Information Technology Reference
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fragments of daily life — those have all moved away, they have moved out there. The
term “digital lives” has come into popular use to describe these aggregates of
material. If you really want to intuitively capture this as specifically as possible and
understand how deep the shift is, think of the notion of personal effects: used to be
somebody died and somebody, some member of their family or the executor of their
will or someone, would come and sort out their personal effects. These personal
effects were mostly physical things, some of them were bought things, they might be
topics, many of them might be family photos, they might be letters, or the electric
bills that strange people you know file for 35 years, month after month, just because
they get them and they file them… but there was this sort of notion of personal effects
that were physical, that you could find and sort and transfer possession of.
Today when people die, we move into this enormous ambiguous terrain, a legally
gray area, a gray area in practice and procedure and custom, where simply getting an
inventory is almost impossible, you know. Do you know all the accounts that people
you are close to have on all of those systems out there? Do you know their
passwords? Do you know what the policies of those various organizations are in terms
of you show up and say I am the heir of so and so and I would like access to their
account? Do you understand the potential consequences of impersonating the
deceased because you have their logon information? Do you know what is likely to
vanish in thirty or sixty days because nobody is paying the bill to the storage cloud or
application service that is hosting it? There have been some really heartbreaking cases
here where, for example, young kids go off to war, they do not come back and their
parents want to ensure that their Facebook page or MySpace site, or whatever, is
saved, and sorting out the right arrangements and access has proved to be very
complicated or failed totally. This is an area also where there is tremendous
variability from nation to nation; the law on this is anything but settled but that just
illustrates the level of fragility we have come to regarding personal digital materials
and the extent to which all of the personal information that people have has migrated
out into these various clouds that are now an integral part of the fabric of our cultural
record, for better or for worse.
5
A Few Comments: Software as a Cloud Generated Service
I want to close by spending a couple of minutes on a few comments about the recent
move of software to the cloud, the examples from Microsoft, Adobe, Google and
others that I mentioned earlier, and even the idea that you are starting to see now of
applications that are self-updating all the time (in various architectural distributions
between cloud and desktop). If you really step back and look at many of the issues
around the meaningful longevity of digital information and our ability to manage this
longevity (by which I mean more than preservation, I mean the ability to be able to
continually, reliably use the digital information in mainstream ways, without heroic
measures, antique hardware, and the like - it is the difference between obsolescent
and major archival challenges, perhaps), one of the things that is at the heart of our
ability to handle this is being able to connect and pace software revisions to the
management of data. Particularly in a world where we sometimes find software
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