스터링은 정보의 디지털화 문제점을 지적하며 다음과 같이 언급했다. “컴퓨터는 환상적인 기계이다. 아마 너의 증조 할아버지는 보지도 못했을
것이다. 그러나 최고의 기계는 시계이다. 컴퓨터는 빠르게 쇠퇴하며 비참할 정도로 시간에 맥을 못 추기 때문이다.” 그래서 CD나 DVD는 책과
같은 인쇄물에 비해 정보를 저장할 수 있는 기간이 짧아 정보 유효성이나 안정성에 있어서 좋은 저장수단이 되지 못한다.
디지털 정보화의 첫 번째 문제는 과학기술 발전과 더불어 컴퓨터의 작동 속도는 점점 빨라지지만, 그것의 안정성은 그다지 보장되지
못하다는 점이다. 컴퓨터는 자주 이상이 생기며, 수리하는데 엄청난 비용을 필요로 한다. 또한 기존에 고장 난 컴퓨터를 대신해 마련한
새로운 컴퓨터는 기존의 것과 절대 똑같지 않다. 새 컴퓨터는 새로운 기능과 프로그램으로 다르게 작동한다.
두 번째 문제는 컴퓨터 작동 시스템에 관한 어려움이다. 지금 전 세계적으로 컴퓨터는 마이크로소프트사의 독점으로 인하여 다소 안정적 상태를 유지하고 있다. 그래서 정보 보관인들은 어느 정도 프로그램의 안정성을 보장 받을 수 있다. 하지만 한 회사의 지배적 독점은 다양한 바이러스에 대한 면역력을 높이는데 도움이 되지 못한다. 또한 앞으로 언젠가 마이크로소프트의 윈도우 시스템이 무료로 공유되는 새로운 소프트웨어로 대체된다면, 마이크로소프트 방식으로 만들어진 정보는 모두 죽은 거나 마찬가지가 된다고 한다.
이러한 소프트웨어 문제에는 또 다른 문제점이 있다. 작동 시스템이 더욱 더 진보할 수록, 낡고, 단순하며, 싼 기존의 소프트웨어와의
호환성 문제가 야기된다는 점이다. 이러한 문제는 시스템을 불안정하고, 제대로 작동하지 못하게끔 한다. 그리고 이 과정에서 정보가 저장되는
방법, 즉 포맷 상의 문제가 발생한다.
위에서 언급했던 문제점들이 해결되더라도 정보의 컴퓨터화가 갖는 모든 문제가 해결되지 못하다. 왜냐하면 기술적 문제점 외에 다음과 같은
정치적, 경제적 문제점이 있기 때문이다. 누가 만들었는지, 누가 소유하는지, 누가 관리하는지, 누가 저장하는지, 누가 빌려서,
복사하고, 대중에게 공개하는지, 누가 분별 있는지, 누가 이득을 얻는지, 누가 비용을 부담할 것인지.
엄청난 양의 정보는 파일 서버, 개인 하드 드라이브, CD-ROM, 그리고 DVD로 저장될 수 있지만, 이 중 어는 것도 신뢰할 만한
저장고는 아니다. 저장은 인간의 의식적인 선택과 구성의 문제이기 때문이다. 저장은 단순히 파일더미가 아니다. 저장된 자료의 질을 높이기 위해서는
인간의 조정과 관리가 필요하다.
하지만 디지털 기술은 이미 인간의 조정 능력의 범위를 넘어섰으며, 값 싼 생산과 저장으로 인하여 쏟아지는 정보를 관리할 사람의 수도 충분치
않다. 안전한 디지털 정보 저장은 상당한 인력을 요구한다. 하지만 인간은 너무 느리고 비용이 많이 든다. 그래서 우리는 인간 대신에 정보를
정리할 수 있는 자동화된 방법을 만들고 싶지만, 이는 가치판단의 문제이다. 현재 기계는 이러한 가치판단의 능력을 갖지 못하고 앞으로도 그런
능력을 갖지 못할 것이다.
인쇄를 통한 방법이 컴퓨터를 통한 디지털화보다 더 오래, 더 안정적으로 정보를 저장할 수 있다. 지금 컴퓨터에 있는 정보를 인쇄하여 차곡차곡 자신만의 저장고에 쌓아둔다면, 앞으로 언제가 그 인쇄물은 약 백년 안에 매우 흥미롭고 가치있는 정보가 될 것이다. 마지막으로 이렇게 자신의 글을 정리하며, 스터링은 독자를 향해 묻는다. "자, 그럼 당신은 그렇게(인쇄를 통한 정보저장) 할 것인가?"
