Impermanence and Link Rot
Apparently, The Buddha taught that “…because conditioned phenomena are impermanent, attachment to them becomes the cause for future suffering”. Clearly the big B had an early glimpse of the future suffering that was to be caused by our attachment to fundamentally impermanent digital media.
Back in the day, we carried our 1″ master tape in it’s strong lockable case away from the edit suite and stored it on a shelf somewhere. And, it’s probably still there. A bit dusty, but perfectly accessible and perfectly intact – so long as you can find someone with a 1″ tape machine to play it back for you.
But now we’ve got the digital rushes from a shoot. Transfer them to a hard drive on a Mac or a PC and all is fine. Until that hard drive stops spinning. And then it’s all gone, probably forever. So you keep a copy on another drive, but the same is true of that. As someone said, there’s no such thing as a hard drive that doesn’t fail, there’s just hard drives that haven’t failed yet.Or you could store stuff ‘in the cloud’ – all good until the company running your cloud goes bust.
My thanks to Graham Dean who has pointed out that the perils of impermanence have affected the art world as well, where some digital works are said to be suffering from ‘Link Rot’ – an excellent term devised to describe the impermanence of a location on the Internet. There’s more about this issue here.
I think there’s much to be said for the permanence of films stored on tape or film and for art painted on big bits of canvas or paper – even if the Buddha would disapprove of such attachment.
