On a Less-Appreciated Form of Lost Media
How certain "mistakes" that have accrued on certain filesharing websites may deserve preservation and closer public scrutiny.
I’ve been pitching a lot of extended projects recently, all of which would require that I take time away from this blog. This isn’t something to worry about anytime soon, but if I do choose to transition away from weekly posts you’ll all get a heads-up at least a month or two in advance. For now, I’ve got another long-term research project that might interest some of you.
The concept of “lost media” isn’t something I give a whole lot of attention to. Many of the most sought after examples of the phenomenon are either things that aren’t likely to advance any deeper knowledge of culture or are things that have been preserved in the sense that the details of the media have been recorded, just not in its original format (i.e. in writing rather than physically or online). There are behaviors and cultural ephemera that will indeed be important to record or catalog, but we won’t necessarily know which are historically relevant to our time until we are long gone. Take this hypothetical scenario as an example: It’s 2045. Your third child is in the midst of testing for their driver’s license, when all of a sudden you have a heart attack. It’s totally unexpected and they can’t get you to the hospital in time. The whole community collectively weeps for you and your family is in mourning for months on end, yadda yadda. You get the whole shebang. Eventually, that 16 year old kid gets to rooting around in your closet because your family is looking to downsize or generally make extra room around the house, and cleaning is a good way to move on from grief. In an old shoebox, they find a couple mixtapes, or copies of burned CDs that you used to take on long car rides, or your old 5th generation iPod. They recognize a whole bunch of the songs as things that you and your spouse would sing to each other late at night, or slow dance to in the early hours of the morning. In order to keep your memory close to them, they decide to pop whatever aforementioned format of storage into the audio setup of your 2007 Honda Civic with vintage license plates that they’ve been driving. They scan everything into Shazam, but notice something peculiar. The song names on the LED display/tracklist written in the jewel case are correct, but all the artists are totally wrong. Thinking something has gone wrong, they pull up the songs in Spotify, but no, the tracks are exactly identical. Why would you, who valued these songs enough to save in that shoebox for all these years, not have known which bands wrote them? You, dear reader, know what the answer is, but your child will be absolutely clueless.
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