“The digital audience wants different things,” and according to a recent article Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi Is the Future of E-Books on Wired.com, they want fiction. There has been a large push for fiction titles since e-books became popular. One explanation is that the anonymity of e-readers allows people to be more comfortable reading strange books on their commute [e.g., Fifty Shades of Grey (which was originally self-published)] or that fiction lends itself to episodic books that leave the reader wanting to see what happens next as soon as possible. [2. McMillan, G. (2013, June 26). “Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi is the Future of E-Books.” Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/digital-publishing-genre-fiction/all/1] But, maybe digital fiction is popular because it’s being contrasted against the unpopularity of digital non-fiction. Perhaps this is caused by the communal consensus that digital publications are not as trustworthy or authoritative as print.

Is something digital legitimate? It’s easier to copy and share, which is positive because it lowers the threshold to dispersing information. But, at the same time, anyone can post his or her thoughts online in a second, visible to anyone that’s willing to look. Who are these people? Is what they’re saying valid? Supported? We’ve lost the publisher’s role as gatekeeper. They used to be the largest determiner of what was worth printing and distributing. As Derrida put it in his book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression:

“Why detain you with these worn-out stories? Why this wasted time? Why archive this? Why these investments in paper, in ink, in character? Why mobilize so much space and so much work, so much typographic composition? Does this merit printing?”  [3. Derrida, J. & Prenowitz, E. (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics 25(2): 13]

The logic would follow that if the weight of the decision to publish something is lessened by not having to invest the time and money in printing, less time and thought would be spent determining what is worth printing. Though large firms still manage most e-book publishing, these firms are offering services for individual authors and likely aren’t vetting every title that goes through their system. [4. “Self Publishing Sees Triple Digit Growth Since 2007.” PublishersWeekly.com. (2012, October 24). http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/54482-self-publishing-sees-triple-digit-growth-since-2007.html] The risks of publishing digitally are lower and the returns on successes higher; this encourages publishers to not only take chances on new writers and ideas, but also to put books into the world with less thoughtfulness.

Maybe the fact that fiction has taken off in digital form is because we don’t have to trust it. The author’s opinion doesn’t have to be supported; there are no footnotes to link to or glossary of terms to reference; and it doesn’t matter if the publisher actually screened the book or not. All that matters is if the writing is engaging enough and the right subject matter for the reader’s taste.

Another subconscious concern that may be driving consumers to continue buying non-fiction in print is archiving. There is a importance to non-fiction information and a feeling that it is more likely to be needed in the future. Readers want to ensure that they have the book on their shelf to reference later on, and, on a larger scale, to ensure that future generations can connect to past thoughts and determinations contained within. As Roy Rosenweig said, “Digital documents – precisely because they are in a new medium—have disrupted long-evolved systems of trust and authenticity, ownership, and preservation.” [5. Rosenzweig, R. (2003). “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” The American Historical Review 108(3): 743] Or, to put it more abruptly: “Digital Documents last forever—or five years, whichever comes first.” [6. Ibid. 740] Even in our own homes, we still want to ensure that factual information is kept around and we don’t fully trust digital media to do so. If your Kindle dies and all your fiction books are lost it is likely to be less upsetting than losing all of your non-fiction.

One possible upside of the ease of digital publishing is that it puts the power more into the hands of the readers. Not only do consumers push the publishers in certain directions based on their download statistics, but they can also share books that they like more easily. If  a book is interesting or important enough to share you can send a link quickly and without too much effort. If you recommend a book to someone and they don’t like it, it wont be thrown out or kept on a shelf forever, a file is just deleted, so the information flow can be stopped just as easily.

