Analog's twilight: Digital trumps physical

There is something vaguely melancholy about leaving behind the physical past — the physical present, even — and looking to technologies that are less solid, less graspable, less tactile.

The question bubbles under the surface, rarely articulated: What happens to the soul of something when its physicality is removed? Is a yellowed family portrait from 1897 that was held by your father, grandfather and great-grandfather the same thing as a passel of pixels arranged just so?

It's not as if these are the first such changes to the fabric of our lives. Every invention that reconfigured our relationship with information, from the telegraph to the telephone to television to Facebook, was greeted with the suspicion that something of humanity would be lost.

The temerity of recording music so irritated John Philip Sousa that the bandleader denounced its very existence. "Music teaches all that is beautiful in this world," he wrote in 1906. "Let us not hamper it with a machine that tells the story ... without variation, without soul, barren of the joy, the passion."

That suspicion endures. Even technology that was newfangled as recently as the Nixon era now feels traditional. Luke Bryan sings about this in the 2007 tune "Country Man," drawing generational and cultural distinctions as he addresses a girlfriend: "Your little iPod's loaded down with Hoobastank — don't be a tape player hater, girl, we're groovin' to Hank."

"There is a sense of unease," says Edward Tenner, author of "Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity." But, he says, "We're always in transition. There's an illusion that there's some stable future that we're moving to. And I think the norm is that we always have this jumble of the old and the new."

The difference is that until a decade ago, the personal wasn't so portable. Sure, you could send your voice across a telephone wire, and sure, you could watch the same episode of "The A-Team" in Savannah or Sacramento, but it's not as if you could call up your entire address book at an Internet cafe in Sri Lanka.

Now, on services like Flickr and Shutterfly, we can share our vacation slides with our friends and the world in real time — without the Campari and the onion dip, the darkened den and carousel projector.

These online outlets are particularly useful given that decay is beginning to claim some of our oldest personal information. Sure, paper can last a century or more if cared for properly, but videotape's shelf life is generally about 15 years and film's about 30. Photo prints from the 1990s are already beginning to fade.

"There's a lot of that content that's at the fourth quarter, two-minute warning," says Mark Rukavina, founder and CEO of iMemories, the Arizona company that ingests entire boxes of American memories, digitizes them and puts them online.

"We see film that's beyond its life span. It's gone. And there's nobody on the planet that can bring it back. ... And we have people in tears," he says. "We are now digitally aware, but you look over your shoulder and you see all the stuff that isn't. And you say, `How can I get this into digital form?'"

That seems to make eminent sense — particularly if people back up their data, though many don't. Digital, too, has its pitfalls, though: It can decay, albeit in a different way, and it is often locked in a specific format — one that may not exist decades from now. Try opening a MacWrite file these days.

Which brings us to one thing about paper that is simply genius: You never have to plug it in.

Acoustics, too
In life, Christoffel Teeuwissen was an acoustic engineer. Among the many cartons his son uncovered were boxes of reel-to-reel tapes filled with the possibility of undiscovered aural treasures. The trouble, says Jon Teeuwissen, was that "I didn't have access to a reel-to-reel tape player. Who does?"

Today all of the memories — "media," we call 'em now — sit in the iMemories building outside Phoenix, gradually becoming digital. When it's done, the Teeuwissen kids will sit down together and dip into their own childhoods and their parents' half-century marriage. It will be an exercise in nostalgia, in all the joyous and longing senses of the word.

"I can remember as a child looking at these movies showing my parents very young at family picnics," Jon Teeuwissen says. He goes silent for a moment. "Now I want to see the `through-line' — to see them both silver-haired on a fishing boat in Sarasota, Fla. That's the story I want captured."

Since humans began scrawling on caves, we have instinctively captured our stories. Most times, we choose the most important ones to preserve and retell. Now, though, in analog's twilight, we can tell all of them.

We can warehouse tens of thousands of pictures and videos on a single computer, create instant shuffled soundtracks to our lives, turn cluttered ephemera into organized databases. For our descendants, we are starting to leave not just bread crumbs but entire loaves.

Tenner has an omnivore's sensibility about it all. "None of us has an idea of all the things we create, the things we do, what anybody's going to care about in the future," he says. "So we should treat everything we do as though somebody might be interested."

Human beings, though, are not built to be completists. Selectivity matters. Our stories are told as much by winnowing as by adding, and the choices we make about them affect how we see the world. Looking back from adulthood, a single cherished photo of your seventh birthday party, dog-eared and slightly faded, helps shape the prism of distant memory. What kind of a different tale will 300 hi-res JPEGs of the same event tell? We don't know yet.

And so we go forward, turning our stuff into data and our lives into potential stories that can be shared, consumed, reconfigured for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. No shelf space required. Just ever bigger hard drives for all that we can possibly wish to remember. No matter how important, or unimportant, it might be.

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