“Archive”
Part 1:
Katherine D. Harris (2016) begins her argument on the expanding definition of “archive” and how online archives offer digital storage beyond the physical capabilities of a library, or surrogates. Despite making metanarratives accessible to everyone in the endless amount of digital space, this new archive, she argues, has potential for “contamination” as we continue to obsess over archiving every moment, often losing sight of the meaningful works truly worth preserving.
The author worries about the current messiness associated with the physical and digital archiving process for cultural records, and is particularly concerned with important information missing due to the constant influx of information in our information society. Harris uses Wikipedia as an example of a modern-day digital archive, and how its users try to document every thing happening in the world, resulting in a messy plethora of archived content. Harris warns that literary works and artifacts not archived in the digital spaces will be forgotten and digital copies of print books are essential to preserve the literary mastery. She cites some important researchers, such as Patrick Leary, who similarly argues that the works inaccessible through the internet will be forgotten, despite their cultural significance.She worries that genuine and prestigious works of art, the literary canons, will be replaced by reckless archives of meaningless literature, referred to as “vulgar misuse” (p. 48). Parallel to Harris’s argument, she describes Derrida’s concept of “Archive Fever”, where our constant digital archiving has resulted in the diminishing importance and remembrance of old documents in order to make room for the new ones.
Part 2:
Similar to the digital archive, our concepts of ourselves are prone to contamination, along with our relationships in the digital era. Compared to the constant replacement of old documents with new ones, we are constantly arching old pictures and posts on platforms such as Instagram, in efforts to portray ourselves in a particular way. This is a result of, according to Sherry Turkle, our need for control.
Turkle’s TedTalk, “Connected, but alone?” compares to the idea that despite the seemingly infinite amount of information in the digital archives, it is useless if the literary canons are hidden beneath it all. Despite the seemingly infinite social media platforms to connect with one another, these interactions are meaningless if they lack the intimacy of face-to-face conversation. In our attempts to be in control of our image and relationships, we have begun to lose the authenticity of human communication, as we are losing works of art to “archive fever”.
Similar to how traditional, literary canons are continuously drowned by materialistic content in the digital archives, and are eventually forgotten about, “An ethics of networked caring within young people’s everyday lives” argues how caring for others has become replaced by excessive individualism and a lack of intimacy. Additionally, “My So Called Instagram Life” shows that our relationships are prone to contamination, just as our archives are. We become obsessed with “branding” ourselves, losing our true personas in the process, just as we are obsessed with archiving every moment, losing literary masterpieces in the rush of information.