Maybe this how it will be determined which published materials to archive in the digital sphere: whatever lasts. Whatever is handed from person to person, device to device, is reformatted with each upgrade. If it makes it through the social/collective hand-me-down for , say, ten years then it’s important enough to know in the future. Kind of a throw-it-out-and-see-what-sticks approach to archiving, similar to the approach the publishers seem to be taking with their distribution: “Digital publishing also allows books to go to market much more quickly than printed books, and offers publishers the benefit of both rapid consumer feedback and the ability to adapt to reader response.” [7. McMillan, G. (2013, June 26). “Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi is the Future of E-Books.” Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/digital-publishing-genre-fiction/all/1]

But if that’s the case, that power is still limited to those that can access digital collections, which is likely causing a further increase in the economic gap of knowledge. If you don’t have an e-reader or an internet connection, you aren’t able to consume or share digital-only materials and your voice isn’t a part of the conversation. “When something is rare or limited to a select number of individuals, such as an educational degree or cultural artifact, it has effective symbolic capital and provides the holder with a degree of symbolic power.” [8. Leckie, G.J., Given, L.M. & Buschman, J.E. eds. (2010). Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from across the Disciplines. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited] So if the power of deciding what to publish moves more away from the publishers, it’s still moving to only a subsection of society, the section that can afford digital readers. Even though libraries now offer e-books to check out, very few of them also check out e-readers.

The popularity of digital publishing is increasing rapidly and encourages traditional publishers and self-publishers to try new things and allows them to receive consumer feedback faster, but readers don’t seem as eager to consume non-fiction text digitally and are favoring the fiction genres in digital form. Over time, as iPads and tablets become the norm, and more textbooks are distributed digitally, it’s safe to assume that non-fiction digital sales will increase. Digital writing will become more trustworthy and authentic as it becomes more normalized . It will be interesting to see how long it takes for non-fiction digital sales to catch up.

Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” expands the notion of what can be considered an archive, and assigns more power to the act of archiving. For him, the process of archiving an event leaves a trace on an exterior substrate. A mark is made on a substance; memory is made tangible. This leaving of a trace is called the “repetition” of the event. As he notes,

There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. [1. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (July 1, 1995): 14, doi:10.2307/465144.]

This repetition is by nature removed from the original event. The archive possesses a quality Derrida terms “spectral”: “…neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met…” [2. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 54.]

Yet at the same time it’s spectral, the way an event is repeated/archived is deeply linked to our understanding of that event. For Derrida, the archived form of the event ends up becoming an integral, inseparable part of it:

…the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media. [3. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 17.]

The act of or potential for archiving ends up influencing the event itself. But what about events that resist archiving, like certain kinds of performances?

Recently, the National Gallery of Art in Washington presented an exhibition on Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and as part of their web content they produced a video on the history of the dance company. Included were a mix of photographs of the original dancers, photographs of restored costumes, and videos of later recreations of several of the dances. Some of the earlier restagings were done by the Monaco-based branch of the Ballets Russes formed shortly after Diaghilev’s death, whereas others were staged by companies like the Joffrey Ballet in the 80s.

Traditional archival records (like photographs, costumes, and drawings) were probably used to construct these restagings, but the videos of the restagings themselves can also be considered part of “The Archive” of the Ballets Russes: in the absence of a video trace produced of the first performance of a dance, these videos become the most tangible trace of the whole performance.

But should these archives of the Ballets Russes become part of the Ballets Russes? Though any kind of change of medium of reproduction (like the photographing of a painting) can be understood to enact changes on the “event”, reproductions of performances seem to be especially spectral and those changes can be jarring. In the realm of performance art, an awareness of the changes that occur when an original performance is repeated led some artists beginning in the 1970s, like Vito Acconci, to prefer not to reperform pieces—to keep out archival accumulation. Maybe the “death drive” is a concern, reperformance in a way superimposing or causing the forgetting of the original piece. As Derrida says,

If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import here, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition… [4. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 51.]

This has come up in the context of the performance work of Marina Abramovic—for example in 2005 when she reperformed some of her own works as well as the works of others (including Acconci). On the other end of the spectrum there are artists like Tino Seghal, an artist who vigorously prohibits any kind of archiving of his work. No photographs and very little writing about his pieces is permitted: in the catalog of the exhibition documenta (13) held in Kassel in 2012, the page describing his work was completely missing, and his name only appeared in the table of contents and index.

In some cases the resistance to archiving is a conceptual aspect of the work, but even when it’s not it can be said that in general the ephemeral nature of dance performances and performance art makes them difficult to archive. Part of this must simply stem from the fact that a performance is temporal, and doesn’t necessarily become fixed into a tangible medium: it doesn’t easily leave a trace.

