy, "Tech's Double-Edged Sword," Newsweek Nexis, 24 Sept. 2001).After the dotcom boom, criticality was also the buzz word in more academic circles.For instance, the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts 2004 symposium, one of the largest and longestrunning international digital art symposiums, emphasized themes such as critical interactivity and had a reflective focus.In contrast, the 2006 symposium emphasized themes such as "transvergence," arguing: "new ideas and possibilities never before considered become evident when diverse disciplines intersect" (Steve Dietz, "ZeroOne San Jose / ISEA2006 Themes," 01sj.org/content/view/188/30/).Hyperpolis 3.0, a small annual new-media conference, also emphasized "really useful media" for its 2006 conference, arguing that we already know too much about "media communications technologies as instruments of social control....about media discourses as, on the one hand, 'popular culture': alienated and commodified cultural forms; and on the other, 'cultural theory': paranoid cosmologies of hyper-rhetoric, and the ubiquitous inevitability of evil" (idmi.poly.edu/?qdrupal/&qhyper).Importantly, the criticality discovered after 9/11 also rewrote history, erasing the critical strains in digital media that always existed.