Key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media's archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines. This conflation of memory with storage is not due to some inherent technological feature, but rather due to how everyday usage and parlance arrests memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of superhuman digital programmability.
The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 148-171. [stop @ 161]