Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition 1138639370, 9781138639379

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DIGITAL MEMORY STUDIES

Digital media, networks and archives reimagine and revitalize individual, social and cultural memory but they also ensnare it, bringing it under new forms of control. Understanding these paradoxical conditions of remembering and forgetting through today’s technologies needs bold interdisciplinary interventions. Digital Memory Studies seizes this challenge and pioneers an agenda that interrogates concepts, theories and histories of media and memory studies, to map a holistic vision for the study of the digital remaking of memory. Through the lenses of connectivity, archaeology, economy, and archive, contributors illuminate the uses and abuses of the digital past via an array of media and topics, including television, videogames and social media, and memory institutions, network politics and the digital afterlife. Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal of Memory Studies, founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies and founding Co-Editor of the Routledge book series Media, War & Security. He is also founding Editor of the forthcoming Routledge Focus on Digital Culture series. @andrewhoskins. http://brokenmedia.net.

DIGITAL MEMORY STUDIES Media Pasts in Transition

Edited by Andrew Hoskins

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Andrew Hoskins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hoskins, Andrew, 1967– editor. Title: Digital memory studies : media pasts in transition / edited by Andrew Hoskins. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2017002790 | ISBN 9781138639379 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138639386 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media—Social aspects. | Digital media—Social aspects. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC HM1206 .D53 2017 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002790 ISBN: 978-1-138-63937-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-63938-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-63723-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Contributor biographies 1 The restless past: an introduction to digital memory and media Andrew Hoskins

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1

SECTION 1

Connectivity

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2 Culture of the past: digital connectivity and dispotentiated futures Martin Pogačar

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3 The media end: digital afterlife agencies and techno-existential closure Amanda Lagerkvist

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4 Memory of the multitude: the end of collective memory Andrew Hoskins 5 The Holocaust in the 21st century: digital anxiety, transnational cosmopolitanism, and never again genocide without memory Wulf Kansteiner

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110

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Contents

SECTION 2

Archaeology

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6 Tempor(e)alities and archive-textures of media-connected memory Wolfgang Ernst

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7 The underpinning time: from digital memory to network microtemporality Jussi Parikka

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8 Television in and out of time Timothy Barker 9 Memory in technoscience: biomedia and the wettability of mnemonic relations Matthew Allen

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SECTION 3

Economy

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10 Iconomy of memory: on remembering as digital, civic and corporate currency Joanne Garde-Hansen and Gilson Schwartz

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11 Globital memory capital: theorizing digital memory economies Anna Reading and Tanya Notley

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SECTION 4

Archive

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12 Memory institutions, the archive and digital disruption? Michael Moss

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13 Tensions in the interface: the archive and the digital Debra Ramsay

