Week V: Archives and Archive Fever

In a society that has become fascinated with immediacy and the here and now, the past exists almost as an afterthought. It is strange to think just how much the information we do choose to archive away can have a wider social impact. Archives have the power to influence how we interpret history, what values are upheld, how people view others and themselves. Therefore archives can dictate culture.

The role of archives is to provide structure to our past experiences, which therefore has some influence on present and future actions. The importance of archives can be seen in multiple ways. For example, e-mail, chat logs, bank statements all make the lives of individuals easier, while recorded history and law assist with governing society. Thus archives can be traced back to any aspect of everyday life and our wider world.

 In the diagram above, I have attempted to explore some of these connections by applying the mindmap-like structure that was used last week to explore assemblages and actor-network theory. While there are similarities, I’ve also decided to include network nodes such as time, past and present, which don’t fall neatly into either the human or non-human actant category.

“Archive fever” refers to the constant need to create more archives in order to document information, history and memories. In our contemporary technological landscape we are presented with countless ways to archive every aspect of our lives; each device has a separate archive, online accounts archive customer information, emails have a backlog, social media platforms broadcast and store away evidence of different activities, Google makes note of web searches for advertising opportunities, etc. There is an archive for virtually anything.

With so many ways to document the self, it is possible that playing around with so many archives can have an adverse effect on an individual’s self-awareness. This could result in choosing to store away content that is flattering or neglecting to record undesirable content, warping our perception. Thus, I don’t believe that archives and the subject being archived are one and the same. Each archive serves a different purpose and each individual or organisational body is more than the sum of its recorded parts.