narrative designer, goofball


dog
@dog

I have kind of a petty annoyance I'm dealing lately, and that's what the term "lost media" gets used to mean. I'm seeing it get used so widely, and for so many different things, I'm worried it's losing all meaning entirely.

So, some background: in the preservation world, "lost media" is a technical term. It means, specifically, media which is believed to no longer exist. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually eradicated; lost media is rediscovered now and then, and it's always nice when something is no longer lost. But the important thing is that "lost media" is a statement about preservation state and existence - if it exists in an archive, in a private collection, and so on, it's not "lost".

I feel like it's also important that it comes out of specific preservation contexts, especially film. 75% of silent-era films are lost - gone entirely, no copies known to exist anywhere. Film's interesting to look at from a preservation perspective because it wasn't a mass-distributed medium; prints were sent out to theatres, but there were only rare and expensive ways to have a movie at home. Once a movie was old, it was less valuable to the studio to hold on to it for later, and they often didn't pay much attention to holding onto a copy for later. Even the Library of Congress didn't always hold on to copies of films it was given for decades.

Why am I focused on studios and the Library of Congress? Because these materials were scarce and mostly held by institutions or corporate archives. So when we say something is not lost, most of the time it's held in some kind of institutional archive - and most of the time, for copyright or just organizational reasons, it's not necessarily available on demand.

Really, that sense of "access" seems to me like it's ahistorical - something that only makes sense within the past 15 years. Treating something which exists, but only held in private or not actively available for sale, as something that's "lost" didn't even make sense for most of history. Most media was inaccessible to most people for various reasons before the past 10-15 years!

The popularized version of "lost media" seems like it gets used to mean something a lot broader. I've seen it applied to rare things that exist and show up at auction every few years; to things that are in someone's private collection; to things that are actively catalogued and preserved in a cultural heritage organization's collection. These aren't "lost" by any reasonable definition!!

And, speaking of institutions, it feels bizarre to me to have media be declared "lost media" by people who haven't tried contacting the corporate archive who might hold a copy of something. They might answer, they might well not, but the company that created something and holds the copyright is always going to be the most likely to hold on to a copy of something. Many times they'll have lost it, or not bothered keeping a copy - but declaring something "lost" without actually checking if they have it is a stretch!

Most of this is just me being grumpy, but I do feel like there's a signifiant chance this ends up acting as a distraction. "Lost media" focusing so heavily on media that actually exists, and not trying to track down media that's actually lost. Having media be widely available is valuable, but I really don't want us to dilute a term for media that's at risk of being lost forever when we're having an entirely different conversation altogether.

I guess I just wish the online "lost media community" had picked any other name so that it was easier to make sure I'm still talking the same language with people outside my professional circles.


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in reply to @dog's post:

I get that if you've only seen the term on the internet, you don't really know any other context, but it drives me up the wall.

I also get that some of it's probably generational. The idea that every piece of media ever created is instantly available is... very new. But there's people where that's all they've ever known.

God, I just remembered a case where this confusion of definitions could have been actively harmful to preservation efforts:

OK, so you remember Rock Odyssey? Before that one DVD of it was discovered and uploaded to the Internet Archive, the only known copy was archived at the Library of Congress, and I saw one person float the idea of going there themselves so they could basically pirate the film off that copy. Putting aside how infeasible the plan itself is, given how tightly controlled archive materials tend to be, there's a realistic chance they could have damaged or even destroyed the only known copy (at the time) of that film, all because there was no publicly available version of that film.

speaking from personal experience, i think a lot of this comes from the layperson guerilla nature of lost media communities, which i think is partially a manifestation of a cultural failure to make archival material publicly accessible (which is, of course, almost entirely due to ip law being completely fucked)