Much of the information people have been creating lately has been “born-digital,” meaning it was born on a computer or some other digital device. While this is convenient and certainly seems like a step in the right direction as far as access is concerned, it feels like we are losing something in the process. For things like news, posting directly to a website is great when one thinks about it. Newspapers are ridiculously wasteful. You buy one everyday and (usually) throw it out on the same day. I cannot think of a better candidate for digital reconstitution. However, the question we have to ask ourselves is will this news be readily available when it has become history, in fifty or a hundred years? Unfortunately, “that’s part of the danger of our digitized world — we don’t know how to store things for safe keeping hundreds of years into the future” (Heimbuch), and without this crucial information of how to preserve computer-generated content, it can be argued that we have no right to unload so much material onto the internet without backing it up with hardcopies.

The problem with digital information is not the fact that it is digital. It is the fact that it is ephemeral. Although it may last for several years in the digital realm, it will not last forever. While the same thing may be said of paper copies, the paper copies are not in a constant state of upheaval the way the digital world is.  It seems convenient that fleeting information and fleeting attention spans have popped up at around the same time. Today, knowledge is quickly gotten and quickly gotten rid of. Perhaps it is because we are able to so easily find information online that we now take it for granted. Before computers allowed us to store everything we could think of, a lot like Bush’s “memex,” we had a bit more respect for tactile information. Now, the more advanced computers become, the more of a throw away lifestyle we find ourselves accepting. We keep our phones for a maximum of two years and our laptops for about three to five years. We have come to almost revel in our excrement and we do it with a smile.

Derrida says it best in his book, Archive Fever: “What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (18). Because information has stopped being truly saved for future generations, we no longer see it as an important element of our lives.

In a way, archiving has become more about the process and less about the result. In other words, how we archive has become more important than what we archive. How do we archive? Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. What do we archive? Anything that is on our minds at any given time. This can get rather tedious and frankly boring. Seneca’s idea that, “it does not matter how many books you have, but how good they are,” is partially true (qtd. in Battles 9). We throw most anything into the “universal” Archive by posting things on the internet. But we do this without realizing we are adding to the Archive. Obviously some of the things added to the internet do not necessarily have to be saved for others to read in the future. It is not paramount that everything floating around the World Wide Web always be readily available. That goes for information not created digitally as well. Still, by making all information digital, we have set up a system through which we will haunt people long after we are dead with information that was never meant to be eternal. If you delete your Facebook account, all the information is still there and will always be there. If you save a Word document, you can delete it but they do not make it easy. With so much stuff and no real way to weed all of it, “instant info can make us a whole new breed of hoarder,” Heimbuch says in her article, “7 Major Ways We’re Digitizing Our World, and 3 Reasons We Still Want Hardcopies.” She contends that because of all of the information at hand, people feel compelled to absorb as much as they possibly can.

While the idea of people wanting to learn is commendable, it appears to be trending, hip knowledge that everyone is most jacked into, such as the latest gadget, which will become obsolete in a few years. Richer, more fruitful knowledge is usually passed over in favor of Skynet’s newest toy. But we should never forget: The T-1000 was not user compatible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjsSr3z5nVk

Works Cited

Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. New York: W.W. Norton. 2003. Print

 

Secrecy draws and marks, as it were, the boundaries of privacy—privacy being the realm that is meant to be one’s own domain, the territory of one’s undivided sovereignty, inside which one has the comprehensive and indivisible power to decide ‘what and who I am’, and from which one can launch and relaunch the campaign to have and keep one’s decisions recognized and respected. In a startling U-turn from the habits of our ancestors, however, we have lost the guts, the stamina, and above all the will to persist in the defense of such rights, those irreplaceable building blocks of individual autonomy. (28)

 

Recently the founders of social media app, Snapchat, turned down an offer of $3 billion from Facebook and a subsequent $4 billion from Google, meeting with fierce criticism from the tech and business worlds. People questioned this potentially foolish decision made by a couple of 20-somethings with no prior business experience, who don’t currently even control the central patent of their own technology, tied up in litigation with one of the other founders. The app itself, and its founders decision to do the unthinkable and say no to these colossal firms is an interesting case in terms of where the internet and these technologies might be headed.