Online media and websites can also be understood this way, even though a website seems fairly tangible at first glance, and for a while even looks the same upon repeated viewings. But like a performance, websites are dynamic. In his essay, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”, Roy Rosenzweig points out that although it feels like we are drowning in digital documents, websites actually change or disappear rapidly. In an article on web archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Heather Slania also brings up this point, noting that it is difficult to capture websites built in Flash and sites that link to databases, “…meaning that the only documentation left might be a website’s mere existence.” [5. Slania, Heather. “Online Art Ephemera: Web Archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 118. doi:10.1086/669993.]

To illustrate this point, Slania includes an image of a flash website captured in a crawl done with Archive-It, which appears as a gray box. Of course, the image captured in that crawl is an archival trace, but as Slania says, it only testifies to the existence of the website. How useful is that kind of trace? In this case probably not terribly, but it brings up the point that just as the process of archiving shapes the event itself, so does the character of the archive (what kinds of traces are left) shape the kinds of questions researchers ask.

A recent effort to restore Douglas Davis’ “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”, an early example of Internet art, could provide a model for archiving web-based materials. Even though it was created less than 20 years ago, the site was already in need of restoration, which was undertaken by the Whitney in summer 2013. Problems like “link rot” (when hyperlinks no longer function since the site linked to has disappeared) arose, as did the question of whether to alter the code so that it functioned in modern browsers. Ultimately the team decided to present multiple versions of the site: a live version that works in modern browsers, the original site (with its broken code), and screenshots of what it looked like in Netscape (an old browser). The live version satisfies researchers who want to understand the interactive aspects of the original site, while the presence of the untouched original site, along with the residual broken hyperlinks left in the live version of the site, are a testament to the fragility of web structures—and to the challenges of archiving dynamic ephemera.

In “Search for The Great Community,” Dewey argues that democracy is not created by individuals acting in intelligent self-interest, or by “democratic” forms of governing (suffrage, elections, majority rule). Rather, it is created by individuals acting in relation to others, in a community, with the recognition that the community’s needs must be upheld. Communication between members of the community is the crucial tool furthering that recognition. Dewey suggests that knowledge is a function of association and communication.

Communication transmits the symbols and indicators of meaning. Derrida and Foucault posit that archives are a way to control the meaning of history by communicating that meaning. The symbols and indicators, in the archive context, are the classification systems, the taxonomies, the tools of knowledge organization. That is how the data or information in the archive is contextualized and presented to the world.

Destroying an archive, then, can appear to be a profoundly rational (but arguably misguided) political decision. Mali, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Poland, Yugoslavia, China, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Burma, the United States, Wales, Mexico and Guatemala, the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, Ancient Persia, Ancient China – the list of archives or libraries that have been destroyed by hostile political forces is truly extensive. Destroying the archives disrupts the intellectual habits of the community, creating the possibility of a societal “tabula rasa,” allowing new habits to be imposed. According to Dewey, though, the creation of a “tabula rasa” in order to permit the creation of a new order is “so impossible as to set at naught both the hope of buoyant revolutionaries and the timidity of scared conservatives.”

Dewey posits that when old habits, particularly of opinion, are thrown out, the first change that results is the disintegration of old beliefs and the substitution of “floating, volatile and accidentally snatched up opinions.” This is far from the ideal condition to harbor democracy. The political volatility of countries implicated in the “Arab Spring” may be, in part, related to the overthrowing of old habits of opinion.

Instead, Dewey suggests that freedom of social inquiry and freedom of distribution of its conclusions would be crucial conditions that would allow individuals to perceive the community context of knowledge. As Dewey puts it: “No [person] and no mind was ever emancipated merely by being left alone.” It is hard not to be reminded of our own political situation, with a vocal and obstreperous minority of Republicans arguing that democracy would be best served by government leaving its citizens alone. It may not be coincidence that there is overlap between Tea Party members and religious fundamentalists and climate change deniers. Fundamentalists often insist that the Bible be read literally, with no reference to historical context, prevailing social mores or current affairs. Climate change deniers ignore the weight of opinion in the scientific community. Each position prizes isolation of thought.

