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.

See... everyone has a blog...

The ability to easily create and publish a personal blog might pose a unique problem for scholars of the future.  To this point in history, the majority of preserved written documents were published documents.  While publication is by no means a fail-safe of ensuring documents are culturally or intellectually significant (and also generates numerous other questions about what and who determines cultural significance), digital technologies have nearly eradicated the barrier to publication.  The results, from a historical perspective, should be interesting.  I discuss this potential problem in more detail in my “methodologies” section, but the summation is that anyone can publish anything, which eliminates any sort of hierarchical filter.  Whether this elimination of filters is “better” or “worse” is not an argument I’m interested in presenting, and the answer is surely “it depends.”  But the byproduct of eliminating hierarchical filters, regardless of any value judgments, is the archival documents with which interested parties review our current cultural moment will be different.

An example which interests me is a personal blog called “Reshaped Jakie” (www.reshapedjackie.com).  Reshaped Jackie is a blog written by a Georgia woman who is recording her experiences following a diet program called Reshape the Nation.  The content is provides is not as significant as the archivization of its content.  Because of the Internet, a single person’s personal interaction with a diet program that may or may not (and probably not) exist in 50 years, is available and retained in the cultural archive.  This artifact Jackie is creating — a constant recording of a single person’s interaction with a diet program of the early 21st century — is an artifact that, in any historical moment prior to the digital age, would very likely not have been published, and probably not even have been recorded.

And Reshaped Jackie is only one example of thousands — maybe millions — of personal publications.  These blogs produce a lot of published and archived content.  How will scholars sift through the archives of the digital age?

For as much as Digital Textuality discusses the concept of the “Internet as a Digital Archive of Human Culture,” it is important to remember that people are already archiving the Internet.  The best example is the Internet Archive, which allows users to view past versions of websites.

The fact that an archive is archiving the Internet does not contradict the idea of the Internet itself being an archive.  For example, any archive that exists within a larger library is, itself, a sort of nested archive.  The Internet Archive is interesting, however, because it is an archive that exists within the archive it is archiving — the Internet Archive is a website.  The Internet Archive underscores Derrida’s pronunciation that “The archivization [process] produces as much as it records the event.”

Fans existed before the Internet.  Sports fans existed.  Music fans existed.  Fans of any entertainment culture existed.  But before the Internet, how were those cultures cataloged and preserved?  They were cataloged in historical perspective.  For example, a simple search of the words “Baseball,” “Fan,” and “History” in the catalog of the Library of Congress reveals this form of record keeping.  See the results here.

Records of fandom from generations prior to the Digital age are generally secondary.  They feature books like Fred Stein’s History of the Baseball Fan and Donald Dewey’s 10th Man: The Fan in Baseball History. While books such as these rely on historical materials, they are selections of the cultural archives represented by the fan-groups.  They are removed from the contexts in which they were created and edited and collated to fit the agenda of the author.

Some physical archives of fandom exist.  For example, the Duke University Archives retains a collection of information on Krzyzewskiville, a fan-inhabited “tent city” populated during the winter as a line for admission to campus basketball games.  These archives, however, are mostly historical archives and records of events.  They do not preserve the interactions among fans, and this is the primary distinction between the digital archivization of fandom and those archives of fan cultures that preceded it.  For fan cultures, digital technologies archive the first-hand interactions of fans.

The first example is one with which I am personally familiar (and admittedly biased toward, as a fan myself), called the Duke Basketball Report (www.dukebasketballreport.com).  The Duke Basketball Report (DBR), is a fan-operated site designed to provide information about and a forum of discussion for, primarily, the Duke Men’s Basketball program, with a secondary emphasis on all Duke University sports.   The DBR exists in an interesting space within the dynamic between popular entity and the fans who support it.  Duke University has a sanctioned, University-operated athletic website, www.GoDuke.com, as well as a men’s basketball program-operated website, www.DukeBluePlanet.com.  DBR, however, is an independent and fan-run website, meaning its existence is a product of Duke Basketball’s fans.  Could DBR have existed before the Internet?  Certainly not in the form in which it currently exists.  Not in the sense that it could not exist as a website, which, without the Internet, it obviously could not exist.  However, without the Internet, the Duke Basketball Report could not have existed as a daily updated repository of globally produced information on Duke Basketball, produced by people unaffiliated with the program itself, and accessible anywhere in the world by anyone with an Internet connection.  The Internet created this archive of Duke Basketbal information as well as this archive of Duke Basketball fandom.