 

In the literature surrounding changing information environments there is a reoccurring theme of a shift from the private to public—this idea of a wired society defined by a public sphere its members can not avoid. To participate in our culture means to participate in this public arena. In Liquid Surveillance, Bauman and Lyon point to an erosion of anonymity due to pervasive use of social media, cheap cell phone cameras, free photo and video web hosts, and a general shift in society’s view on what ought to be public and private. “Everything private is now done, potentially in public — and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet ‘can’t be made to forget’ once recorded on any of its innumerable servers” (22). Pointing to drone surveillance combined with the surrender of personal privacy inherent in social media use, Bauman discusses how the most remarkable feature of contemporary surveillance is the way it has somehow managed to force and cajole oppositions to work in unison. Traditional forms of panoptical surveillance (you never know when you are being watched, so should behave as if you always are) are being recast as the hope of never being alone. With social media and this shift to public living the “fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed” (23). People are ready and willing to consent to the loss of privacy in order to participate in this culture of being seen and validated.

Within this context, Snapchat takes on an interesting significance. This exchange of ephemeral content can be seen to represent a kind of fantasy of escape from this pervasive system of surveillance. Snapchat doesn’t save user data, it knows nothing about its users. Each of the millions of photos that are sent are erased from a third-party server within seconds of being received. Unlike other forms of social media that have become mandatory tools for building an essential legitimizing online identity, Snapchat is subversive and cool.

Bauman and Lyon argue that in a society that has been reshaped in the likeness of the marketplace, its members are simultaneously promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. “The test they need to pass in order to be admitted to the social prizes they covet demands them to recast themselves as commodities: that is as products capable of drawing attention, and attracting demand and customers” (32). These comments take on a further significance combined with Robert McChesney’s claim that “personal communication, mass media, and market information have been subsumed within the new order so that distinctions are passé” (3). Within this environment in which traditional boundaries between the private and public, personal and commercial are broken down, the internet becomes a space for a kind of constant self-curation, in which you are ever aware of the persona your actions online create. Snapchat represents an escape from this anxiety of accountability, in which its users can enjoy brief moments of supposed freedom. Its founders’ decision to remain independent seems to align with this image. In addition it brings to mind a fantasy about competition being a click away, that giants like “Microsoft and Google…are in mortal fear for their very survival if someone were to develop a better algorithm in her garage” (136).

Of course, as McChesney points out in Digital Disconnnect, these huge firms are much more than an algorithm and a stack of patents. While cloud computing represents a brilliant way to make the internet more efficient and less expensive, it is really in the hands of a few giant firms. Google’s enormous server farms serve as an example of this domination. And where does Snapchat store its infrastructure and unopened snaps? Google’s cloud computing service, App Engine. Even if the company were to remain independent, the answer to the question of how to generate profit might come from further dependence on these internet giants. Snapchat can’t offer advertisers any user-generated content to target, which is the way social media apps turn a profit. An article in Business Insider provides one simple and brilliant possible solution: simply connect users’ accounts to Facebook or Twitter and advertisers can target users in Snapchat based on that data. All Snapchat would need to do is sync its application programming interface with these other sites. It is yet to be seen in what direction Snapchat will go or if they will survive, but the recent news surrounding the app is certainly interesting and relevant in light of this ongoing discussion.

Sources

Bauman, Zygmunt and David Lyon. (2013) Liquid Surveillance: A conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press.

McChesney, Robert W. (2013) Digital Disconnnect: How capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. New York: The New Press.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/meet-the-23-year-old-kid-who-turned-down–3-billion-for-snapchat-010309114.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-data-monetization-through-advertising-2013-11

 

Almost everyone is familiar with the poet Emily Dickinson in some way. Dickinson is remembered to be a private poet and is well known for her short poems with themes of isolation. In her lifetime, only a dozen out of roughly eight-hundred of her poems were published. Since she led a life so private, most of her friendships are evident through correspondence.

Today launches the Emily Dickinson Archive, a large scale open-access digital archive containing all of the poets surviving manuscripts. This project was two years in the making, led by Harvard University Press in collaboration with Houghton Library, Amherst College, and the Boston Public Library. “It collects many surviving manuscripts of the slight, shy poet who once called herself — with considerable irony — “the Belle of Amherst.”(The Harvard Gazette).

So what might this 19th-century poet make of the decidedly immodest archive of her poems being released today, bringing to light in one digital place most of her surviving manuscripts?

The compilation of these digital documents sparked great controversy from a feud that has continued for generations. The collaboration between institutes sparked debates over ownership. It has been stated that the site is intended to “facilitate scholarship” and not “make the scholarship”. The two year project required overcoming jealousies in effort to create a “neutral online space for gathering manuscripts”. Some members of the scholarly community disagreed with such claims, stating “archives are not neutral spaces and the presentation of documents is to some degree interpretive”.