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume had its beginnings in the Digital/Social Media and Memory Symposium hosted by the University of Glasgow in April 2013 and I am grateful for support for this from the Economic History Society (www.ehs.org.uk) and Catherine Schenk, CREATe, the RCUK Copyright Centre (www.create.ac.uk), Martin Kretschmer and Sukhpreet Singh, and the SAGE Journal of Memory Studies ( journals.sagepub.com/home/mss). The development of Digital Memory Studies has benefitted from critical feedback from a diverse set of academic and public audiences over many years and I am grateful for all their support and also to those that have kindly invited me and hosted my visits and talks, including: Shona Illingworth, Astrid Erll, Ann Rigney, Stef Craps, Jiang Sun, Jo Garde-Hansen, Anna Reading, Phillip Hammond, Amanda Lagerkvist, Philip Seib, Michael Rowlinson, Paul Taylor, Athina Karatzogianni, Katharina Niemeyer, Bruce Scates, Rae Francis, Michael Moss, Sarah Maltby, Ben Burbridge, Brian Loader, Holly Steel, Barry Richards, Dinar Matar, Annette Fuchs, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Maruša Pušnik, Mark Sealy, Rick Crownshaw, Oren Myers, Motti Neiger, Eyal Zandberg, David Lowenthal, Frank Furedi, Michelle Henning, Emily Keightley, Wendy Moncur, Effi Gazi, Paul Bijl, Lucas Bietti, Charlie Stone, Martin Pogačar, Oto Luthar, Pat Brereton, Bill Hirst, William Spencer, Dan Gilfoyle, Marichka Verenikova, Eugenia Kuznetsova, Amy Holdsworth, Thomas Pettitt, Jose van Dijck, Sarah Oates, Filippo Trevisan, Jay Winter, Martin Conway, Karen Renaud, Catherine Happer, Marie Gillespie, Wayne Hope, Sacha van Leeuwen, Karen Worcman, Michael Pickering, Pavel Shchelin, Stevie Docherty, Dounia Mahlouly, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technologies (FACT), Liverpool, the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Museu da Pessoa, São Paulo, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, The National Archives, Kew. Thank you to Simon Norfolk for his kind permission to allow use of his photograph ‘Swiss bow’ on the front cover.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Debra Ramsay for her fantastic work on our Archives of War project (archivesofwar.com) and to all at Historical Branch (Army) and especially to Robert Evans for his support. Working with my colleagues on the Journal of Memory Studies is a constant learning experience and I am very grateful to all of our contributors and for continuing support from: John Sutton, Wulf Kansteiner, Andrea Hajek, Kate Stevens, Matthew Allen, Paula Reavey, Amy Sodaro, Kirk Michaelian and Sarah Robins. Amanda Barnier continues to open my eyes to the world of memory way beyond my comfort zone and it is a pleasure to work with her. I continue to be inspired by William Merrin who is still the most underrated media theorist of his generation. I am also very fortunate to have lovely friends who continue to keep me grounded: Nina Fischer, Gillian Youngs, William Merrin, Ben O’Loughlin, Mark Neville, Steven Brown, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, John Tulloch, Amanda Barnier, John Sutton, Martin Jarvis, Jonathan Nicholson, Robert John, Shona Illingworth. I am grateful to Erica Wetter and Mia Moran at Routledge, New York, for their faith in the Digital Memory Studies project, and to the anonymous proposal readers and to the reader of the final manuscript for their constructive comments and important advice. My thanks are also due to Janet Andrew for her excellent work on the index. Thank you to all of the contributors here for their great commitment and pioneering work in this volume. Finally, my love as ever to Rachel and Jasper.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Matthew Allen lectures in cultural economy at the University of Leicester, UK. He

is author of The Labour of Memory: Memorial Culture and 7/7 (Palgrave, 2015). His research on memory and digital culture has been published in Memory Studies, Theory & Psychology, and Organization. He is editor of Memory Studies and a member of the editorial collective for the open access journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization. Tim Barker is a Lecturer in Digital Media in the School of Culture and Creative

Arts, University of Glasgow. His research interests include the philosophy of time and media, German media theory, questions of technology and creativity and histories of experimental audio-visual media. He is the author of Time and the Digital (Dartmouth College Press, 2012) and a number of essays and book chapters on topics related to the materially oriented studies of media. Having been academically trained as a historian and classicist (Latin Philology and Classical Archaeology) with an ongoing interest in cultural tempor(e)alities, Wolfgang Ernst grew into the emergent technology-oriented media studies and is Full Professor for Media Theories in the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2003. His academic interests once focused on historicism, archival theory and museology, before attending to media-technical matters. His current research focus covers media archaeology as method, theory of technical storage, technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, critique of history as master discourse of cultural and technological time, and sound analysis (“sonicity”) from a mediaepistemological point of view, that is time signals. Books in English: Digital Memory and the Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Stirring in the Archives. Order from Disorder (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Chronopoetics. The temporal being and operativity of technological media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Sonic Time Machines.

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Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices and Implicit Sonicity in Terms of Media Knowledge (Amsterdam University Press, 2016). Joanne Garde-Hansen is Reader in Culture, Media and Communication, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She was Reader in Media at the University of Gloucestershire and Director of the Research Centre for Media, Memory and Community. Joanne is the author and co-editor of a number of books and articles on media, memory, emotion and environmental studies, including Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Geography and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Media and Memory (Edinburgh University Press, 2011); and Save As . . . Digital Memories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She has been collaborating with the Museu da Pessoa, São Paulo, Brazil and working with UK and Brazil colleagues on Flood Memories, Drought Narratives and mediating resilience through memory work. Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the College of Social

Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His latest book is (with John Tulloch) Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Broken Media (with Catherine Happer) is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. His AHRC Research Fellowship interrogates the intersecting and contesting roles of individual and organisational memory of warfare through an original ethnography of Army Historical Branch in Whitehall (the “keepers” of the official operational record of the British Army) http://archivesofwar.com. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal of Memory Studies, founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies and founding Co-Editor of the Routledge book series Media, War & Security. @andrewhoskins. Wulf Kansteiner is Professor of History at Aarhus University, Denmark. A

cultural and intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Kansteiner has published widely in the fields of media history, memory studies, historical theory, and Holocaust studies. He is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Ohio University Press, 2006) and coeditor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke University Press, 2006), Historical Representation and Historical Truth (2009), Den Holocaust erzählen: Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrative Kreativität (Wallstein Verlag Gmbh, 2013), and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is also co-editor of the journal Memory Studies. Amanda Lagerkvist is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies and

