Materiality and Immateriality
Digital resources have another interesting characteristic from an historical perspective. These resources provide users with an experience analogous to, but not precisely emulating, physical, material resources. They therefore give the perception of “immateriality”. Everything in the digital realm seems to reside in “cyberspace”. Users are accessing “data”, which are immaterial, in contrast to “physical”, material objects and artefacts. The perception of immateriality results from the transparent access that users have to the material: users generally do not think about, nor do they need to be concerned with, the physical storage media on which the data are stored, the microprocessors on which the algorithms execute, or the physical memory into which the “immaterial” data are loaded. The digital nature of the archive therefore abstracts away materiality from the user’s viewpoint. However, maintaining the perception of immateriality and transparency is possible only because of many unseen background processes. For instance, programs are modularized, or written in discrete components. Error-correcting algorithms are employed to reduce the “noise” inherent in physical media. And degradation of physical computational resources, which result specifically as a consequence of their materiality, are hidden from the user through system migration, physical resource redundancy, “garbage collection” to recover unused but still occupied memory locations, and additional error-correcting and noise removal measures. These processes to ensure a transparent virtual experience has a negative effect on performance, although this effect is negligible to most users. The trade-offs of “overcoming materiality” are balanced by performance penalties to ensure the perception of immateriality (Ries & Palkó, 2019).
Consequently, although materiality can be hidden from users, immateriality is only a perception provided by multiple, complex background tasks. Digital resources and environments, appearing as immaterial, are built atop a physical, material substrate, and are therefore subject to degradation. Hardware and software inevitably age and become obsolete. Bitrot, the gradual loss of data on physical media, and diminution of the performance of these media, is caused by physical factors, including the flipping of polarity in bits stored on media due to background electromagnetic radiation (recall that all digital data are represented in the binary code of 0s and 1s). Network environments that operated in the past no longer function. Although not directly related to material considerations, many online services that were part of the original environment of born digital material are now offline, and no longer in service. All these factors raise the question of what and how much needs to be preserved and maintained. Another central question is whether the human-computer interaction experienced by the original creators and users of the digital bo