#77: Perfect Sound Forever
In 2013, Nathan Jurgenson wrote an essay, "Pics and It Didn't Happen," in which he argued that the ephemeral nature of Snapchat photos serves a valuable purpose by reversing the assumption of photographic permanence and slowing, ever so slightly, the exponential accumulation of digital images that drives the value of each individual photo down toward zero. When every image lasts forever, we lose the privilege of choosing what to remember. Snapchat restores that privilege and thus "reinflates" the value of those images as well as the memories they correspond to: "Let’s face it, much of photography was already becoming Snapchat even before Snapchat existed...in the age of information immortality, the likely fate of the vast majority of images today is to be briefly consumed and quickly forgotten." Things that disappear more quickly, and have a built-in mortality, matter more.
This alludes to another important function Snapchat performs: It allows data to decay and vanish intentionally, in a predetermined way and on our own terms. We still live with a very powerful myth about computers, that digital information will live forever. While that is narrowly true—a particular bit can physically outlast a book or most other analog media—in practice, it's not true. All these zettabytes and yottabytes of immortal information are useless (or worse than useless) without a social infrastructure that lets us separate the signal from the noise. Bruce Sterling explained this best in 2004: "When left alone without human attention, digital media die quite quickly. Computers and their contents survive only through constant, expert maintenance. Data are painfully dragged into the future through "migration" from one obsolescing form to the next...The world suffers a silent phenomenon of "digital decay"." We are constantly being surprised by the gradual erosion of information we thought we'd always have at our fingertips. Snapchat offers one method of euthanizing data before it grows unmanageable and then departs us in some more traumatic way.
Snapchat, and of course Instagram Stories, complicate the visual memory that unlimited photography lets us assume will always be taken care of. With an iPhone constantly at hand, there is no risk that anything important will go uncaptured, but if the past and future are sorted, we do still have to wonder how we see things in the present. Unlike still images, video takes the same amount of time to record as it does to watch later, so the limit on how much filming we can each do is roughly 100 percent of waking life (a limit that wearables like Snapchat Spectacles promise to approach). The relatively recent ease of visual documentation means that watching and recording are converging and will become less distinguishable, reversing the old complaint that excess photography prevents us from experiencing the moment in front of us. Meanwhile, the never-ending horizontal feed at the top of my Instagram app represents an always-growing accumulation of videos that surely exceeds the 16 or so waking hours available to me each day. Most photos are at least seen once; how much video will never even be seen at all? Recording something isn't just a way of seeing, it will increasingly be the ultimate way of seeing—the only time anyone ever will.
Reads:
SimCity and the 1960s conservative/libertarian theory that inspired the game, Jay Forrester's Urban Dynamics. "'I became a total Republican playing this game,' one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992."
How Geocities introduced spatial metaphors to the internet: "As users populated different neighborhoods, each community offered a fixed number of addresses (numbered 1,000 through 9,999), prompting the creation of thematically-appropriate suburbs."
A Russian company wants to put giant ads in low-earth orbit.