Wallenberg Academy Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She is head of the research program Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity (et.ims.su.se), funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, and Stockholm University (2014–2018). She works in the fields of media philosophy and media

Contributor biographies

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memory studies, developing an existential media theory in relation to digital (memory) cultures, with a particular focus on death online. As a media phenomenologist she has contributed to debates on media, memory, time, urban space and performativity. She is the author of the monograph Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is also the co-editor of Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity (Ashgate, 2009) and has published in, for instance, New Media and Society, Television and New Media, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Sociological Review, Space and Culture, The Senses and Society, The European Journal of Communication and The International Journal of Cultural Studies. Michael Moss is Professor of Archival Science at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. He previously held a chair in the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute at the University of Glasgow. He is by background an archivist and historian. He has written widely on archival topics, for example “Where have all the files gone, lost in action points every one?” ( Journal of Contemporary History, 2012). He is a non-executive director of the National Records of Scotland and was, until 2014, a member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on National Archives and Records. He was Miegunyah Distinguished Fellow in the e-Scholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne in 2014. Last year he edited with Barbara Endicott Popovsky: Is Digital Different? How information creation, capture, preservation and discovery are being transformed (Facet, 2016) and published ‘La campagne en faveur des économies de guerre en Grande Bretagne: naissance d’une politique modern de l’epargne’ (in F. Descamps and L. Quennouelle-Corre, La mobilisation financiére pendant la Grande Guerre, (Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2016). Tanya Notley is Senior Lecturer in Internet Studies and Digital Media in the School

of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University and she is a researcher with the Institute for Culture and Society. Her research is focused on understanding how media and communication technology impacts upon social and cultural participation, public accountability and transparency, education and learning, human rights and social justice and, most recently, on the natural environment. Tanya collaborates with a number of human rights and social justice organisations to design and evaluate social change communication initiatives. She is currently collaborating with Anna Reading on an Australian Research Council funded project that examines data centers, labour and territory in Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong (with a team led by Brett Neilsen and Ned Rossiter). Jussi Parikka is Professor at the Winchester School of Art (University of South-

ampton). His books have addressed a wide range of topics relevant to a critical understanding of network society, aesthetics and media archaeology of computational culture. The books include the media ecology trilogy Digital Contagions (Peter Lang, 2007), Insect Media (University Of Minnesota Press, 2010) and most recently, A Geology of Media (University Of Minnesota Press, 2015), which addresses the environmental contexts of technical media culture. In addition, Parikka has published

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such books as What is Media Archaeology (Polity Press, 2012) and edited various books, most recently Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (MIT Press, 2015, with Joasia Krysa) on the Finnish media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi and his archival art method. His website/blog is at http://jussiparikka.net. Martin Pogačar is a Researcher at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies,

Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In his research Pogačar focuses on memory and digital media (Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-presencing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)), popular culture and social media (“Music and Memory: Yugoslav Rock in Social Media”, 2014), post-socialism and digital afterlife (“Digital Afterlife: Ex-Yugoslav Pop-cultural Icons and Social Media”, 2016), and material heritage of socialism. Debra Ramsay lectures in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the

author of American Media and the Memory of World War II (Routledge, 2015) and has published articles on the impact of digital technology in various forms on the relationships between war, history, memory and media, including an article on the First Person Shooter and the memory of World War II (Cinema Journal, 54:2, February 2015). Recent research includes a forthcoming monograph on Archives and War as part of the AHRC funded project, Technologies of Memory and Archival Regimes (archivesofwar.com, ref. AH/L004232/1). Anna Reading is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, University of London and Honorary Visiting Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia (2012–2019). She is the author of Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (Palgrave, 2016); The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust (Palgrave, 2002) and Polish Women, Solidarity and Feminism (Palgrave, 1992). She worked with Colin Sparks on Communism, Capitalism and the Mass Media (Sage, 1998) and co-edited Save As . . . Digital Memories (Palgrave, 2009) with Joanne Garde-Hansen and Andrew Hoskins; Media in Britain with Jane Stokes (Macmillan, 1999) and Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles with Tamar Katriel (Palgrave, 2015). She is currently collaborating with Tanya Notley on an Australian Research Council funded project that examines data centres, labour and territory in Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong. Gilson Schwartz is Professor in the Department of Film, Radio and TV, School of

