Negative Media: Erasure and the Limits of Retention

In a world inundated by an endless proliferation of texts, images, and data, the tension between the human desire to preserve and the economic incentive to retain collides with the finite nature of storage and its attendant costs. The impulse to keep everything inevitably confronts material constraints, compelling a reckoning with erasure as a necessity that enables ongoing creation. As this book reveals, such considerations are far from unique to the digital age.

Spanning early analog sound recordings to contemporary debates about digital cloud solutions, Negative Media proposes that acts of removal, cutting, deletion, and effacement shape the invention and use of popular storage technologies from the 19th century to the present. Ella Klik invites readers to reconsider how recording mechanisms operate, arguing that negation is not a design flaw but a process intentionally woven into the very fabric of these systems. Through engaging stories, including the accidental deletion of the Apollo 11 moon landing tapes, the book traces a genealogy of undoing that reframes our understanding of media's lifecycle, from production to managing scarcity and abundance. Rather than privileging long-term retention as the primary framework for analysis, Klik navigates through media histories and theories to foreground reuse at a moment where prevailing narratives insist--perhaps too boldly--that nothing can ever truly disappear from the internet.