Wolfgang Ernst discusses and classifies potential means of technological archiving of different types of media, from art to video. Although his writing is quite confusing and could make use of more examples to support his claims, he does bring up some intriguing points that highlight the defining nature of an archive, and delves into key elements such as permanency, power/usefulness, materiality, formatting, etc.

To me, an archive is one that needs to be permanent; the rules of storage and classification are defined and then the content is modeled after those rules. Accessing the Internet as an archive, for example, changes often due to the changing rules for extraction and classification since search engines constantly update their algorithmic criteria; for this reason, the Internet does not encapsulate the identity of an archive (to me). Additionally, to answer the question of the power of archives lying in their security of materiality or storing information, I believe that a great archive does both. One has to be sure of the material authenticity when accessing an archive, and one should easily be able to access that information or else it’s not a very helpful archive.

As a side note - in the beginning of the chapter Underway to the Dual System, Ernst mentions a type of archive that takes shape cumulatively as a shift to a generative, participative form of archival reading; this reminded of the memex due to the focus on contextually shaping the archival narrative.