Communication and Arts, University of São Paulo. He is research group leader of the City of Knowledge, and of Iconomics—Business, Policy and Innovation in Digital Capitalism. Since 2012 he has been Professor of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme on Human Rights and New Legitimacies at USP. He is Latin America Director of the Games for Change network, a member of WISH—World Innovation and Sustainability Helix and a member of The Future of the Games Industry in Brazil. His publications have covered research on media and capitalism and he continues to innovate on projects such as the Brazilian IMF (Imaginary Money Fund) to address the global financial crisis.

1 THE RESTLESS PAST An introduction to digital memory and media Andrew Hoskins

For pre-internet generation kids like me, the crash was deafening. That was the sound of the past landing. All its strangely familiar inhabitants suddenly amongst us taking tentative steps from its long-lost time spaceship, like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind crossed with Pleasantville. But this was no sci-fi fantasy. Overnight, digital media resurrected the faded and decaying past of old school friends, former lovers, and all that could and should have been forgotten. By the mid-2000s human pasts fragmented, scattered, decayed or simply lost through modernity’s radical mobility, had been unearthed. There was something quasi-religious about this massive redeliverance, a return of biblical proportions making the twentieth century’s memory booms (Huyssen 2003; Winter 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010) look minuscule. And digital omnipresence afforded a view seemingly liberated from the confines of experts who thrived on scarcity of information (no-one uses the phrase ‘I need a second opinion’ anymore, when there are millions to compare with online). The ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins 2011a, b)—the sudden abundance, pervasiveness, and immediacy of digital media, communication networks and archives— forces a view unprecedented in history. This turn drives an ontological shift in what memory is and what memory does, paradoxically both arresting and unmooring the past. It has re-engineered memory, liberating it from the traditional bounds of the spatial archive, the organization, the institution, and distributed it on a continuous basis via a connectivity between brains, bodies, and personal and public lives. This opening up of new ways of finding, sorting, sifting, using, seeing, losing and abusing the past, both imprisons and liberates active human remembering and forgetting. It is not easy to grasp the digital’s transformation of memory. For in our oddly called ‘participatory’ digital media culture, the dominant form of sociality

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is something I call a ‘sharing without sharing’. This is to signal that individuals and groups feel active in an array of connective practices such as posting, linking, liking, recording, swiping, scrolling, forwarding, etc., digital media content, and yet do so compulsively, constituting a new coercive multitude that does not debate but rather digitally emotes (as in via emoticons) (see for example Dayan 2013, and Hoskins and Tulloch 2016, 289). ‘Sharing’ in this way is nothing like an act underpinned by the values of equity and unselfishness, but rather is more a matter of an obligation to participate and to reciprocate, underpinned by a set of digitally fostered values (see below). And sharing without sharing is indicative of a shift in media consciousness after the connective turn, that is both consciousness of and in media. This is the seemingly diminished capacity of a given user to be responsive to, in Jonathan Crary’s words: ‘how the rhythms, speeds, and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption are reshaping experience and perception’ (2013, 39). In these circumstances, it is difficult to comprehend, let alone to arrest, the digital reconfiguration of remembering and forgetting underway. And given the compulsion of connectivity and the distribution and entanglement of all of our digital traces, attempts to try and imagine or return to an earlier, less risky, media age, will not succeed in this one. This is obvious in the foolery known as ‘digital detox’, whereby any period of abstinence from social media is always underpinned by the reassuring knowledge that disconnection is only ever a temporary estrangement. We are already all addicts. At the same time the connective turn fundamentally reconstitutes and redistributes the past, it also compresses more of the present into each moment and potential moment to shape a deep or extended now (see Pogačar, this volume). Thus the networked self and society foster a view that collapses past and present into an orgy of hyperconnectivity: an impossible fantasy of prior generations with their now forgotten closed and contained media imaginaries. As Kevin Kelly (2005) says: ‘Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real’. But this new memory is not the panacea it may have once appeared if glimpsed from when information about anything and everything was more scarce and more scattered. And yet it is difficult to place ourselves in the media imaginary of inhabitants of earlier media ecologies with, for example, a sense of individual privacy and memory that today’s ‘network ego’ seems to lack, or has forgotten (Kroker 2014, 106). This ‘incapacity to conceive that bygone people lived by other principles and viewpoints’ (Lowenthal 2012, 3) is not in itself new, but the connective turn in its unprecedented uncovering and regenerating of the past, has undermined that scarce thing once called heritage, now stripped of its nostalgia seen in awkwardly naked clarity through the ‘magic window’. Moreover, the connective turn’s archaeological triumph has in fact delivered the ultimate reminder of the limits of human capacity to arrest what has been unearthed. And I will just develop this point: If we consider recent centuries’

