The end of decay time

The digital’s inexorable annexing of the past has finally caught the attention of policymakers. Article 17 of the European proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation seeks a ‘right to be forgotten and to erasure’ (see also Rosen, 2012). But this ambition fails to recognize that today life is lived through hyperconnectivity – copying, editing, posting, sharing, linking, liking – these are not subject to the rules of what I call ‘decay time’ (Hoskins, forthcoming). Before the digital, the past was a rotting place. Its media yellowed, faded or flickered, susceptible to the obscuration of use and of age. And wherever it was collected and contained, the media archive concentrated emissions of volatile organic compounds: the fusty smell of a second-hand bookstore or library was a mark of age which accompanied the visible signs of use and decay. And the analogue recording and storage media, dominant for much of the late twentieth century – magnetic tape, film, vinyl records – stretched and scratched and wore out through physical contact with their capture and playback machines. These media’s finite forms marked the past’s decline, holding a proper distance between what was and what is now: making visible and audible society’s dissipating memory. And this distance was mediated through the scarcity (and sometimes fragility) that comes with machinic and artefactual decay, degradation and loss. The result was familiar deterioration. The passage of this decay time afforded value and made the past worthy of careful excavation, re-imagination and representation. And it was this media that reached its denouement of memorial power but also of decay in the late twentieth century with the mass market for the audio and video cassette recorder. It seems strange then to say that it was the media of deterioration, of decay time, that underpinned the contemporary ‘memory boom’ (Winter, 2000, 2006; Huyssen, 2003; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010), the archival tendencies of which were driven by the principles of scarcity and the bounding of space. But today’s archive is a medium in its own right, liberated ‘from archival space into archival time’ (Ernst, 2004: 52). The avalanche of post-scarcity culture and the databasing of the multitude challenges decay time. Suddenly, the faded and fading past of old school friends, former lovers and all that could and should have been forgotten are returned to a single connected present via Google, Flickr, Ebay, YouTube and Facebook. By the mid 2000s, the fragments of one’s past selves variously scattered by time and mobility were suddenly searchable and minable without the need of private detective agencies. As Kevin Kelly (2005) says, ‘Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real’.