Speaking at the New Media and Social Memory symposium at the University of California at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, researcher Kurt Bollacker said the porn industry drives the technology behind preservation of digital media.
“I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form because it's a social model that's working extremely well,” he said. “Anyone interested in preserving digital art should evaluate ongoing distributed data efforts.”
Bollacker cited the value of adult entertainment in the quest to archive digital art because, as he put it, the porn industry is an example of a community that swaps out picture and video content regularly, creating a real-time archive.
The symposium, which featured Bollacker along with several other academics and technology experts, sought to address the problems faced by archivists in the digital age. With the proliferation of digital works, many archivists have said the role of preservation is increasingly the domain of the community, rather than professionals.
“Millions of people can make digital art, and maybe most of it is crap, so we don't know which to save,” Bollacker said.
According to Bollacker, the choice of what to save and how best to store it is one made almost by default as adult entertainment professionals continue to pioneer new forms of data distribution.
Bollacker also cited the value of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, which allow a community to separate what is worth saving from content that has no archival value.