아이러니하게 그의 대답은 이렇다. "글쎄, 나도 그렇게 하지 않을 것이다." Delete our cultural heritage?
(Filed: 12/07/2004)
The world is suffering from a dark and silent phenomenon known as 'digital
decay' ? anything stored in computerised form is vulnerable to breakdown and
obsolescence. And this has enormous implications for the arts, says Bruce
Sterling. Dear reader: since you demonstrate an interest in arts and books, you
probably use a computer. Authors write with them, journalists research with them. Publishers use
digital composition and sell their books online. Photographers are hastily
dumping film for megapixel cameras. Movies are no longer "films" except through historical accident, for every
frame that hits the public's eyeballs has been treated by digital effects.
Yesterday's Japanese transistor radio is today's iPod crammed with 10,000 songs.
Television, architecture, industrial design: scarcely a field of creative
endeavour goes uncyberised. There's a dark side to this, growing darker every year. Consider that ongoing
tumble and scramble inside your own computer: processed words, spreadsheets,
PowerPoint presentations, email, websites, jpegs, mpegs, MP3s... Try to imagine
conveying that mess to your grandchildren as your heritage. The computer is a
fantastic gizmo: your great-grandparents probably never saw one. But the
ultimate gizmo is a clock. Computers obsolesce quickly and are miserably
vulnerable to clocks. I'm writing this on a computer ? I believe it's my 10th such machine. Being
half a century old, I'm of the last authorly generation to work professionally
with a typewriter. That being the case, I have enjoyed hands-on experiences with
such archaic oddities as paper punch cards, magnetic cassette tape,
five-and-a-half inch "floppies" and three-and-a-half inch plastic disks (also
called "floppies," even though they were rigidly stiff). Today's ephemeral darlings are compact discs ("CDs") and DVDs (this acronym
used to mean "digital video disc" and now, officially, it has no meaning ). None
of these storage methods lasts. And that's just the bedrock level of the crisis.
A book, given acid-free paper and stable inks, will last for centuries in a
dark dry room. Nothing created with a computer has ever enjoyed any such
persistence. When left alone without human attention, digital media die quite
quickly. Computers and their contents survive only through constant, expert
maintenance. Data are painfully dragged into the future through "migration" from
one obsolescing form to the next. "Bits", digital ones and zeros, are not numbers or Platonic abstractions.
They are physically real and subject to entropy, just like leaky plumbing. Bits
are electrons moving through circuits, or photons in a fibre-optic pipe. Bits
are laser burn marks in plastic, or iron filings stuck together with tape. Those
are the weird stopgaps that we are using for heritage.
The digital computer is about as old as I am yet it does not have, and has
never had, any archival medium. We have no guarantee that anything made of ones
and zeros will be usable, or even readable, in another 50 years. The world of
computation has never settled down and matured. It may never settle down. The world suffers a silent phenomenon of "digital decay". This quirky realm
is mostly populated by librarians, archivists and museum curators, plus the
occasional anxious scientist and panicky megacorporate record clerk. These antiquarians are considerably more futuristic than the rest of us. It
is their task to store, handle and preserve objects from the past and present,
so that the future will be able to see them. When it comes to the future of our
present-day digital possessions ? well, the future will probably see rather few
of them. Most will be chunks of text and primitive still pictures. In other
words, they'll be things rather better and more cheaply preserved in books and
artworks. The ones and zeros that survive to confront our descendants will have to leap
hurdle after hurdle of menace. The first such layer is the physical storage
medium. It is mutable, vulnerable; it's always getting faster, but often
frailer. New storage media want to replace all the old ones. They are always very
cruel to anything stored in a simpler fashion. The computer, as a physical object, endlessly sucks energy and money from
anyone trying to preserve it. Computers are exceedingly difficult to repair.
Traditionally, one simply pitches it out and buys a new one ? but that new one
is never entirely identical to the first, and is likely to differ in various
complex, treacherous ways. It may be possible for a modern computer to "emulate"
an earlier, extinct computer ? but computer emulation is never perfect. If the computer survives (and they don't), then the next level of hazard is
the computer's operating system. The traditional tumult here is stabilising somewhat ? mostly due to the fact
that Microsoft is a monopoly. This offers some benefits to archivists ? but
Microsoft's dominance also makes computers and their contents highly vulnerable
to hostile viruses.
