Something like this

Information has come to exist in a generalized form that is fluid and moveable. Its body has been discovered or its body has been lost depending on how you look at it. In any case, the digital revolution has brought a lot of new problems into play concerning quality, originality, and storage. This is what I want to discuss. Specifically, the reconceptualization of storage and how it relates to the capitalist dream of efficiency and ubiquity. At the same time, these technologies are new, fragile, and singular.

Here is the paradigm shift that I want to investigate. The move from the multiplicity inherent in analog storage versus that singularity of digital storage in terms of materiality and the change in the object from a singular entity to a multiplicity of entities. The story of the former is thus:

a. Once upon a time, people stored their photos in photo albums and had large bookshelves full of books, records, and videotapes. The process of viewing always involved the choosing of a single object and having it engage with a playback device and the storage was divided into separate units. Now, all your music, movies, and pictures can be converted, created, or bought digitally and then stored digital in a hard drive. The entire contents of your music collection, film collection and so on can exist on one hard drive. In the past, a fire might destroy part of your collection, you might lose a tape, break a record but the rest would still be intact. Now, if you've digitized everything for the convenience of having your storage and playback contained in one device or the ease of movement, it can be lost by the simple clumsiness of a dropping. A single drop is the equivalent of a house burning down in terms of information loss and so we are told to have redundancies and redundancies of the same information as a safety measure. In any case, these technologies are relatively new and the whole point of storage is for something to last for an indeterminate length of time. A hard drive must be formatted in a specific file system so sometimes its not compatible with all types of computers and not for all time thus its legitimacy as a storage medium.

The story of the latter is thus:
b. Once upon a time, you had the prized singular possession that had to be taken care of. You just bought a record by Robert Johnson and want to make sure it lasts and doesn't get too much dirt on it so the sound quality remains high. Then your brother borrowed it to use as a frisbee, now you have to buy a new one. The possession was singular barring another monetary transaction for ownership. Now the materiality can be copied and digitized and made redundant over and over again. The piece of materiality becomes the master and the digital file never degrades or you can even circumvent that and buy the file digitally. This, however, brings up a few problems. In terms of accurate reproduction, you have a give and take between quality and space, an mp3 will be 4 mb, a wav will be 40 mb but also, mp3s have more compatibility. The same propriety problems rear their head in terms of if you rip your music into a format that later becomes obselete and cannot be converted. Thus you must decide how much of the original is to be in the copy and you now must have faith in your format. This is similar to the movement from records to tapes to cds except that you could always maintain that player whereas in the domain of information, if you updated your computer or program and now your file format is no longer supported, you're in trouble. Because the computer is mutlifunctional and remotely controlled by the company that creates its systems, you exist at their mercy though systems such as linux complicate this concern. In terms of degradation, a degraded record can still be listened to though there is noise while a file that has become corrupted cannot be used at all. The safety measure for the analog material is the fact that its degradation is slow and allows for use while the safety measure of the digital is its ability for infinite redundancy. The problem is that redundancy requires labor, re-ripping files, copying and copying and copying, uploading, etc.

Another thing to consider is the new domain of the internet as a storage medium. That is, no longer on my computer but on my website of gmail account in which case even more control is lost and given to the hosting or email company for the safety of your information though if its up for download, it can get diffused so that the redundancy of the file is now not just with you but spread through whomever has downloaded your files.

In terms of applicable texts to this discussion, much of it will deal with notions of what information is and has become and its tit for tat with materiality. This is discussed in several texts and I want to focus on its economic and social function and in this sense relates to Terranova as Terranova's discussion always relates back to capitalism and its evolution through the development of new media. Through this development of new storage, a new type of control is enacted where the company controls your things for you. It's not just the record but the record, record player, shelf, and house that a single hard drive in a computer represents. In addition to this, I would like to consider the implications of online storage for globalization and networking. I also want to investigate Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the organization of information versus material objects, that is, the shelf which is a single instantiation of all objects versus the file tree hierarchy of folders in a computer.