[Hollow Tree] All the tapes are turning to dust.

[Zeno Izen]

by DaveX


You have got to love records. And by records, I mean vinyl. Its the one
recording medium that is able to survive a sleeveless trip through yard
sales, thrift stores, and thirty years of abuse and still be able to be
played. Which is the opposite of CD-Rs, apparently. I'm reading now that
the CD-R is vulnerable to "migrating dye problems", which basically
means that the dye inside the disc is busy taking a trip somewhere else,
eventually rendering your disc unreadable. To top it off, the experts
are recommending I start backing everything up on tape again. So I'm
about ready to go insane. I'm 27 years old, and I've already been
through about a million media changes.

It's getting old.

The problem is that I'm a media junkie. I enjoy being able to take
photos, burn albums, save text, copy websites, you name it. I like
having all sorts of music available, so I can actually go listen to
whatever song happens to pop in my head. Its something beyond
consumerism for me, it is really more about the fascinating ability to
have so much of my past archived. If I come into contact with it, I want
to grab it and make a copy. When I need it again, I'd like it to be
there, whatever it is. Of course, one does run into problems. The past
starts intruding into the present, and eventually is bleeding into the
future. Sitting around experiencing something old becomes an activity,
and archived data migrates toward corruption as quickly as memories
blur. I'm sometimes wondering-- "is this real? did I dream this?"

I'd like a way to check. Something of a baseline, a default, a control
sample to understand everything else by. Something unquestionably true,
and positively real. A thing that could only exist in the present. Let's
face it, music changes. The encoding artifact can become part of the
song. The newly remastered version supersedes the old. And you have the
unsettling idea that somewhere, a quadraphonic version exists that you
never heard.

The photos get cropped. They fade and crack. Something gets loaned out
and never returned. The frame breaks. Tapes bleed through. The player
breaks. The cord is lost. You forget, you remember, and you doubt.
Compilations are made, and the order is lost. The cover art is resized.
The media is no longer supported.

All the tapes are turning to dust.

So yeah, records are cool. I reasonably expect they'll be around when
I'm dead. When my body is dispersed, I'll let go of it all, and someone
else can worry about keeping everything together. Is that what it comes
to? Do we try to make ourselves into gods? Accumulating a world of
memory, stretching our ability to contain it? When there are so many
things, you realize that its really like an entire life. Too much to
deal with, and everything would be slipping away all the time. The same
problem exists at NASA. The extraordinary amount of data requires
constant backing up, because by the time its turn comes to be backed up,
it has begun to break down. When the weight of data increases faster
than it can be processed, it will begin to be lost.

I don't like to think of anything being lost. I don't like to think
about the dead beneath my feet, or about the things they desired in
their lifetimes. I don't like to think about how every arrow has an arc.
How no matter the push, it always comes down. Isn't it sick? Does this
bother you? I'm really not prepared for these type of ideas. I can't
even manage a music and photo collection, ha ha. But here we all are,
needing a backup.

--
DaveX is the host of WDBX Carbondale, Ill.'s It's Too Damn Early program, and writes the Startling Moniker blog.

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Posted By Zeno Izen to Hollow Tree at 11/12/2007 09:05:00 AM