Dewey, writing in 1927, says that our ability to collect information has outrun our ability to inquire into and organize its results by placing them into their community context. In a presentation this year at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research highlighted that same concern when she pointed out that people are ill-informed of the ways in which “big data,” i.e. the wealth of data collected by monitoring of internet use and social media, is used to impinge on their rights. Crawford pointed to efforts by insurers to discover what health problems people research online to enable the insurer to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. She argues that a new legal right to “data due process” may be necessary to protect people from infringements on their right of privacy. The immense archive of information that is generated on the internet is being effectively used by commerce but is outrunning our ability to organize it in a community context, with appropriate protections.

One way to ensure that archives convey meaning that supports communities, and thus supports democracy, would be to make the classification systems more open, to allow different members of the community to say what they believe the meaning of the archive is. How this idea could be applied to the classification of internet-derived information remains to be seen.

Humans, though extraordinary, are curious creatures. Our behavior is a constant interest of study. Jacques Derrida is one of many who have attempted to make sense of the curious behavior humans engage in. Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression attempts to understand why humans archive. With the help of Freudian ideology, Derrida connects the need to archive to the three drives described by Freud; death, aggression and destruction. All three are very interesting but the death drive stands out because on all levels of life, death exists. It is intriguing that humans approach death very differently, yet we all archive it in some way or another. Death is the reason we archive, whether it is the fear of it, the anticipation of it or the aftermath of death. Culturally and religiously we approach death in various ways. What we archive is the choice of the individual and their cultural surroundings. Differences are seen in burial rituals, mourning rituals and even how the dead are represented later among the living. Do these personal archives help keep the dead as real as they were when they were alive or do they create this vague memory of a person we wanted to exist?

The way Derrida wants the reader to understand the death drive in relation to archives is that we archive because we fear being forgotten and archiving is our way of carrying over our memory after death. Memory is flawed, therefore when creating an archive we are destroying (destruction-drive) the truth of the event. This suggests that the deceased  person is remembered through their material belongings and since we choose what to keep and what to discard we have the power of manipulating the actual existence of that person which is essentially creating a new person all together. Our obsession with immortality is interesting but our ritual surrounding it is so bizarre that it recreates a new life rather than remembering one that already existed.

What stays and what goes is a question constantly being brought up in archival institutions but they usually have guidelines aiding archivists on how to sort through records. But what about the individual, how do they determine what stays and what goes, why not keep everything? Culturally we follow the norms of death rituals that pertain to our immediate social group but on a individual level we make deeper, more emotional choices in deciding what stays and what goes after the death of person..

David S. Kirk and Abigail Sellen attempt to make clear the behavior of individuals when faced with death in their study On Human Remains: Values and Practice in the Home Archiving of Cherished Objects. They determined that people collect and archive objects that had belonged to the deceased, were given by the deceased or are a remembrance of the deceased in order to support memories of the deceased. People chose to keep items such as jewelery, photos, clothing, furniture, paintings and home videos. Derrida would argue that memory despite any support material or not, given to it is flawed, the only truth is the experience itself. These items that we chose to keep are they supporting a memory or are the selected items strategically replacing the reality of the event and creating a new imagined one?

Would Derrida’s argument still hold true today? Video captures the event (although from a single perspective) it records the event in real time. Home video, for example can support a memory by providing the basic who, what, when, where, and why. What is witnessed in the home video can very easily be as real as the event itself though it is filmed from a single perspective it does capture some aspects of the cameraman’s experience. This footage for the individual is certainly supporting the memory instead of warping it, especially if the individual archiving the piece was in control of the camera during the time the video was shot. This type of exposure to the individual experience would be useful to researchers researching topics that involve the understanding of individuals in a family because it gives an opportunity to take a glimpse into the experiences of others.

On a broader level, do archives choose to keep selected records because they help support the factual events or do the selected records aid in creating a newly understood perspective on or of the event? Death of a person and the death of an event is essentially the same. Just as a person can warp their memory of a person by carefully selecting what to remember and what items to cherish, the archive can change the reality and facts of an event by selecting and providing a carefully selected assortment of records. The archivists may not even be aware of their tottering with reality but it is inevitable because humans attach emotions to events and experience. An archive dedicated to Presidential Pets is subject to the same distortion as an archive about the Holocaust. People associate emotions both negative and positive to events and experiences that they have personally experienced, ones that they have read about and ones they have imagined. These emotions sway their opinions on the matter allowing them to subconsciously make biased judgments on what items get to remain in the archive and what items get tossed.

