emafrankfurt-blog

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Introduction

When talking about archives, most people just imagine a dusty old basement with a lot of filing cabinets and drawers. Archives are seen as a thing of the past and a thing that stores the past.  However, in the ideas and thinking of media archaeology the term archive becomes a completely different one and can create a whole new idea of the concept of archive.  In this essay or rather this experimental essay project I want to analyse and also play around with the notion of the archive and its role in the times of digital media and especially social media. This is very much a work in progress which to a certain extent relies on reaction and interaction and will therefore only have certain features of a classic academic work - I do however hope this will be made up for by the fact that there is a variety of themes and ideas that will be presented. Through connection and following links this might get even more of an experiment - of which I hope that it is thoroughly enjoyable and presenting valuable ideas at the same time. 

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Archive drift

“One explanation for the deep affinity of archivalism and social media may be simply technological; specifically that data is itself always necessarily relational, nested, searchable and thus (digitally) archival as a matter of its own programmatic logic. While this technological explanation would explain the importance of archivalism as the software architecture of social media, it would not, however, account for the seduction of archivalism in a technological culture so feverishly dedicated to the future of the decontextualized, the dehistoricized, the dematerialized.” (Kroker, 2011, p.2)

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Characteristics of the social media archive

Considering the fact that social media itself is only a tiny fraction of what is the internet, the world wide web, it is worth havng a quick look at how the internet is characterised in terms of archiving in media archaeology. Wolfgang Ernst puts it succinctly when he says: “The Internet “archive” is on precisely this level, at once nonmetaphorical because it is nonconceptual and metaphorical because it is “transferent.”7 In 1991, Tim Berners Lee defined the new medium for communicating scientific information as no longer the static accumulation of dossiers but (directly in line with Ted Nelson’s hypertext vision) rather as the dynamic connection of documents and links. Although their indexes are primarily search oriented, unlike traditional archive repertoires, they are not passive but themselves constitute a logistical document containing links to the pertinent data records—a finding aid in the documents themselves, a self-referent archive.” (2013, p. 84)  Connection and connectivity seem to be key elements here, whether in allowing people to communicate and connect through this medium or the medium being in itself connected and even self-referent. The centrality of connectivity is also pointed out by Cubitt, him referring to it as “a good specific to media and communication” (2013, p.7)  One of his central arguments for anecdotal evidence and the inherent refusal of anecdotes so be archived because their nature is ever-changing and connecting, so they cant be “locked in place” (ibid., p.15) seems to some extent no longer valid when one looks at how in social media this moment of change and reshaping can still take place. His observation that the digital age asks for everything in numbers and systems and archiving it might be overlooking the fact that the archive and its nature certainly changes in not only times of the digital media but on and in digital media itself. The characteristics are therefore then different but that must not be looked at as a negative thing. In media archaeology change and how it occurs over time and influences itself and new inventions should rather be an incentive to look at the archive in the digital age and specifically social media as archives as new and at the same time old opportunities to learn from. 

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Wolfgang Ernst on the Digital Archive

“It is not the digitality of the so-called digital archive that is new but the fact that what is involved is the binary code, the smallest information unit of which is the bit, through whose duality words, images, sounds, and times are archivally encodable. Archivalia that happen to be media art thus for- feit their exclusivity (apart from their format) vis-à-vis other forms of data object.” (Ernst, 2013, p.82)

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Role of the archive in EMA

The role of the archive is a very central one in the concept (if one can even say there is such a thing as a concept rather than a constant development of ideas, experiments and theories) of experimental media archaelogy. Strauven (2013), p.68 points this very fact out and refers to the archives of the FIAF (Brighton Project), closely related to the early cinema movement and the idea of the “digital archive”, developed by Wolfgang Ernst as important subjects. 

The importance of the archive for experimental media archaeology comes from the very subjects that it analyzes and experiments with. As seen in the course that lead to this particular project getting started, temporality, materiality and art are central points, all of which are closely related to the subject of the archive. The key points here seem to be the temporality and the materiality, especially if one wants to see how it would play out on social media. There is a certain linearity at the core of social media which in most cases heavily relies on news and constant renewal to stay relevant and create interest. However, especially when looking at microblogging sites such as Twitter and Tumblr that give their users the possibility to retweet or reblog the content, this linearity gets broken up completely. Just like that the linearity can get changed completely and a medium (e.g. a video) can be put in a new context of time and sometimes even of space if it gets reposted to another social media site where the audience is a completely different one.  The materiality of the content of social media also is a very important factor in experimenting with it. As Cubitt (2013), p.6 puts it, the “material specificity of every instance of a photograph or film” is one of the most important parts that one has to look at when analyzing a medium or trying to put it in a (oftentimes historical, which refers back to the temporality of the concept of experimental media archaeology) context. This specificity changes which each time and each person looking at it. Seeing as Tumblr has millions of users, so sometimes hundreds of thousands of people look at, like or reblog a certain e.g. image it could thusly be said that social media completey redefines this specificity. This does not only go for the outer appearance of the medium, in this case the image, which can look different depending on which computer, at which time of day and with what eyesight people look at it. It also is as relevant for the inner appearance, meaning the text and all implications that come with it. 

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“[...]the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass...it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing: it is the system of its functioning.”

Foucault (1972), p. 129, as cited in Cubitt (2013), p.15

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Anecdotal evidence (Sean Cubitt)

“[...] the evidentiary status of media artifacts points to a further field of uniqueness already explored by archivists: the material specificity of every instance of a photograph or film. There are no two identical books or recordings; each bears the traces of its production and even more so of the vicissitudes of its transmission. This is quite as true of digital media as of traditional forms. All media decay, all accrue the traces of their biographies (what Giovanna Fossati calls the ‘archival life’ of a medium), all stories are retold in new circumstances.“ (Cubitt, 2013, p.6)

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Article on Facebook as a digital graveyard, in the sense that it keeps profiles of people online after they have deceased. This makes it one of the largest archives for information on people that don’t exist anymore.  Even more stunning, since most people don’t leave a digital “testament” their accounts can not get closed or changed without the password so the control over those archived profiles lies solely with Facebook. The implications of that are still somewhat unclear. 

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Question

Is regarding and/or using social media as an archive a re-purposing of the intended use of the medium? Or is it an inherent function? 

Is there a temporal linearity in social media? What happens to the linearity if I or someone else reblogs, reshares, reuses or repurposes it?

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My first Instagram photo.

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Googlemail archive function.

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http://www.dailyedge.ie/facebook-profile-changes-1881280-Jan2015/

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https://codex.wordpress.org/Next_and_Previous_Links

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We are miniarchivists ourselves in this information society, which could be more aptly called an information management society. [...] We also see this in business models of social media: the so-called free platforms we are using to connect to friends and to share ideas, links, and preferences for films and music are all material for data mining, which is the new form of subsumption of our lives into capitalist production and accumulation of value. This algorithmic unconscious of social media cultures knows a lot about us and is often keen not only to keep but to sell those data to third parties.

Jussi Parikka, Archival Media Theory. An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology

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Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. 

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression