Interesting Wired article on a problem that everyone realizes, but pretends doesn’t exist: media formats and their transience.
The other day I tried to watch a Flash media piece my friend Florian Perret and I made back in 2002 for the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art’s Digital Gallery. It wouldn’t play because, according to MoCA’s error page, “Suffusia: A Beautiful Life requires the current Flash Player.” Flash 8 wasn’t good enough for the MoCA website; it wanted Flash 6 or nothing.
Eventually I was able to reach the file by another route. But it made me think about just how quickly formats die these days. I remembered how, back in 2000, blown away by Mumbleboy’s Flash work, I speculated that, had this program been around when I was 20, I’d have dedicated my life to making Flash files instead of pop records. After all, we tend to fall in love with media, programs, idioms or formats even before we have anything to say in them.
Seeing the 4-year-old Flash piece appearing to slip out of reach, I thought about how precocious and precarious that first rush of enthusiasm for Flash had been. Sure, Flash 8 can play Flash 6 files, it’s backward compatible, even if the MoCA website isn’t forward-compatible. But nobody at this point knows whether the Flash medium itself is just a flash-in-the-pan. Who’s going to think of something like that as a vocation? Who’s going to try to be “the Tolstoy of Flash” when we don’t know whether Flash will even be around in 10 years, let alone a hundred?
It’s partly a matter of physical formats. How much data is now essentially lost forever because it was last stored on 5.25 or 3.5 inch floppies? When will the Mini-DV tapes I’ve made of Katherine need to be transferred or lost. What happens when CDs become like 78s?
But more important than that (after all, a lot of data is now stored out on the Net, and presumably the drive space there will continue to be refreshed) are software formats. I can take a text file, or an HTML file, or even a Word document, and get the content back out of it. But Flash? That’s a locked system, susceptible to the whims and winds of format changes. It’s not likely JPEG is going to go away any time soon — but anything you can’t easily decode through external means is an investment in something that will, someday, be inaccessible.
Posted by RoboDave
Precisely why most DRM is a really, really bad deal for the consumer.
An excellent point.
Media “owners” have very little interest in making sure that folks in the future — certainly beyond their copyright (assuming copyright is not extended infinitely into the future) — is accessible. It’s only of value (to them) if it makes money.