Archives

To be perfectly honest I found it hard to fully grasp the concept of archive fever. I think it has to do with an obsession or fixation on archives and what can be recorded, a kind of nostalgia. Having information on times and events.
What I did find interesting however was Matthew Ogle discussed, 'The Memory', in his Archive Fever, A love letter to the post real-time web. He states, 'By providing us with new ways to share what we're doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We've all been so distracted by the now that we've hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We've all become accidental archivists; our our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future.' I like how Ogle phrases this point and I feel it in my own anxieties which sprout from digital archives. For example, I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald sometime last year about Facebook tracking its users web history even if they don't have their Facebook account open, if they are on the same browser that they use for Facebook, they actions are being archived by Facebook. For instance, I use Firefox so whenever I have firefox running, Facebook is archiving everything I do. Although the web is doing this anyway, archiving my every action, even the action of writing this blog, Facebook sells their archives to corporations for millions of dollars. So one action, lets say of writing this blog, has been archived in my web history, Facebook, and possibly multiple organisations archives for commercia purposes, reating back to what Ogle describes as being 'accidental archivists'. I particularly like the way he describes this as a comet tail of personal history, all linked to me, the accidental archivist, who thrusts my comet relentlessly forward, leaving a larger tail everyday.

This kind of 'burgeoning digital archives', as Ogle puts it, scares me at times. It reminds me of our studies in first year, about 'the doubling of place', whereas such a private action, a google search, something not even mediated by a social networking platform, could be archived in hundreds of different places, for countless people to see.. who knows where in the world my information could be archived, and it all would have originated from my desk in my room.