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pursuit of the accumulation and the preservation of the past, we find this manifested in collections, museums, exhibitions, archives, with perhaps its high point in the late twentieth century second memory boom. And this shift in an orientation from the future to the past was also driven by the transformations in recording and archival technologies that were publicly regenerative of the mass of individual memories of the nodal events of the last century. However, today, the historical process of collection and encapsulation and archiving has not reached completion and success but, rather, its own failure. For the internet is the technology that makes visible our inability to encompass everything, because it is the first medium that’s actually bigger than us. For instance, Jussi Parikka (this volume) cites Peter Weibel who asks: ‘do we even have time to produce so much so as to fill that possible memory space’ (2013, 188). The triumph of the networked archive to deliver an apparently anytime, everywhere view, paradoxically illuminates the infinity of media after the connective turn, and thus the limits of our capacity to hold or to store (a classical problem of memory), as well as to know. But post-scarcity culture is also oppressive in other ways. Too much information always potentially available at a touch, a tap, a flick, a swipe, or a spoken command, has moral consequences for ignoring the world out there, as Luciano Floridi argues: ‘The more any bit of information is just an easy click away, the less we shall be forgiven for not checking it. ICTs are making humanity increasingly responsible, morally speaking, for the way the world is, will be, and should be’ (2014, 42–3). But this sense of connective responsibility is a corollary of what is a transformational difference between last and this century’s media. That is, whereas media audiences once had collective anonymity in their consumption in the golden age of broadcast that defined the twentieth century, in today’s media ecology, it is users that are made personally accountable (Hoskins, 2017a). The already mundane digital comments, consumption and acts, routinely recorded, posted, tagged, tweeted and liked, make this the most accountable generation in history. The post-scarcity past weighs heavily on the present and future; digital memory has become an awesome new risk in its entanglement in the unimaginable scale and complexity of hybrid personal/public networks and archives, and therein digital traces’ immeasurable capacity to haunt, including after death (see Lagerkvist, this volume). And yet, despite this forever restless and risky past that compromises the human capacity to move on and to forget, at the same time there has emerged an unassuageable faith in the affordances of digital discovery in post-scarcity culture and in the harnessing of big data, a view encouraged through being participant in this media ecology. Thus, there is a new cultural and political force of digitally fostered values of unbridled commentary, open access, freedom of information, the ‘right to know’, the immediacy of instant search, and confessional culture, which all feed on and provoke the restless past. These have profound consequences on all actors in our new memory ecology (see below) including institutions whose business is memory. For example, the

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National Archives (TNA) in the UK, as Debra Ramsay shows (this volume) has to negotiate tensions between users’ everyday digital experiences and expectations of the smooth aesthetics of popular search engine and social media interfaces, and the organisation’s archival principles, history and identity. This is not a battle the latter can win. For instance, as a former member of staff at TNA told me recently, the Archives are hemorrhaging visitors as people believe they can access everything online. And the reliance in the capacity of digital search can mean paradoxically that less is found, for example, in the loss of the interpretive complexity embedded in the material and in the ‘contextual marsh’ (Baker 2002, 41) of paper records, as I have argued in relation to the digital risks to the future history of warfare (Hoskins 2015a). Meanwhile, the UK Cabinet Office working with the National Archives are embracing ‘search and data analytic tools’ to save government ‘digital legacy’ collections, which is a massive investment of faith in tools still in development.1 Furthermore, this strategy exposes the profound uncertainty in the future of sensitive digital records and in their ever seeing the public light of day, given that the Cabinet Office/TNA cannot calibrate their own/government risk appetite at a given time with the sensitivity review of records.2 Relatedly, Michael Moss (this volume) writes of the worldwide archival community’s slow adjustment to ‘the shock of the digital paradigm’, and also of another threat to the stability and continuity of archives in terms of prohibitive costs. Although in terms of some aspects of storage, these costs continue to fall significantly, which is why the UK Cabinet Office/TNA’s aversion to serious consideration of any kind of ‘keep everything’ strategy is surprising.3 Elsewhere, the third memory boom4 (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010), with its more immediate, visceral and effervescent digital modes of representation, circulation and connectivity, both sits alongside but also clashes with those modes of representation consolidated by memory institutions and organizations in the preceding memory boom, and particularly of the Holocaust, as Wulf Kansteiner (this volume) effectively demonstrates. And the third memory boom’s belief in the knowable archive and in digital search drives an approach to the past that, if we look hard enough and wide enough and long enough, the truth will surely (and must) be found. For example, in recent years, the British establishment’s past was itself said to be ‘on trial’, including with the UK’s ‘Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)’,5 which has been floundering since its establishment in 2014 given its impossibly broad remit (Hoskins 2015b). And even the fourth chairperson of IICSA, Alexis Jay, following the premature departure of the previous three, on her appointment still reaffirmed the inquiry’s unlimited scope. More broadly, what I am speaking of here is not only some acceleration of the twentieth century’s generalized turn to the past, but rather a fundamental turn on the past: an emergent, indiscriminate and irreverent memory that haunts.

