Emergent Archives
It’s fascinating to think about how much we give to the internet, and sometimes, how much it gives back. In my mind, there is a fairly direct historical connection between self-archiving practices from a couple of decades ago (keeping a diary, making photo albums, writing letters, etc.), to all the more recent variations on this idea (status updates, tweets, photo feeds, etc.). The difference is arguably in how much of the background work is taken care of for us, and the fact that we now make so much of this information public or semi-public. While many have explored the implications of this for privacy, security, and surveillance, there is another aspect that gets less attention: the automatic creation of our own archives.
