illustration : Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No 2 (1847) is known as the ancestor of the computer (courtesy of the Science Museum)

The life and death of the media

All must end in death, and the technologies are no exception. But what about the media?

At the end of the nineties, a group of writers and scholars devoted themselves to the study of dead media. Purposely swimming against the current in those days of Internet euphoria, they constructed a shrine to outdated devices of all kind: the Dead Media Project.

Technically, it was a sort of open database which aimed to gather notes and reflections about outdated media. It is not active anymore, but remains of great influence for anyone interested in obsolete technologies. Since then, a wide range of academics, artists and journalists have explored the twists and turns of the media lifespan (among them, we could mention the journalist Steve Baldwin, who's website Ghostsites is dedicated to forgotten web celebrities and online digital decay).

The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, who initiated the project in 1995, is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement, whose novels include Holy Fire (1996) and The Difference Engine (1991). At that time, as he explains in his Dead Media Manifesto, he aimed for a deeper understanding of the media lifespan. "There's a difference between this pleasurable contemplation of the technological sublime and an actual coherent understanding of the life and death of media", he said. "We have no idea in hell what we are doing to ourselves with these new media technologies, and no consistent way even to discuss the subject. Something constructive ought to be done about this situation."

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