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As I outlined above, the past always looks alien from the perspective of the present: it is transformed through decay, discarding, forgetting, misremembering, reappraisal, and through all the various needs identified via the lens of today. For instance, as William Gibson puts it: ‘The one constant . . . in looking at how we look at the past, how we have looked at the past before, is that we never see the inhabitants of the past as they saw themselves’.6 But this continuity of estrangement through distance is today subverted. The digital does reveal alien and unpalatable memories, but it also transcends the time of now and then, reconnecting, reimagining and reconstituting the past as network, as archive, as present: as Laurence Scott (2015, xv) argues, ‘it contorts the old dimensions’. He continues, ‘And so it is with digitization, which is no longer a space in and out of which we clamber, via the phone lines. The old world itself has taken on, in its essence, a four-dimensionality. Every moment, every object has been imbued with the capacity for this extra aspect’ (ibid.). Digital media have transformed the parameters of the past and have ushered in a new imaginary, that amazes in the very recognition of the scale of this post-scarcity culture, but that also, to repeat, makes visible our inability to encompass everything; the digital simultaneously affords a synchronic and diachronic unlimited depth of vision that at the same time makes us aware of the limits of the human capacity to arrest and to hold and to keep the archive. And thus the very idea of the future from this perspective is suffocated (Pogačar, this volume). Of course, much has been said of the initially disorienting experience of the introduction of a new technology, overwhelming all in a McLuhanist recalibrating sensorium. But today’s digital fusion of network and archive ushers in a hyperconnectivity, namely ‘a new shaper of patterns of experience both synchronic and diachronic, forging and reforging new assemblages of remembering and forgetting’ (Hoskins and Tulloch 2016, 9). Kelly’s magic window (above) in this way makes a node out of all of us; no longer merely external, the media of memory are brought within. To comprehend the consequences of this shift and our emergent everywhere view, it is useful to think of ourselves made omnipresent, rather than the devices and the platforms we use. Despite the thrill and opportunities of the ‘magic’ of this new everywhere media consciousness, it also exposes the user and wider culture and society to a whole new set of threats, to privacy, security and memory. There was no time for reflection on the cost-benefit ratio of living in a digital society before we were irretrievably connected, before the past had attached itself as our omnipresent shadow. Memory has been lost to the hyperconnective illusion of an open access world of the availability, accessibility, and reproduceability of the past. I say ‘illusion’ as our submergence in post-scarcity culture has also elided what is really at stake here: the loss of the security of vision that the past once afforded (a clear sense of the why of the difference) and a slippage of the grasp of what effect all our

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current entanglements with media will have on remembering and forgetting. The past has been stripped of its once retrospective coherence and stability, entangled in today’s melee of uncertainty. This is not some kind of negotiation in the present with the traditionally estranged past, but rather its arresting, its digital hi-jacking. This is the hyperconnectivity of the digital present that has an insatiable appetite: there is no containment; little is invulnerable to the relentless trawl of digitization and its partners-in-crime, with uploading and downloading making the archive restless, and even speculative in its ‘permanently archiving presence’ (Wolfgang Ernst, this volume). What follows in Digital Memory Studies is an agenda for mapping these transformations, their consequences, and of potential ways forward through the interrelated lenses of connectivity, archaeology, economy, and archive. But firstly, below, I set out a recent media history of the shift in ‘ways of seeing’ the world and others as part of that world, that has moved from a somewhat steady co-evolution of media and memory through to today’s revolution of media consciousness. In this way I offer something of a pre-history of digital memory, to aid the remembering of those who claim that the digital does not rupture and utterly reimagine and replace the twentieth century’s imaginings, aspirations and technologies of memory.

