Part of the "Tools" series of Abstractions.

Since the advent of the internet, sharing content has become simpler, faster and most importantly reliable and foolproof. Today we commonly make use of instant messaging platforms as WhatsApp which features well refined algorithms for compressing images allowing for with a not too relevant loss of quality. The storage saving magic happens behind the scenes, and we don’t need to think too much about it.

The ability of having an immediate and automatic archive of every digital thought that went through these platforms, has also an immense potential. As long as something has been shared, it also seems to be preserved, and safeguarded for an easy future retrieval.

But is the risk of losing information really a thing of the past?

This leads to a reflection on a long-term perspective, of sharing conceived as archive and historical transmission. Storage hardware deteriorates quickly, and retro compatibility of software is an issue we are confronted with on a daily basis. While deterioration of digital materials is theoretically not an issue, it is far from absent on the long run. Hard drives fail, files get corrupted, overwritten, compressed, images scaled, down sampled, printed, scanned and compressed too. What if our sharing isn’t so lossless after all?

For us, as architects, this ephemeral storage of information is in harsh contrast with the lifespan of the artifacts we build. Retrieving a plan from an email exchange is just a matter of a few clicks, at least in the present. In the future this might not be the case, as care/less shared and archived data could irreparably have lost its intrinsic information and reason to be.

Brief for the Care/less Sharing competition.