My Great Ghost “Glass Machine” from SPH on Vimeo.

via boingboing

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A really popular thing among my friends on Instagram is to take pictures of newspaper and tabloid bills, especially if they’re funny or insane (which they usually are). This morning it was probably around 5 or 6 pics in a row in my feed of different magazine covers. It struck me that what is going on here is collective digital archiving. If I was a researcher from the future, I would think these images quite valuable, not only because you can find every front page the way you do when going to a physical archive, looking through micro films, but also in the way you can see why they are chosen and what they say about a given time and space historically. These type of micro themes are potential goldmines from a myriad of perspectives and approaches, but might also be a great way for archives (such as The Royal Library who collects one copy of every single issue) to precisely crowdsource digital archiving when money is an issue (which it always is).

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Some digital archives are almost like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter, they pop up whenever there is a need for them, but they also have to be found and organised by those who see their value and can make sense of the data.

For memory institutions, this should be of great importance for a number of social and cultural reasons. Collect them, they’re right there.

Polaroid Cacher:

The Polaroid Cacher is a camera that allows you to take traditional instant pictures of your digital experiences. It’s an ambient device, part physical and part digital, meant to address the fleeting nature of online interactions.

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We believe that our daily online activity –conversations, discoveries, games– is as meaningful as our activity in the physical world and, as such, should be preserved the same way we try to capture every important moment in our life. Especially because most of this experiences will be soon forgotten, lost under layers of information, databases and outdated services.

Given the powerful association of instant photography with memories, people and nostalgia –rather than with photographic quality– we designed our camera as a fictional Polaroid product. One that captures digital media in a traditional analog format, as means to create tangible, durable mementos of our digital life.

via prostheticknowledge

Will Self:

But the world of photo-messaging and Facebook, of YouTube and Google, is not one defined by the manipulation of the masses alone – rather, it is conjured up by the digitations of the great mass of individuals.

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In this brave old world, I can employ a few keystrokes and so correlate my personal recollection of what was happening on that day, at that very hour, with public events in Birmingham, Bratislava or Beijing.

Because of this, it seems to me that in the past decade or so, the half-life of our memories has become artificially extended. Instead of curling photographs and yellowing newspapers, we are possessed of a shiny and permanent now, one we flit-click about and so delude ourselves as to our own eternal youth – until, that is, we look down at the wrinkled and liver-spotted hands that rest on the keyboard.

via berfrois

Michelle Lhooq on the Creators Project:

Using Unicode characters, Glitchr tinkers with back-end coding to turn his profile page into an interactive minefield: clicking on certain links results in a series of unexpected glitches. Facebook’s clean lines explode into disconcerting chaos without warning.

X on Berfrois:

Everything, everything about our loss is recorded now. Nothing is secret.

Joanne McNeil on Rhizome:

Carlo Zanni’s “Self Portrait with Dog” (2008) and “Self Portrait with Friends”(2012) both include the artist captured in Google Street View.

MrTeacup:

Identity is caught up in the mirror-gaze of the Other, and flips between recognition and misrecognition. Although we might object to restrictive recognition by others, in the exact moment when we feel most free of it, we are secretly dependent on it.

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“You are who your last dozen tweets say you are,” says Kottke, but I don’t really buy this. I think Matt Haughey’s essay makes clear that the primary problem, the obstacle to self-reinvention on Facebook, is the people who are on Facebook: your family, your high school or college friends, colleagues from old jobs and so on. Facebook collects history mostly as a side effect of its position as the dominant medium of online social connection, not because of any special effort to constrain users’ freedom to reinvent themselves.

via new-aesthetic

Rob Horning:

The problem is not that Facebook exposes how we’ve changed or that identity is performative in general; the problem is the searchable archive. It’s that Facebook stores details about our identity performance as decontextualized information. It encourages the idea that identity isn’t embedded in context but is strictly a matter of data. This makes us vulnerable to having our identities “remixed” by anyone who can access the identity information about us and verify we are connected to it somehow. It’s as though social media lets people rewrite your diary, forcing you to correct the record with further additions, which can be further remixed — possibly by enemies, possibly by bots or algorithms — until the undermining becomes virtually instantaneous. Then identity becomes a matter of continually shouting your current version of yourself in every possible medium to counter the competing versions.