The Increasing Value of Physical Media in a Digital World

If you’re reading this in The Oracle newspaper, you are saving physical media.

The previous statement was a bit of a hyperbole, but in this day and age, who doesn’t have a vinyl record, a polaroid camera or just a physical book itself? Physical media, though a dying form, has been making a comeback in a generation infatuated with vintage items. Yet oftentimes, the aesthetic vision of ownership over media often overshadows the true need for these items, the need for free, accessible content in an age where our entertainment and culture can be paywalled or permanently erased. The argument is two-fold: physical media needs to be a radical tool against our current digital over-reliance, and we need to support and protect online archives — the fate of humanity is at stake.

In August 2022, HBO Max pulled almost 200 episodes of “Sesame Street” from its platform, citing the company’s preparation to merge with streaming service Discovery+ as the cause. The platform went from offering 650 episodes to only 456, losing episodes primarily between seasons two to four and now only offering 29 episodes from seasons one, five and seven according to Variety. Today, those old episodes are still lost from the platform with only the latest episodes being routinely added. Some of the removed episodes can be found on the Sesame Street YouTube channel, but others can only be found in archived clips. For a show with so many lost episodes, this inaccessibility fragments the show’s running even further.

Sesame Street was not an isolated attack — this was coordinated in conjunction with mass layoffs and the removal of 36 other titles including Infinity Train, an animated series that ran for four seasons, first on Cartoon Network, then HBO Max. With its removal, the show is no longer freely available, being trapped behind paywalls in pay-per-season/episode places like Google Play or Amazon Prime. According to CNBC, the three potential motivations behind these title cuts are “slashing costs, moving away from content aimed at kids and families and decluttering the service.” Because of this, Owen Dennis, the creator of the show, took to Substack to comment on the whole ordeal, saying “The issue we have right now is that our most well-known art is, for the most part, owned by about five gigantic, multinational corporations. That means they also own our culture. If you own our culture, then you also own our history and our access to it.”

Streaming services have undoubtedly changed the entertainment-sphere, and yet headlines like these show the true danger of over-relying on these digital spaces for content. They are fostering a culture in which profit is prioritized over art, and TV shows/movies are not given the chance to find their audience and grow. At any given moment, these can be pulled from the platform, cutting off access to the content, and the only ways users can circumvent this are either fronting the bill per episode or sailing the seven seas. Yet, even content designed to be free is still in danger of censorship and removal.

One of the scariest pop-ups that I’ve read earlier in October came from the Internet Archive, though that day, it wasn’t the usual digital library I frequent. The website was down with only a singular pop-up on my screen reading, “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!” It was there that I learned of the DDoS attack on Internet Archive, breaching 31 million users’ usernames, email addresses and passwords. In addition to this data breach, all services were knocked out, leaving the website under maintenance for days until it could be secured again. 

The Internet Archive, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form,” have archived over 835 billion web pages, 44 million books/texts, 15 million audio recordings and much more saved on the site, freely accessible to all users. In just a few attacks, all that information went completely dark.

This comes just a little over a year after their loss in the Hachette v. Internet Archive case, in which major publishing companies sued Internet Archive for copyright infringement in 2020 in response to the launch of the National Emergency Library, which gave library access to books for users unable to access their own public libraries due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision had major impacts on their book lending system. As Chris Freeland, Director of Library Services at Internet Archive, put it, “this injunction will result in a significant loss of access to valuable knowledge for the public.”

Digital spaces like Internet Archive work to provide valuable information to all users free-of-charge that otherwise could not be accessed elsewhere. Spaces like these are crucial in documenting society and culture, but this DDoS attack and court case demonstrate the powers that exist, the people who will go to lengths to limit Internet Archive’s reach. This is especially detrimental to those in economically-disparate areas or communities censoring information in schools and libraries. When we are denied the ability to access information, we are more easily controlled.

Though this editorial’s tone is pressing, it is not blind to the obvious truth — the digital space is more accessible and convenient than its analogue counterparts. This is not a call for a 21st-century Luddite movement but a call to attention on the ways in which media is preserved, paywalled or destroyed. It is a caution to keep physical collections of things that are important, whether it be a favorite movie on Blu-Ray, a rare CD from an obscure local band or photos from childhood saved onto a film reel, and to not solely rely on the digital space to store and archive that information. Eggs were not meant to be placed all in one basket, after all. In turn, it is also a call to protect the current digital archival spaces threatened by corporate greed. The paywalling and erasure of information relinquishes our control — we need to get our culture back.

Besides keeping physical media of your own, support and utilize local libraries. This ensures that these spaces can exist in the future without corporate intervention or overreach. Supporting online libraries and databases is especially crucial, as they battle to keep information free and available for all. The fight for free information is the fight for our past, our present and our future.