In addition to the content linked to and regularly produced by the editors of the Duke Basketball Report themselves, DBR also has a common feature on many fan sites, and websites and general, known as a forum.  Forums serve as a sort of online messaging system in which users can add their own thoughts and insights on site-related (or sometimes unrelated) topics.  At current count (December 16, 2009), the DBR forums features 14,168 discussiong “threads” containing a total of 325,241 posts.  That’s a lot of fan conversations.  And while those conversations (or similar ones) might have existed regardless of the Internet and the Duke Basketball Report, the Internet has archived and preserved them.

I offer the Duke Basketball Report as only one example of thousands of fan websites, with more being created daily.  Fan websites exist for nearly every major sporting team, as well as for any number of other organizations and activities, from bands (www.beatlesfans.com) to fictional characters (www.mugglenet.com).  The Internet, regardless of whether or not it creates the fans or the cultural content those fans produce, is responsible for the archivization and preservation of that cultural content, enabling the Internet to represent an archive of human cultural activities that had, previously, a limited archivization, if any archivization at all.

In the introduction to Jacques Derrida’s printed lectures on the concept of archives, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Derrida offers a tantalizing hypothetical. He wonders how the discipline of psychoanalysis might have been born in the crucible of contemporary digital cultures. Derrida says:

One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail.

(16)

Derrida laments that while he “would have liked to devote [his] whole lecture to this retrospective science fiction,” the time and space allowed him in his medium of dissemination – a public lecture limiting in a way Derrida describes as “the still archaic organization of our colloquia” – placed on him unhelpful and artificial constraints. Instead of expanding, in detail, on his hypothetical, as he desires, Derrida instead offers only a few brief thoughts before continuing his lecture, suggesting that:

This archival earthquake would not have limited its effect to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis.  It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events.  This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been.  No, 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.

(16-17)

For Derrida, digital technologies would have reshaped the discipline of psychoanalysis’s entire development.  These technologies would have done more than simply change the way the history of psychoanalysis was recorded; they would have altered the fundamental ways in which psychoanalysis existed.

This project, Digital Textuality, accepts Derrida’s pronunciation that digital technologies would have changed the history of psychoanalysis.  In accepting that history, it also accepts (and expects) that these same technologies have altered the developments of all cultural activities.  This altered development creates an unanswerable but intriguing question.  In the same way Derrida wonders how psychoanalysis would have developed differently in a digital age, this project wonders how cultural events would have developed differently in a non-digital age.  While this question cannot be answered, it does emphasize Derrida’s final pronunciation on the subject of technology and archives.  It underscores the claim that, “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.”  No, archivable content cannot be re-imagined in the ways it might have developed before the digital age; however, the new technical structures of archiving made available as a result of the digital age have enabled a “coming into existence” of cultural production and a “relationship to the future” that, prior to the digital age, could not have existed.

While Derrida, in his lectures, did not have the time or space to expound on the influences of digital technologies in archives, I do (thanks, in part, to these very digital technologies helping this project come “into existence”).  In particular, this project will unpack Derrida’s final suggestion about how the technical structure of the archives facilitates its archived content’s coming into existence, as well as how these technical structures preserve that content for the future.  The new technical structures available have fashioned a new kind of archives — digital archives — and these digital archives achieve a kind of cultural archivization never before available.  Digital archives have produced and are producing a unique and unprecedented cultural recordation, making the Internet a digital archive of human culture.