Aging in Data also involves the aging of data and caring for data into the future.
Wi: Journal of Mobile Media was an online only, media-rich publication that ran from 2006 until 2017, featuring 16 issues and nearly 200 articles drawing on mobility studies to address emerging communication technologies and practises, mobile cultures, and the circulation of data writ large. With firm roots in media history, much of the content of the journal sought to put new developments in mobilities into dialogue with longer histories and older technologies.
During the final phase of archiving, the journal is viewable here: https://wi-archive.dreamhosters.com/
We will provide the updated link to the archived journal once it’s ready.
Looking back at the journal now in 2026, Wi speaks to four layers of aging (in) data:
- Content on aging. Over the years, many articles in Wi addressed themes of aging, whether of people, technologies, or imaginaries – for example, Kim Sawchuk and Barbara Crow’s work on seniors and cells, or Simone Natale’s edited special issue on past imaginations of the data- and technology-rich future.
- Aging of content. The early articles from the journal speak to a historical moment involving mobile technologies that might now appear quaint, before smartphones dominated the cellphone market, and when data plans were small and relatively rare. While the material might sometimes feel “dated” when it comes to devices, it is also a reminder of how the current moment will appear a few years from now, a reminder that data, technologies, and practices are always aging, even as they are sold as cutting edge in the moment.
- Aging infrastructures. Part of the challenge of archiving a media rich online only journal involves the labour of maintaining or recreating media experiences that no longer have any official support. For example, the journal relied on Macromedia Flash for much of its multimedia content. The deprecation of that application has required the researchers to not only reproduce the content otherwise, but in some cases to find out what the content actually was. Sometimes content reveals itself through existing code, other times it requires contacting journal contributors from 15 years ago. Re-establishing these contacts also reveals that archives are sustained by social infrastructures that age alongside technical ones. Contributors have changed institutions, research interests, collaborations, or life circumstances, reminding us that archiving is not only a process of recovering files but also of negotiating evolving human relationships and the changing communities through which data circulates. It also involves working within an outdated Wordpress universe, adding on updates as best we can and filling in the gaps of articles that exist only in HTML or as PDFs.
- Language on aging. The archiving process makes us aware of the language around aging technologies, platforms, and data – the associations with things that are out-of-date, obsolete, old-fashioned, quaint, or deprecated, and how value circulates as things age. Sometimes value accumulates (in the case of something with aura, now rare and desirable) and more often when it comes to the digital, value decreases and artefacts are associated with uselessness and complication, as in the case of bit rot, link rot, software entropy, software erosion, and data degradation.
This raises questions for how we care for data as it grows old. Does the hype around digital data need to be balanced by a decline narrative that faces the material realities of aging data? Does the aging of data require a reorienting perspective that looks more deeply at our relationships to data, and finds something positive in the ever-present possibility of loss along with the imperfect but committed acts of care that attempt to keep data in circulation?
