Persistent Paleontology

Definition

Persistent paleontology describes the condition in which electronically mediated subjects increasingly act as excavators of their own accumulated records. Facebook is a system with layers of geological history. The email inbox is a rapidly expanding site of excavation which one must continually query. The newness of everything buries one's ability to reach it without digging.

Everyone who interacts with an archive of their own past is now a persistent paleontologist: always going out to email, searching, digging up what is needed at the moment, and finding what got buried before.

The Sedimentary Metaphor

The term's force comes from the specific geological analogy. A sediment is not organised; it is deposited. Layers accumulate in the order they arrived, without regard to their importance, and the record of a significant event and the record of a trivial one are laid down by the same process at the same rate. Retrieval is therefore always excavation: you must know roughly where to dig, and you must move a great deal of material that does not interest you to reach the material that does.

This distinguishes the digital archive sharply from earlier personal records. A filing cabinet, a photo album or a shelf of diaries is curated at the point of storage — someone decided what went in, and that decision is itself a form of indexing. Systems that store by default remove that step. Nothing is chosen, so nothing is indexed by choice, and the burden of selection is deferred to the moment of retrieval, where it is much harder.

Why Digging Is the Normal Interaction

Several properties of contemporary systems make excavation, rather than browsing, the default:

• Reverse chronology. Feeds and inboxes are ordered by recency, which means importance and position are unrelated, and anything older than a few days is functionally inaccessible without search.
• Storage cheaper than deletion. The effort of deciding what to discard exceeds the cost of keeping it, so nothing is discarded.
• Volume outpacing memory. The number of items a person generates has grown much faster than their ability to recall having generated them, so people search their own archives for facts about themselves.
• Search as the only index. Where the sole retrieval mechanism is a query box, you can only find what you can already name — which is a poor tool for the very common case of looking for something you have forgotten the name of.

Effects

The practical consequence is a distinctive kind of labour: continuous, low-grade, unrewarded archival work performed by every user on their own behalf. It produces its own anxieties — the sense that something important is in there somewhere, the reluctance to declare an inbox finished, the dread attached to a folder rather than to its contents. It also produces a new relationship to one's own past, in which old material surfaces without being sought, delivered by systems designed to resurface it.

Related Reading

• Hyperlinked Memories
• Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation
• The Poetics of Space
• Frictional Interface