Doane's Assumptions About the Digital

In the final paragraph of her article, Doane finally—though briefly--addresses an objection that continued to reoccur to me throughout the piece—“the fantasy of immateriality, the dream of the perfect archive, of digital media” (148). I thought it was interesting that the points she makes about the materiality of photography (and thus, the significance?) disappearing with the arrival of the digital are grounded on exactly the “fantasies” she mentions here—for example, in mourning the loss of the image’s “vulnerability to destruction,” she assumes that digital images are inherently permanent. Digital information is destroyed just easily as material objects are, and, like she says, the “perfect archive” of this information is only a dream; though there are programs dedicated to “archiving” the internet (like the Wayback machine), these programs are not exactly comprehensive and digital information easily lost forever.

However, I suppose I might be oversimplifying her point here. Her statements about photography as a “medium subject to dissolution and corruption” seem to rest on the fact that the photographs themselves will bear this trace, and she's mostly correct in noting that digital images don’t register aging in a (noticeable) way; though, in my admittedly very limited knowledge of technology, I am pretty sure that digitally transmitted photographs do actually lose a minute degree of quality with every "copy" made. But I guess I'm not really sure if my objections matter enough to really raise any problems with Doane's arguments.