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Cited by 25Digital and Traditional Archives ManagementCybernetics and Technology in SocietyMemory, Trauma, and Commemoration

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 16 of the 17 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The end of decay time

Hoskins, Andrew·2013·Memory Studies
DOI 10.1177/1750698013496197
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Abstract

The digital’s inexorable annexing of the past has finally caught the attention of policymakers. Article 17 of the European proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation seeks a ‘right to be forgotten and to erasure’ (see also Rosen, 2012). But this ambition fails to recognize that today life is lived through hyperconnectivity – copying, editing, posting, sharing, linking, liking – these are not subject to the rules of what I call ‘decay time’ (Hoskins, forthcoming). Before the digital, the past was a rotting place. Its media yellowed, faded or flickered, susceptible to the obscuration of use and of age. And wherever it was collected and contained, the media archive concentrated emissions of volatile organic compounds: the fusty smell of a second-hand bookstore or library was a mark of age which accompanied the visible signs of use and decay. And the analogue recording and storage media, dominant for much of the late twentieth century – magnetic tape, film, vinyl records – stretched and scratched and wore out through physical contact with their capture and playback machines. These media’s finite forms marked the past’s decline, holding a proper distance between what was and what is now: making visible and audible society’s dissipating memory. And this distance was mediated through the scarcity (and sometimes fragility) that comes with machinic and artefactual decay, degradation and loss. The result was familiar deterioration. The passage of this decay time afforded value and made the past worthy of careful excavation, re-imagination and representation. And it was this media that reached its denouement of memorial power but also of decay in the late twentieth century with the mass market for the audio and video cassette recorder. It seems strange then to say that it was the media of deterioration, of decay time, that underpinned the contemporary ‘memory boom’ (Winter, 2000, 2006; Huyssen, 2003; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010), the archival tendencies of which were driven by the principles of scarcity and the bounding of space. But today’s archive is a medium in its own right, liberated ‘from archival space into archival time’ (Ernst, 2004: 52). The avalanche of post-scarcity culture and the databasing of the multitude challenges decay time. Suddenly, the faded and fading past of old school friends, former lovers and all that could and should have been forgotten are returned to a single connected present via Google, Flickr, Ebay, YouTube and Facebook. By the mid 2000s, the fragments of one’s past selves variously scattered by time and mobility were suddenly searchable and minable without the need of private detective agencies. As Kevin Kelly (2005) says, ‘Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real’.

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Crossref · 10.1177/1750698013496197

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  • The past used to dissipate, decline, and decay through media in mostly comprehensible ways and at predictable rates.

    “The past used to dissipate, decline, and decay, in and through the media of the time, in mostly comprehensible ways and at predictable rates (Hoskins 2013).”

    From AI and memory (2024) · cites this paper as Hoskins 2013

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1 of the 17 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Ernst W, 2004, Open, 7, 46
  2. Winter J, 2000, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 27, 69

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Metadata

Authors
Hoskins, A.
Affiliations
University of Glasgow (GB)
Corresponding author
Hoskins, Andrew
ORCID
Hoskins, Andrew
Venue
Memory Studies
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2013-09-30
Volume
6
Issue
4
Pages
387-389
ISSN
  • 1750-6980 (ISSN-L)
  • 1750-6999
DOI
10.1177/1750698013496197
OpenAlex
W2142834380
Cited by
25
References
17
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 3
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
Locations
  • Memory Studies (publishedVersion)
  • ENLIGHTEN (Jurnal Bimbingan dan Konseling Islam) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Conservation › Digital and Traditional Archives Management
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
Keywords
decay time, right to be forgotten, General Data Protection Regulation, data deletion, digital archives, memory boom, hyperconnectivity, social media, media archaeology, cultural memory, EU data protection

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