ABSTRACT
I can’t seem to shake a déjà vu feeling when considering the current moment of media change as if, knowing what I do now, I was present during cinema’s first decade. How, I often wonder, did that new medium’s contemporaries fail to preserve films, key texts, and audience experiences? But when I consider the lax and, with a few notable exceptions, unsystematic efforts that are being made to preserve our latest ‘new’ media, it should come as no surprise. In the pages that follow, I will speak as a cultural historian who makes extensive use of archives and has an abiding interest in heritage and access. But I also speak as one whose personal and working life is increasingly bound up in new media and particularly social media. These two positions are hardly incompatible; on the contrary, they seem to me to offer not only real advantages thanks to the computerized archive, but real opportunities for historians to reflect upon the birth and development of the latest ‘new’ medium. And they bring with them the responsibility of learning from the past and preparing for the future, and urging the thoughtful and systematic archiving of this latest chapter in our cultural history. What follows will therefore of necessity have a polemical edge. The stakes for our culture and our ability to understand are both immediate and profound.
