The readings offer a new perspective to me as I often think of media as pure content deprived of its materiality. But after all no content can be delivered without a coded format, which is bonded by the form of certain type of decoding. Taking from that perspective and looking over a longer time span, you start to realize how ephemeral the embodied technologies are: one moment we’re used to the 3.5-inch disks and think they might be there forever, and 20 years later we can’t even find a computer that have a drive to read CDs.

It seems like the digital archiving activity itself then needs to be constantly renewed to catch up with the evolution of technology. With all the individuals constantly documenting their lives on earth in various mediums, you would expect the human history to be readily evidential and accurate from now on. But we find ourselves facing with the fragmented realities caused by the lost objects of transitioning technologies. Are we able to carry them along with us and pass them on, or will they be lost like all the rest of the fragments that we dig out from underground, carrying pieces of truths about the lives of our time?

Maybe one day artificial intelligence will also be dedicated to the archiving of human histories. Will we then be elevated from the duty of deciding what is important enough to be documented and maintained accessible, or will the task of designing and maintaining such system cost too much that the loss of information is still inevitable?