One issue that is particularly delicate is who has access to our century’s (our two centuries’) audiovisual record. It is rarely discussed in public forums. Yet as we think of how most of the world’s advanced societies run today, how their leaders govern, and the ways in which cameras and recording devices are present with us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, one ought to wonder: Why not? Moving image archives, ripped by evening newscasts and social media, delivered anew in recut clips on television, radio, and the web every day, all year long, are becoming increasingly essential to our understanding of each other and society. Indeed, television, film, and online video—together, the moving image—has gotten to the point, only some 440 years after Gutenberg, of displacing print as the world’s medium of record.
As a result, our audiovisual record, and access to it, has become more and more important to society—to our study of the past, our knowledge of the present, and our planning for the future. Access to the archives should become a right more specifically enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a touchstone charter for human freedom, which set forth in 1948 that “[e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” UNESCO’s Constitution, established in 1945, had already committed its signatories to protecting and promoting “the free flow of ideas by word and image.” At the time, the “image” was mainly photographic. The United Nations, through the UN Human Rights Council, passed a follow-on resolution in 2016 “affirm[ing] that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice,” and “unequivocally condemn[ing] measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to or dissemination of information online.”
That assertion of rights includes access to the audiovisual record. Archiving, properly defined, is the establishment and stewardship of the human record, and the remembering that it facilitates may be the most critically important imperative in modern human society. The Hebrew verb “Zakhor” appears in the imperative—“Remember!”— in the Bible more often than any other command. It is no accident that the etymology of the word “archive” comes from the Greek “ἄρχω”—to begin, to rule, to govern—and thus no accident that “archive” shares the same root as the word for monarch, autarchy, and hierarchy. Archives started in the “archon”—the seat of government—and the centrality of the power of the archive, and the audiovisual archive in particular, may well become the story of power in the 21st century. The current and future significance of audiovisual archival work cannot be overstated.