Situating media and memory To even speak of a relationship between media and memory already presumes media as some kind of external shaper, carrier, or manager of memory. And society has long seen itself and its past through the external media of its day, including the media envisioning of a past that serves the needs of the present. Media have long been instrumental in the settling of history: the selective restorative process through which societies generate their history: rediscovery plus translation (and remediation) through the representational, archival and circulatory technologies, discourses and witnesses of the day. The past has long been inexorably and securely put to bed with the aid of media, offering certainty through memory: media history has long been steady and benign. And this reliance on media for shaping a useable past was acutely felt in the late twentieth century turn to memory. For example, advances in 1970s electronic audio/visual technologies of representation, broadcast and archiving enabled a taking stock, a public facing up to the man-made catastrophes of only a few decades earlier, in other words a form of remembering so that a defining history of conflict and its complexities and complicities could become settled, put to rest, enabling a moving on. Memory seemed everywhere—museums, television, video—yet this was nonetheless a contained past, literally walled by the memory institutions of the day, when the government of archival space—to use Ernst’s distinction (this volume)—was the pre-eminent means of bringing this emergent past into a settled present.

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This past was newly available to be reconsidered, as memory of the catastrophic emerged into the light. It is also marked for many by the premiere screening of the Holocaust television miniseries on NBC in 1978 (Shandler 1999) and the 1980 publication of the English translation of the Godfather of collective memory: Maurice Halbwachs’ The Collective Memory. Since then: boom, boom, boom! By whatever measure, both celebrated and derided, the turn to and on the past has been relentless. The contemporary memory booms have been propelled by the anchoring and atomizing debate around the nature, form and status of the memorializing of conflict, the ‘globalizing of Holocaust discourses’ (Huyssen 2003), the trauma of everything, the ‘right to remember’, and the rise of confessional discourses. We quickly moved from a culture that afforded rights to multiple voices of difficult histories to an almost requisitionary approach to the telling of stories: responsibility has become obligation in the inexorable cycles of a persisting mainstream news that demands its fill of commemorative events. In this chapter I contextualize today’s unsettled past against media and memory studies’ perspectives on the contemporary period by advocating a way of seeing digital memory as a condition that evades inspection through the traditional binaries and inflexibilities of these fields. To this end it is critical to recognize that a new ontology for memory studies is needed that is cognizant of media, and not as some partial or occasional or temporary shaper of memory, but as fundamentally altering what it is and what is possible to remember and to forget. It is much easier to be timid and to tinker around the edges of representational and archival discourses and technologies, to add ‘trans’ to the cultural, to reextend or re-distribute the cognitive, and to reduce the technologies of memory to the ‘prosthetic’. Instead the new memory ecology hosts the shifts from representation to enfolding, from space to time, from distribution to hyperconnectivity, from the collective to the multitude, from certainty to uncertainty, from privacy to emergence, from white into grey. Yet, to wrest some kind of sense from these complexities is hampered by their very transformation of our capacity to be conscious of their altering of our perception in and of the world, not to mention the prospects of our disentanglement from them. Is it possible then to forge an active media consciousness that can sufficiently illuminate the difference the digital makes to remembering and forgetting? As the American writer Leon Wieseltier observes: ‘We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily, governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning—to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason.’7 This has resonance with Jonathan Crary’s view of the individual as an ‘application. . . of various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological template of one’s social reality’ (2013, 43).

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The more media churn and entangle our everyday, the more compliant we appear to be, as though we are vaguely aware out of the corner of our eye of the mediatization of almost all aspects of our lives, and the creep of the archive in enveloping all of the most personal. The what we do with media, rather than what media does, is the critical shift here, namely a story of transition from reliance to dependency on the media of the day. We are entering a stage of ‘deep mediatisation’ in which ‘digitalisation and related datafication interweaves our social world even more deeply with this entanglement of media and practices’ (Andreas Hepp 2016, 919). The prospects for an active mode of remembering in these circumstances then appears increasingly beyond reach. An everyday continuous compulsive connectivity—the lively and everyday digital forging of connections, which also provide a comfort of immediacy, a feeling of control—disguises the almighty convergence of communication and archive, and makes opaque our memory’s digital dependency and accumulations. And it is this diminished media consciousness that also haunts its study. A great deal of memory studies’ assumptions as to the relationship between the durability, continuity, and stability of external media and mechanisms, and that of memory itself, are being turned on their head. What is needed is a clearer vision of both how media and assumptions about media have come to shape ways of seeing the world and others as part of that world—to begin to chart the new memory ecology. Given then the accelerating slippage in media consciousness results in a loss of self-perception and a loss of vision about how memory is made, a clearer lexicon of media is needed in order to bring memory into plain sight. To this end, I give a short history of media and memory to set out how connectivity is actually also a feature of a pre-broadcast age, and that the dominant media of the twentieth century—and the second memory boom—can be seen as a kind of institutionalized blockage of the past, even at the time it appeared as newly emergent and as liberating. Today, by contrast, the digital has unsettled the past: embedded in connectivity it has new unpredictable life and memory’s future has been destabilized by its escape from the once relatively reliable finitude of media.