Such disagreements connect to the earlier reading of Questioning Library Neutrality, in which the social and political roles of libraries are discussed – the question of how the archive might impact public perception and support. The scholars disagreeing with the claim that EDA is a “neutral online space for gathering manuscripts” likely find contradiction in the assertion that there’s an absence of decided views, expression, or strong feeling.

With the evident controversies surrounding the institutions collaboration with such jealousies over ownership their is evidence that perhaps the debate is concerning the trading of cultural capital and in that “who controls the information, controls power over that society”. That society being the community of scholars interested in the knowledge organized on EDA. Controversies surrounding the archive exceed the topic of information literacy.

The conflicts surrounding the archive’s manuscripts, many of which some scholars consider nonessential, derives from the overarching goal to bring all of Dickinson’s work to light. The institutions collection of works strived to skip on of the age old archival practices; “Archival work is about making fine discriminations to identify what is significant from a mass of data”. Instead, EDA makes available any and all of the poets work, perhaps in effort for scholars to better understand the very private poet and her life of solitude. In that approach, it must have been conceivably easier for the process of archiving these works, documents, and manuscripts. It has been observed in the past, a universal philosophic problem  in the “underpinnings of both library and archival collection and cataloging practices”. In many cases, the difficulties in archiving are rooted in the process of determining how and what to acquire, preserve, and catalog. It is possible that the EDA project portrays a newer approach to scholarly archives. In considering Marlene Manoff’s journal, Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, and the section on Implications for Future Research, perhaps EDA falls under this archival discourse about the changes in knowledge-making practices. One argument from Manoff’s journal is that “open archives are a cornerstone of a free and informed society”.

“What if those manuscripts were the very ones Dickinson hesitated to publish in her own lifetime, or — in bursts of cheerful immodesty — delivered to friends with fresh gingerbread or a bouquet of flowers? What if that archive revealed, in every variant, all of her known poems? And what if it showed the world how her handwriting began to slope and sprawl as she got older, and that she sometimes wrote poems on old bills, paper bags, or the backs of envelopes?”

While we will never have those questions answered from the renowned poet herself, one can hope she might appreciate the role she has played in the modernization of archives.  Emily Dickinson was a reclusive person and a poet that found inspiration from the confines of her home. Things have changed for Dickinson, while she was once isolated from the outside, her work’s now available to the world. The article released by the Harvard Gazette explains, “It’s that enduring drive to know Dickinson better that the EDA is trying to capture.”  In Manoff’s journal, “despite their limitations, we cling to archival materials in the hope of somehow connecting to a past we can never fully know” (p. 17).

 

Sources:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/10/the-digital-dickinson/

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/23/harvard-amherst-dickinson-archives/#

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/books/enigmatic-dickinson-revealed-online.html?_r=1&

Dickinson, Emily. Final harvest: Emily Dickinson’s poems. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.

Manoff, Marlene. “Theories Of The Archive From Across The Disciplines.”portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9-25.

 

 

