Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, a professor at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), researches data loss in the digital age.
In June she published an article in the
New York Times
titled
The world's digital memory is in danger
,
and this year it has received one of the most important grants from the European Union to study how, in the era of digital abundance, the past of our societies is in danger.
Going paperless has unforeseen implications for who and how keeps current discussions, private messages or business documents from the past.
It is a challenge of surprising complexity when it seems that society leaves an infinite digital trail.
It is not like this.
The interview took place in Barcelona, where Thylstrup, 42 years old and born in Copenhagen, participated in a conference linked to the exhibition
AI: Artificial Intelligence
at the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
Ask.
There is more and more information, more data.
What should be preserved?
Answer.
It is a political decision that each country must make.
More and more data of public interest are not available.
The problem is not just whose information it is.
Also who has access.
I'm not just talking about government information.
It can also be data owned by Amazon, not just what it stores on its servers.
It is data that they produce themselves or that people produce for them and that they own, such as reviews or descriptions.
Another preservation issue is which organizations should be able to access and preserve this type of information for historical purposes.
Q.
Why is it such a difficult issue?
A.
Now we still understand the challenges and opportunities of digital societies, which are related to accumulating more and more data: that gives us, on the one hand, benefits such as advances in health and, on the other, challenges such as surveillance or extraction. of data to sell us things.
If we only focus on that accumulation, we run the risk of losing sight of the fact that digital is super volatile and fragile and needs constant conservation if we want it to remain accessible.
File formats go out of fashion, there is obsolescence of formats, platforms that close.
We don't even have a vocabulary to talk about these issues: what do we mean when we say that a platform closes and the data disappears?
It depends, for example, if there is a merger with another company, the data could still be there, but we cannot access it.
They could even still be there and be used without us knowing.
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, at the CCCB exhibition "AI: Artificial Intelligence".
Q.
What is missing to talk more about this topic?
A.
We have not debated enough, from a political point of view, about how to preserve our digital memory.
But that doesn't necessarily mean we have to keep everything.
That's not my position.
But we need a qualified discussion about who and how we make decisions about what to keep and what to let go.
That is why I highly value the idea in the European Data Protection Regulation that people should also have the right to be forgotten.
Not only that everything is saved forever.
We know that we do not live in a time of information scarcity like before.
At the same time, the information we have is incredibly volatile.
We could lose part of our memory because a file format becomes obsolete.
Q.
What information should we keep then?
A.
That question is for those in charge of archives.
Who's to know what will be interesting, historically valuable, 30 years from now?
There are the great events, but then also the everyday, which is usually the most interesting for historians.
It helps to understand day-to-day problems: how people lived in 1950 or 1830.
Q.
For example?
A.
Recently there was a controversy in Denmark.
There is a national app that is used for the relationship between schools and parents.
The Minister of Culture has just prohibited the preservation of private messages from that app, which national archivists were capturing.
It's controversial.
Historians said this will be useful in 100 years, when we have to understand how parenting changed with the introduction of digital technologies: can we see gender patterns?
We know that all women are in charge of those apps, even in an egalitarian society.
We don't see men there.
Or with covid and how the school changed.
That is the challenge of archiving, and that is why archivists are experts in evaluating, they make the decisions about what goes in and what doesn't and that is always a political decision because they are guardians of a cultural memory.
Q.
In Spain there is a similar file.
A.
I am not an expert in the Spanish system, but it seems that they have a similar approach to the Danish one.
So they keep certain “.es” websites, also “.cat” and some more.
Then they have a massive scan that runs through the network in a very general way and then there are the key events.
For example, if there is a big football match or a terrorist attack, they intensify tracking.
Then they have something called political or electoral where they do massive tracking specifically in politics.
Also one called risk.
So they have more specialized focuses and more thematic tracking.
Q.
Is this tracking not only on the Internet, but also on Instagram or messages between politicians?
A.
Everything.
For example, with Twitter people reacted not only because of disagreements with Elon Musk's strategy, but there was also a great feeling of loss for the communities they had built there.
An example is the so-called
Black Twitter,
which built an incredible archive and its own slang.
The question is no longer just what happens to this cultural memory, but maybe you can't access it.
It is basically a certain type of cultural memory that is in the hands of a company, in this case Twitter.
We still have a feeling that these platforms are there and we don't really think about mitigation strategies if they suddenly shut down or decide to change like Tumblr did with porn content.
They are clearly private companies that have the right to run these communities however they want because it is within their purview.
Then we have organizations that set up a kind of counter-files.
When Twitter started shutting down or dismantling, there were communities that said you need to counter-archive certain cases.
Q.
Archives does not have agreements with these companies.
A.
The problem is that they can change their technical access modes, so it becomes very difficult to trace.
It is one of their greatest challenges as archival institutions.
They don't have any agreements with these companies that allow them to do that, for the sake of the investigation or the story.
With newspapers or books in Denmark we have a law that says that every time you publish something it also has to go to the National Library.
In my country, a website counts as one publication.
But it is in itself unstable, because the websites are updated and are not sent the same as other publications.
Also, if there are elections and everything that happens is on X or Instagram, it should be preserved because it is also an important part of the nation's cultural memory.
How can we understand Brexit without what happened on Twitter or Facebook?
Q.
Is the main concern that we don't know what to preserve in general or that we are already losing so many things that it is difficult to know which ones?
A.
Both.
Institutions decide what to keep, but sometimes conditions are difficult.
We know that we want to save anything relevant to historically understanding an election, but the conditions for doing so are complicated because private companies protect the data.
So the conditions complicate things for the institutions, then there are the slightly technical, but I think fundamental questions, about if we say that we want to preserve something, how do we differentiate what is Spanish on the web from what is global?
Those are tough questions too.
But they are challenges we have had before.
The fundamental risks now are that conditions are poor for archivists to work professionally because of access.
The political challenge is how do we organize our societies so that private companies do not have the power to block access to something that is in the public interest.
Then you have material challenges around all of this, which is essentially fragile.
It's not like a piece of paper that will be there in a hundred years.
That is a material challenge.
It is linked to economic challenges because companies make money with updates.
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