Television

In Britain, media have been reporting a strange mold affecting audiotape and videotape. Much magnetic tape has already been destroyed by the dustlike substance, and many museums and archives may not know it yet, as they have not opened their boxes of old cassettes for years. The mold is so hardy that it spreads easily, so if you touch one contaminated tape and then handle another, you are likely to infect it, too.

One Scottish archival preservation company, quoted in the Telegraph, said it was implementing practices reminiscent of biology labs: Its employees open packages of tapes in one room, then wash their hands before moving to the room with the playback equipment, for fear of getting the fungus on the playing heads.

If it gets into the machines, it could spread everywhere. Now, librarians and archivists are creating quarantine rooms for moldy tapes.

No one is quite sure what is causing the white taint on the tapes, but it has been suggested that it is prevalent in Britain because of damp conditions. Internet skeptics are challenging the media reports, saying it's not yet clear that it is caused by a single fungus.

Whatever the matter, it's news because it reminds us all of the essential instability of all our media. We have tended to think, for the past few decades, that each technological development has given us more space for storage, and so was an improvement: Audio cassettes were smaller than vinyl, and unscratchable; videotapes were much easier to use, and less vulnerable to damage, than celluloid film was. A two-hour videotape was also much smaller than a two-hour film reel.

So everyone went off in the '80s and transferred all their old Super-8 home movies onto video cassettes. It was thought to give them some permanence, enter them into archives somehow, the way newspapers are shrunk into microfilm.

But videotape turned out to be highly impermanent. Now, one's videotapes must be transferred into a digital medium, put on a hard drive somehow (although we still can't agree on what format will become the universal one) — and not just because the tape medium is obsolete, but because the tapes are actually dying.

Think you're safe with all your movies on DVDs? Think again: "Laser rot" can affect old CDs and DVDs. They are coated with an aluminum surface to make them more reflective; the aluminum can oxidize and degrade. "CD bronzing" is a form of this: If your CD isn't playing well, and the playing surface is going brown, it has become irretrievably corroded. In fact, all digital media are prone to some kind of decay: Flash memory cards are also subject to a change in electrical charge that will cause bits to disappear.

So the problem of how to store all of human history forever still has not been solved. The tape-mold problem reminds us of the essential impermanence of even the newest media. Librarians and archivists still agree that the most stable storage medium for information is ink on paper; you can even soak it with water and much of it will remain readable.

It is also impervious to changes in "platform"; in other words, although printing and writing technologies have changed dramatically over the centuries, a book printed using 16th-century technology can still be easily read by any user. We don't have to find a 16th-century viewing machine to see it through.

That simplicity is threatened, even in the publishing industry. I recently completed a book, printed it and gave the manuscript to my agent. To give it to a publisher, she wanted it in a digital version, so I gave her a Word file. When she opened it on her computer, it was full of garbage characters. There had been some problem in the document conversions among several programs. I couldn't fix it.

But I said no problem, at least we have the print version. No good, she said: Editors want to read new manuscripts on e-readers now; they don't want paper. Although I had a perfectly clear manuscript, readable in bright sunshine and on the beach, it was useless. It was in an obsolete format.

Furthermore, ink and paper can't preserve moving images or sound. For that, we must rely on variations on treated plastic: chemical colors through which we shine a light; magnetic particles arrayed in a certain order; tiny pits impressed on a disc. It is perhaps fitting, even poetic, that moving images are more unstable than all others.