Selecting items to help support a memory is impossible because what the items are actually supporting is the emotions attached to the memory. Regardless of whether the item accurately conveys an emotion attached to the event the emotion itself produces an inaccurate recall of the reality.

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Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”

“The primacy of the written word went into abeyance. And that uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly interwoven, vanished too. Things and words were to be separated from one another. The eye was thenceforth destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear.”
—Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966)

Foucault was writing about the “being of language” and the reorganization of culture in the classical world but he could have been describing the transition from silent to talking pictures, (or further, the ongoing change from analog to digital and the impact on accessing and assimilating information). There’s no doubt the written word is alive and well—just look at the amount of writing online—though it’s dwarfed by the amount and availability of still and moving images.

With a Foucauldian transitional moment in mind, (utilizing both eyes and ears), I’ve picked a few commercially produced movies from the 1950s to today which touch on political and social issues such as the gathering and disseminating of information, the need and relevance for books, libraries, and archives, free access of information, the power of the state, (and individuals who challenge it), the needs of society versus the individual, totalitarianism and the toll on those in it, and the nature of privacy and surveillance and the costs to society.

Storm Center (1956), a bit of a pot-boiler, is nonetheless an interesting look into McCarthy era America. As one of the first movies, (albeit post-McCarthy), to examine it overtly, it’s the story of a small town librarian standing up against the banning of books in her library. Though somewhat simplistic it puts forth a powerful argument against censorship and state control of information. In the scene below the librarian argues before the city council that there are a number of books on the shelves that she doesn’t agree with, (she uses Mein Kampf as her example), and the council is almost swayed until one of them uses information, (one assumes from illegal government surveillance), that she once belonged to organizations that were found to be Communist fronts to destroy her. Though not subtle, the issues of individual rights in a democratic society, the role of libraries, the needs of access of information are all touched upon.

The Time Machine (1960), based on the novel by H. G. Wells, tells the story of a man from Victorian England who travels to the future in the device of the title. Filled with cold war allusions of what the future would bring—in one fantastic sequence showing him travelling through time as he sees his street changing culminating in a nuclear holocaust—he ends up in the distant future where mankind has developed into two races, one who live above ground and the other below. Leading up to the scene below he asks the people who live above about their books. He’s taken to an ancient library where he finds that they have been left to decay and turn to dust. He’s shown “talking rings” that these people spin for pleasure but have no understanding of what they are saying. Here we are confronted with a conundrum: What’s the point of an archive if no one is left to understand it?

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) takes a look at a dystopian society that has outlawed books in an oppressive future. Based on a novel by Ray Bradbury, the government uses an armed force known as “firemen” to set rather than put out fires in the pursuit of destroying all books. They can search anyone, anywhere, at any time in the name of eradicating books and the anti-social behavior they are thought to cause. One of these firemen begins to question his task after he starts saving and reading the books he’s supposed to burn. Used here as a metaphor for individuality, books become powerful symbols for personal liberty and the need to question accepted norms. The issues of privacy, surveillance, and perverse manipulation through the use of mass media is evident in the clip below when the fireman’s wife has a date with her television.

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

Which brings me to the new film The Fifth Estate (2013). Covering the conflicting needs of established and new media, this is the story of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange through the eyes of a former associate. From the opening credits (a two-minute montage covering the history of information gathering), the film brings up some fascinating points about the evolving nature of journalism. Is publishing and posting online with no editing or oversight justified? And is there’s any responsibility that goes along with that? It also touches on the issues of privacy, surveillance, the need, (if any), for authoritative sources, and the nature of information organization on the Internet. Below is a clip showing the sniping between traditional journalists from The Guardian and the new media equation embodied by Wikileaks. As a commercial movie with an eye toward reaching a wide audience it poses these questions with no definitive answers. At this transitional moment even the awareness of these issues takes on enormous importance.