Choose your buzzword: Social Networking; New Media; Web 2.0… the terminology might vary from person to person, and it might change daily, with entrepreneurial techies trying to “cash in” on the newest Internet-based fads, but the result for the archive of the Internet is a publication of the personal archivization process. But first, a caveat. An easy mistake (and, admittedly, the mistake of my own first attempt at this post) is to suggest the Internet and online processes make personal archivization of one’s own life easier and more common. Such a suggestion would misrepresent the concept of archives. People have, for centuries, been archiving themselves and their lives. What is a scrapbook if not an archive? What is a personal journal if not an archive? Even a house, as it collects the objects and marks of interactions from its tenants, becomes a sort of archive of those who have inhabited it. The tools of the digital age are not creating new cultural processes — they are providing new mediums in which those processes exist. Flikr provides a sort of online scrapbook. A blog is a form of online journal. The phrase “digital house” even serves as a useful metaphor for the ways in which users interact with their personal computers — we collect artifacts of our digital lives on them, we make them messy, and we occasionally clean them, but they will always show traces of our use.
No, social networks are not unique in their ability to collect artifacts of a person’s life. Nor do social networking websites make creating a personal archive easy. Yes, for people familiar with a site like Flickr, for example, Flikr offers “less messy” way to arrange and store photos, but is it easier to use Flickr than, for example, keeping a shoe box filled with pictures? Probably not. Using Flikr requires knowledge of personal computers, knowledge of the the web browser, knowing how to navigate the site itself, and knowledge about how to upload pictures from a camera (or other device) onto the site. In contrast, keeping pictures in a shoe box requires, well, dumping them into a shoe box.
No, digital technologies have not made archiving one’s life easier. What digital technologies have done is simplified the processes of self publishing and distributing one’s personal archive. The most prominent contemporary example of this kind of social networking tool is Facebook. According to the operators of Facebook, “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet” (1). Facebook has the right perspective on the technology they provide. Their emphasis is not on the ability to present yourself, but instead, they emphasize the ability to share — publicize — that information.
As a tool of the cultural archive that is the Internet, Facebook allows an unprecedented ability to publicize and distribute one’s personal archive. Facebook, as of this posting, lists 6,424,889 accounts, meaning Facebook offers nearly six and a half million personal archives. Archives of those people’s lives would have existed regardless of the Internet, but the digital versions of them, and the accessibility those digital versions provide, are a unique feature of the medium in which they exist.
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