BigShinyThing

A recent essay by Grant McKracken argues that digital photography, enhanced by sound recording, geotagging and folksonomies, will transform the intimate, ill-remembered ‘Kodak moment’ from a blurry family heirloom, to key documentation of our fragmented identities:

[...] there is a deeper, more pressing value add here that is not much talked about. As change increases and dynamism quickens, individuals will need to have archival data for personal and practical reasons. There was a point in my life when it was possible to say that I had changed jobs, cities, addresses, relationships or perspectives once every six months. (I know this seems preposterous but I think if you sit down and do a “identity chronology” of your own you will see this number or something like it.) This is an awful lot of water under the bridge. The task of reconstruction is now, well, daunting. What would I give for 10 perfectly documented photos for each of those 6 month periods?

Digital ‘arm-chair anthropology’ (McKracken’s term) is in the air at the moment. A much-quoted recent posting elsewhere on the archaeological benefits of the Wikipedia points out that

The Wikipedia is the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time.

Viewed in this light, when the Wikipedia is “inaccurate” due to bias or limited understanding rather than simple error, it becomes more interesting because it is inaccurate. Looked at from this perspective, the word “inaccurate” ceases to have any meaning, because the Wikipedia is being used to determine how we see the world, and not whether that view is “accurate” in any empirical sense. In this light, the more accurate an entry is, the less useful and interesting it becomes. And, of course, what those that contribute to a given entry have found to be worth including is most interesting of all. [...]

Since the Wikipedia exists in many non-identical, language-based independent editions, each of which is constantly changing, all of the editions taken together provide a real-time record of not only how our perception of ourselves morphs over time, but how that perception differs culturally around the world as well.

With personal anthropology explicitly in mind, The BBC’s prototype The Time When site enables the public to hook memorable personal events into a collaborative, RSS-able ‘digital oral history’. And of course, there’s the granddaddy of all online archaeological tools — Archive.Org’s Wayback Machine.

Seems that it’s taken the first ten years of the popular Web for people to realise that the digital world isn’t an ephemeral, weightless Now, but another medium on which history — personal and public — inscribes its long shadow. For future anthropologists, arm-chair or otherwise, the beauty and challenge of the early Digital Age technologies will be in the rich access they provide to our individual little worlds as they stood shortly after the ‘End of History’. Dig deep.

[A footnote: maybe the zeitgeisty fascination with personal timelines is the logical progression of what we've been calling NOWstalgia. We have increasingly easy long-tail access to the media that soundtracks the intimate histories of our generation. It's only natural that we desire to string those remembered jewels on the narrative threads of our own stories. Give it a year and literary agents will be optioning personal-timeline memoirs with the same zest currently reserved for this week's star sex-blogger or 'blogging copper'. Just you wait.]