Temporality and Possession

Writing about 2Advanced, I find myself intrigued by the idea of temporality and why I find it so threatening. That is, why do I find myself threatened/annoyed by the idea that content can disappear or only be available during certain points in time? (as a brief note, this was brought up in class at one point where we talked about the difference in having information online vs. in a book, and how digital information is at once more ethereal and more permanent than printed works).

Aside from the annoyances with illusionary temporality I already discussed (nothing annoys me more than a pretense to temporality that I can easily bypass), I wonder at my need to have things on my hard drive. That is, even though the video is on YouTube, why do I still feel the need to download it to my hard drive? Hard drives fail, as do other forms of media storage, so in some way the video is safer on YouTube than it is on my hard drive.

Is it because I have to pay in order to access the internet? Whether it’s for power or for internet access, I have to have some sort of money in order to access the information matrix of the net. In this way, I don’t have the rights to internet content the same way I have the right to my own hard drive (though even that right is dubious after various laws passed in the last 5 years…). Is that why I’m afraid of storing all my information online? Of not having a book in front of me? What happens if the the 5C gateway goes down and I’m using a Gutenberg text? Do I get an extension? What if it’s down for weeks? Days? (would time stop? I’ve always been interested in this. Need an extension for a paper? Sever the fiber connection!).

The class discussed aspects of this problem at one point, pointing out the anxiety that no matter what form artists use to present their form, the form will be outdated (and probably inaccessible) at some point in the near future. Did this same anxiety surround the birth of literature? Did Socrates fear that speech, if given over to text, might become outdated and inaccessible? If the great literacy project failed, would his words be lost forever?

Is the digital age just undergoing similar growing pains?