This essay could be gone tomorrow

In the death of the masterpiece, Istaara Amjad '28 examines our constantly changing relationship with art in the modern world.

Birthday cards from elementary school, event tickets, completed notebook I like to collect things. It could be referred to as a sentimental inclination or simply a waste of space. In any case, it is a habit that I have stopped all my life and stubbornly refused to throw away the copy of a favorite book that I read again until it falls apart next to a beloved toy for childhood.

Emily Dickinson's poems were only published after her death. Van Gogh rose posthumously to fame. These stories inspire and comfort us. With the assurance of a permanent heritage, the short mortality flicker does not seem to be so in vain. It seems that every large human undertaking – from the shining Taj -Mahal to the flags planted on the moon – is a plea against forgotten bid in the heart. In 1977 NASA started the golden plate in space, a time capsule with noises, pictures and music from the earth. Even if we confront the last border of cosmic exploration, this wish drives us.

Will someone know that we have existed? Will you remember?

And isn't that the question that we ask each other every day? When we capture memories with a photo when we write in magazines when we tell children stories when we do something and bring it into the world or even – here with me – post on Twitter?

Collecting my wish, curating an archive of my memories and forgetting yourself stubbornly can be a strange habit. But I'm certainly not alone. There is no more human characteristic than the desire to be remembered.

Since our lives are increasingly changing online, the memories of our experiences also do. After all, we can escape the fallability of human memory; We can stick to any detail. Every text exchange, every e -mail thread, every picture in the telephone gallery -nothing is lost.

My curation (read: Horten) extends to my digital world, whereby the refined archive methods of folders are used previously doubles and endless bookmarks and nothing can be deleted. You do not have to confront yourself with the undesirable disorder in my desk drawer or the dilemma of packaging of memory in a suitcase for college: digital memory is the Hoharder paradise.

However, the digital medium can also be remarkably fragile and unpredictable. Hard drives will die corrupt and phones without warning. Social media accounts are hacked and passwords are forgotten. The cloud storage was used as a solution for the solution, although I give the concept of my own memories, which is blocked behind a paywall, strangely blocked. Nevertheless, the premise is undeniably attractive. I can easily outsource my memories and the stress of your preservation. Could that be immortality?

The internet is forever, isn't it?

Occasionally I visit links that I saved years ago: recipes, YouTube videos, interesting blog posts. Most of the time it is a dead end: the video may have been put down by the Creator, or the Host website may no longer exist. This is not accidental. Internet contents are remarkable only of short duration. 25% of the websites collected by a study between 2013 and 2023 had disappeared until the end of these 10 years. 11% of the references associated with Wikipedia lead to a dead end.

The Internet calls for a wrong feeling of security. A digital platform and the host content can simply disappear. The organization it does can go bankrupt, no domain hosting fees no longer paid, do not repair a server error or simply remove the content. In this case, the content – whether it is a news article, a work of art or a personal blog – simply disappears without trace.

The company of historical cataloging, supported by huge networks of libraries, museums and archives, does not seem to have translated into the digital medium well. The Internet archive has taken on the challenge: it was founded in 1996 and deals with a service as The Wayback Machine. However, the burden on historical condition is monumental and susceptible to complications. The non -profit organization recently exposed both a large copyright lawsuit and cyber attacks.

The fact is that digital content and its property – and thus their preservation – vary from their physical colleagues. Paying the content through a streaming service subscription is nothing more than the possession of a DVD, which may have been susceptible to wear but once bought, was forever hers.

If streaming services remove a film or a TV show from your platforms, it may be practically impossible to be able to access anywhere on the Internet. Amazon has removed the opportunity to download purchased E -Books, which means that you can also buy your access to a book after the “purchase” of “bought”.

Since Adobe is accused of having used works of art that were created on their platforms for the training of KI and Facebook censorship private chats, digital companies exercise control over the platforms they provide that are repeatedly proven.

It is a tough memory that nothing really is in the digital world your. Nevertheless, there is now a large extent of human knowledge, art and culture now exclusively online. If the digital spaces in which we live exist on the terms of another and companies that are driven by profit and political forces who take care of preservation and posterity decide what it is worth, keeping and what does not, we have to expect the safe and gradual loss of human history.

What does it mean to be forgotten? How absurd is it unimaginable to the moment – suddenly – it is not?