If Microsoft and its Windows operating system is somehow replaced in the
future ? by free, open-source software, for instance ? then everything created
by, through and for Microsoft's systems will be as dead as the archaic computers
of the old Soviet Union. There are other menaces on the level of software applications. As an
operating system "advances" (or simply changes), it often becomes highly
unfriendly to older, simpler, cheaper applications, which may became unstable
and no longer function. Then there is the format problem: the methods by which
data is stored consistently and predictably. Here the struggle to archive has
had some signal successes. There is a general agreement today that a 400-dot-per-inch scan is an
adequate digital record of a common black-and-white piece of paper. Government
printing offices spew these papers out by the billions. This important problem
is now solved. Any bureaucrat who revives this digital copy and prints it out on
paper will have a legible, faithful version of the original. But who needs this? How often does one really want a scanned digital
photocopy of some original piece of paper? Most such papers are "born digital"
these days ? they are not papers struggling to enter a machine, but printouts of
digital text, seeking the relative safety of paper. A digital picture of ink on paper is inert. Most people's computers contain
no such things, for the simple reason that we want words that we can process. We
want our texts to be searchable ? and changeable, and manipulable, and cut-able,
and paste-able, and mail-able, and post-able, and maybe website-friendly. At
this point all hell breaks loose, because at this point we have moved from
merely technical hazards to political and economic ones. Where does the power and accountability lie in this fluid process? Who gets
to say who alters what document, and under what circumstance? Who made it? Who
owns it? Who keeps it? Who stores it? Who rents it, copies it, shows it to the
public? Who are the responsible parties and who are the legitimate users? Who
benefits? And ? this is no small matter in digital archiving ? who pays for all
that? Like most people's, my personal computer has thousands of files tucked almost
randomly into various sloppy folders. It's easy to look at this burgeoning mass
and assume that I haven't lost or overwritten something vital, but, frankly, I
will never know.
Oceans of information get "saved" on file servers, on personal hard drives,
CD-ROMs, and DVDs ? but none of these are true archives. Archives are matters of
conscious, human choice and formal organisation. Archives are not a pile of
files any more than a pile of bricks is a library. Archives can be created and
maintained only by thorough, controlled, curatorial processes that take
humanity's dank heaps of general blether, and enhance them. Archives add
quality, trustworthiness, usability, and the power to last into the indefinite
future. In other words, some expensively trained, salaried human being has to take
responsibility and exercise control: selecting, organising, describing, pruning
the rot and encouraging new growth: and doing it forever. In this arena, the
human race is basically cracking under the strain. Digital technology is
radically outpacing our acts of curatorial comprehension. There aren't enough
human eyeballs in the world to make sense of the torrent of data made possible
by cheap production and cheap storage. The methods we have for securely storing comprehensible digital data are
highly labour-intensive. Humans are too slow and they cost too much. We would
like to create automated methods to decide what data mean and whether they are
worthwhile, but these are value judgments. Our machines lack that ability. They
may well never get it. We ourselves don't know how and why data are "valuable". There are no business models for long-term digital archives, because we've
never had any. A world that had superb archives would surely be far more useful
than a world that had none ? but we have no way to put a financial sum to that
benefit.
We simply don't know what we are dealing with. We don't know how to catalogue
our digital "entities"; in fact, we don't even know how to name them. Books have
titles, authors and library call numbers; but digital data have no persistent
naming system. At this point, the problem dissolves into theoretical haze. Nobody knows how
large a digital archive can become ? while still remaining somehow wieldy. It
might well be possible to build an archive so huge that it could not be peeled
loose from its obsolete storage and safely placed into some newer form of
storage before that form of storage itself also became obsolete.
So there is trouble in this realm that would boggle Hamlet. And yet, this is
increasingly our intellectual and cultural heritage. As well as our books and
our artworks, huge databases are the source of the aircraft in our skies, the
cars in our streets, the wonder drugs in our bodies, the list is endless. The truth is that computation has, from the very start, been built to rot.
Destroying the past is a major profit centre for the computer industry ? they
thrive by forcing us to buy the next upgrade or obsolesce into unusability. National governments like to imagine that they can govern the computer
industry. The US Library of Congress has received $100 million for its "National
Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program". They have a
talking-shop with the libraries of Britain, Australia, Britain, Canada, Finland,
France, Iceland, and Sweden. Kicking a problem upstairs to the global level is a
common suggestion for intractable problems of governance. However, everyone's
problem quickly becomes nobody's problem. Ultimately, this is your problem, as well as the world's. If you, a computer
user, had a sudden outbreak of responsible good sense, you would back up every
file in your computer, and put it on the best storage media available. If you
printed out that machine's digital contents on to a huge stack of archival
paper, photographic stock, and high-quality film, it would last decades. It would no longer be mere data, but a multivolume stack of art and books
that might be of great interest and value in a hundred years. That would cost a
lot of money and effort. So are you going to do it? Well, neither am I. Bruce Sterling is a contributing editor of 'Wired' magazine.
원문:
URL
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/07/12/badigit10.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/07/12/ixartright.html
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