Wolfgang Ernst’s essays on Digital Archiving is an interesting look at technology and media archaeology, and combines a lot of poetics about the physicalities and functionalities of digital archiving with analyses of temporality and archives.

The introduction of time into archiving, and how that adds a new dimension to the world is interesting. Most notably, the idea of Wikipedia being an archive that is permanently dynamically rewritten, instead of having a permanent read-only, is an important distinction. The idea of the archive, then, can be considered differently (and Ernst even considers everyone’s computer a kind of archive), and we can look towards these media objects to understand, in the same way that we use archives now.

My main concern with Ernst’s essays, is that there seems to be a lot of terminology and figuring out the ontologies of these digital archives. While there are cool and interesting comparisons that relate the physical functions and hardware to its semiotics, I had a hard time piecing together the arguments, for example, the movement from “emphatic cultural memory” to “intermediate media memories.”