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin outlined the ways in which the technologies of photography and (especially) film had transformed the production and culture of art. Mechanical reproduction of objects lead to the loss of the “aura” of unique objects, art became severed from its ritualized “cult” tradition, and film, with its astounding capacity for camera trickery, was creating a new mass audience of “absent-minded” critics. One area of mechanical reproduction noticeably absent from Benjamin’s discussion, however, is that of sound or musical recording.
Musical records (vinyl) were certainly prevalent in mass culture by the time Benjamin was writing in the 1930s. Like the mediums in discussion, records became an embodiment of what he called “the work of art designed for reproducibility.” He gives the example of the photographic negative, from which an unlimited number of prints could be made. For Benjamin, artistic production in this sense marks the loss of “authenticity” as an applicable criterion; as he says, it would make no sense to ask for the “authentic” print of a photograph. His conclusion is that this loss also signifies a total reversal of the function of art, where “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” But to return to the record (and my focus of discussion, the record collector), the terms “authenticity” and “ritual” are striking. In the parlance of the music obsessed of the early 21st century, the reproducible form of the record is equated with “authenticity”, and its modes of use tied to something resembling “ritual.”
In 2013, music as it is commonly experienced by listeners often has no material substance, it is another file to be downloaded from the internet at the click of a button, to be uploaded to an iphone later. Images associated with songs or albums are tiny and inconsequential. And yet there remains a section of the population for whom vinyl (and to a lesser extent other physical forms like tape) remains the most pure and true embodiment of musical transmission.
The UK-based music journalist/blogger Matt Ingram, who wrote online under the Woebot moniker, is a great example of this record collector mentality, at least to a certain crowd. From 2003 to 2008, he blogged about his lifelong journey with music, starting from his time as a teenage postpunk fan, to discovering dance music like early house, UK hardcore, breakbeat jungle, garage, and later grime, while also exploring earlier musics like dub reggae, jazz, krautrock, early electronic music, 60s English folk, prog, and other genres along the way. In all of his blog posts, he would catalog and share his impressions of LPs from disparate genres, lovingly uploading album cover images and information, while also sharing personal recollections of finding albums. He also sought to create an alternate canon, a response to the general popular music taste-making where only certain names make it into the classic rock or hip-hop “Archive.” In 2005 he posted a list of what he considered to be the 100 greatest records ever, using a trite list convention borrowed from magazines to showcase music brilliant and sometimes overlooked, a list of unseen or forgotten music currents.
As a side note, after Ingram stopped blogging, all of the written online content (and a fantastic but short-lived online “TV” show) he had created disappeared from the internet, another casualty of digital resources not being preserved. Finally in January 2013, all of his writing as Woebot was organized as a huge digital archive available for download as an ebook called The Big Book of Woe.
For Ingram records, already material documents of musical expression, became re-inscribed with personal history. The “aura” that Benjamin bemoaned the loss of seemed to be re-instated, both through the process of “digging” to find records, ie the search for unique and rare items, but also through the personal significance these particular items gained (even if they were reproductions). Ingram, for example, swore that his copy of Manuel Goettsching’s 1984 release “E2-E4,” had magical properties other copies didn’t have. As a more practical example, Detroit producer/DJ Theo Parrish had claimed to have records that “smell like 1967,” again drawing a connection between a record’s material being and its historical substance. On his blog, Ingram never uploaded mp3s or streamed music, perhaps both a nod to respecting the rights of musicians to be paid for their work, but also not so subtly suggesting that the true or “authentic” way for enjoying music was to seek it out and have an experience. In the end, one came away with the sense that Woebot wasn’t exactly a music blog, but a blog about a lifetime of living with music.
Might Benjamin have argued against this “aura” of records? He warned against the idea that film actors have auras, saying this had been replaced by the machinery of Hollywood hype and glamour, exterior to movies themselves. But in the case of the type of record collector being discussed here, much of the music was made or found in relative obscurity, or at least by people far from the kind of obsession with celebrity associated with film. A better argument could be made that it is simply another symptom of late capitalism, perhaps a fetishization of the rare or obscure for commodity value. But this overlooks the role record collection can play in personal and collective experience, which is maybe where the role of the idea of the “ritual” comes in.
Theo Parrish (aforementioned producer and DJ) has argued tirelessly in interviews for the superiority of DJing with vinyl, saying that though someone could show up with a laptop or ipod with tens of thousands of songs on them, they are at a disadvantage to someone with a more limited selection of records, who knows those records intimately through amassing them over a period of years and getting to know their ins and outs. This might seem a minor point, but the power of musical connection and identification becomes clearer when he describes a life-changing experience as a 15 year old. He was out at a party to hear underground Chicago House music legend Lil Louis, who unexpectedly play Stevie Wonder’s “As” at the beginning of his set. “I didn’t expect to hear this on the soundsystem with 1000-2000 other black kids… and that experience from my youth just touched me directly…” It was a song Parrish could directly connect to childhood memories of listening to records with his mother; Lil Louis’s record selection tapped into the archive of memory that much of his audience shared. As Parrish says, “I didn’t understand what a party was about… and a party in a lot of senses at that point in Chicago was bridging the gap between where you knew safety was – home- to a communal experience. And this song did it.” Unlike the movie audiences of Benjamin’s movie house, absorbing what they saw on the screen into themselves, this type of group dynamic (created by an individual selecting records from a personal collection) created unrepeatable moments where the audience was both absorbed into the experience and absorbing it. People who were at events like this often ascribed a spiritual or religious quality to their experience, precisely that which Benjamin seemed to think had been lost.
Writing in 1936 as a German Jewish exile, Benjamin was amazingly prescient not just about the state of reproduction leading to the coming war, but to the culture of audience as critics we now live in. Anyone with access to a computer can write or share opinions, no matter how mindless. But hopefully looking through the lens of records and music obsession can show that art can serve as more than just a function of politics, and that archived or collected memories can create new meaningful experiences.

References
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Andy Blunden (UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, 1998).
“Woebot’s ‘The 100 Greatest Records Ever,’” accessed October 23, 2014. http://rateyourmusic.com/list/funks/woebots_the_100_greatest_records_ever__complete_/
“Theo Parrish,” accessed October 24, 2014. http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/theo-parrish–3-cheers-for-the-d