Abstract
Perhaps it is historians’ special way of shaking a fist at the image of their own mortality, but every generation must lament that its artifacts, its milieu, will largely be lost to history. One can find countless laments in the early days of recording about what might have been had we just been able to get Lincoln’s, or the speeches of some other great leader, on a cylinder. But one can just as easily turn to one’s own professional journals, such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Here is Phillip M. Taylor, a historian at Leeds, making the case for “preserving our contemporary communications heritage” in 1995:
In 2095, when history students look back to our century as we now look back to the nineteenth, they will read that the twentieth century was indeed different from all that went before it by virtue of the enormous explosion in media and communications technologies … But when they come to examine the primary sources for this period, they will alas find only a ramshackle patchwork of surviving evidence because we currently lack the foresight, let alone the imagination, to preserve our contemporary media and communications heritage. By not addressing the issue now, we are relegating our future history to relative obscurity and our future historians to sampling and guesswork. (Taylor, 1996, p. 420)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Altman, R. (ed.) (1992) Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.
Augé, M. (2004) Oblivion. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Auslander, P. (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge.
Bannon, L. J. (2006) Forgetting as a Feature, Not a Bug: The Duality of Memory and Implications for Ubiquitous Computing. CoDesign (2)1: 3–15.
Bijsterveld, K. and Jacobs, A. (2009) Storing Sound Souvenirs: The Multi-sited Domestication of the Tape Recorder. In Bijsterveld, K. and van Dijck, J. (eds.), Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Brown, J. (2000) The Jukebox Manifesto, Salon.com, 13 November. Available from: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/11/13/jukebox/ (accessed December 12, 2005).
Brylawski, S. (2002) Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound, Building a National Strategy for Preservation: Issues in Digital Media Archiving, ed. Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress.
Conway, P. (2005), Preservation in the Digital World, Report. Available from: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/conway2/ (accessed December 12, 2005).
Evans, A. (2005) Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Featherstone, M. (2000) Archiving Cultures, British Journal of Sociology (51)1: 161–84.
Gillespie, T. (2007) Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jansen, B. (2009). Tape Cassettes and Former Selves: How Mix Tapes Mediate Memories. In Bijsterveld, K. and van Dijck, J. (eds.), Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Katz, M. (2007) The Second Digital Revolution in Music, Music Library Association Meeting. Pittsburgh.
Keil, C. and Feld, S. (1996) Music Grooves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lastra, J. (2000) Sound Technology and American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lee, B. (2000) Issues Surrounding the Preservation of Digital Music Documents, Archivaria 50: 193–204.
LeMahieu, D. L. (1988) A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.
National Library of Australia (2003) Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage, UNESCO Information Society Division.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1957) The Use and Abuse of History, The Library of Liberal Arts. 2nd rev. edn. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Ricoeur, P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Russell, K. (1999) Why Can’t We Preserve Everything? St. Pancras: Cedars Project.
Smart, J. R. (1980) Emile Berliner and Nineteenth-Century Disc Recordings. Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (37)3–4: 422–40.
Starrett, B. (2000) Do Compact Discs Degrade?, Roxio Newsletter. Available from: http://www.roxio.com/en/support/discs/dodiscsdegrade.html (accessed December 12, 2005).
Sterne, J. (2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sterne, J. (2006) The Death and Life of Digital Audio. Interdisciplinary Science Review (31)4: 338–48.
Straw, W. (2000) Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music, Canadian Journal of Communication (25)1: 175–85.
Swalwell, M. (2007) The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games: From Novelty to Detritus and Back Again. Journal of Visual Culture (6)2: 255–73.
Taylor, P. M. (1996). The Case for Preserving Our Contemporary Communications Heritage, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (16)3: 419–24.
Thompson, M. (1979) Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. New York: Oxford University Press.
Van Dijck, J. (2009) Remembering Songs through Telling Stories: Pop Music as a Resource for Memory. In Bijsterveld, K. and van Dijck, J. (eds.), Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Williams, A. (1980) Is Sound Recording Like a Language? Yale French Studies (60)1: 51–66.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Jonathan Sterne
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sterne, J. (2016). The Preservation Paradox. In: Purcell, R., Randall, R. (eds) 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497604_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497604_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69803-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49760-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)