The new memory ecology A useful definition of ‘media’ is the multitude of techniques, technologies and practices through which discourse and interaction is mediated. This is the entire ‘semiotic environment’ in which memory is understood and made relevant to a person, given community or group (Brown and Hoskins 2010). The key words here are ‘entire’ and ‘environment’ in the need for a holistic understanding of media and memory when digital connectivity has become the driving force of contemporary experience. The new memory ecology is an environment in which hyperconnectivity makes it difficult to reduce media and memory to a single or separate medium or individual, respectively. Instead, the mediation of memory

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is seen as a matter of an ongoing set of dynamics: remediation, translation, connectivity, temporality, reflexivity, across and between medias, and their multiple modalities and constant movements. What is then required is a deep ecological lens to reveal both today’s environment of media/memory and the digital messing up of the past. This environment is the new memory ecology (cf. Brown and Hoskins 2010). Let me take the ‘new’ bit first. Memory is always new. ‘New memory’ (Hoskins, 2001, 2004a, 2004b, 2014) is ‘new’ in its continually emergent state availed through the metaphors and media and technologies of the day, but simultaneously these same media reflexively shape a reassessment of the nature and the very value of remembering (and forgetting) under these conditions. Memory is always new if seen as an attitude towards or a representation of the past in the present, constantly remade. For example, Frederic Bartlett (1932), who had a significant influence on the psychology of memory, claimed that the key process of remembering involves the introduction of the past into the present to produce a ‘reactivated’ site of consciousness. He argued, ‘Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience’ (Bartlett 1932, 213). So, remembering is dynamic, imaginative, and directed in and from the present. And this holds across the spectrum of strata of memories, of the individual or the multitude. Yet, what is new about the new memory ecology is that the history of the development of media and memory as co-evolutionary is broken. However, the very changes in human media life—media consciousness—that I set out here also make this break difficult to see. The connective turn has unleashed consciousness (the inner state and working of the mind) back into-the-world. In other words, rather than taking sociocultural perspectives as a starting point, it is useful to consider what insights might be found in the sciences-of-the-mind. This perspective takes cognition as not bound by the head (or even the body) but increasingly seen as extended and distributed across our social worlds. Thus, the ‘extended mind’ thesis (Clark 2008, Menary 2010) is increasingly influential. This John Sutton defines as the idea that ‘mental states and processes can spread across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains’ (2005, 223). And although cognitive psychologists and neurologists recognize (to greatly differing degrees) the role of the external, symbolic and technological ‘memory field’ and its impact on ‘the architecture of biological memory’ (Merlin Donald 2002, 310), they don’t often proceed to fully incorporate the former (social and cultural) dimensions in their work, or consider these as potentially equal or highly integrated components of a larger equation or ecology of memory. There are some exceptions to this state of the field. A notable one is the July 2016 Memory Studies special issue edited by Daniel Schacter and Michael Welker

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on ‘Memory and Connection’,8 which offers fresh ways to illuminate memory as a vehicle of connection between past and present, whilst at the same time looking for memory as a link or connection between the individual and the collective. But still, forging an approach to memory that offers balance—and genuinely interdisciplinarity9—between the cognitive and social sciences and the humanities, is fraught with timidity, suspicion and institutional constraints.10 In response to the institutionalized limits of interdisciplinarity in memory and media studies, I argue for a holistic approach that sees both memory and media as constituted within and by the ecology of the day, as to grasp the character and significance of a phenomenon in its time requires mapping its connective relations and influence of that time. For instance, there is a long history in media studies of work on ‘media ecologies’ (McLuhan 1964; Postman 1970; Fuller 2007), and as William Merrin nicely summarizes: media ecology ‘implies a worldview: it evokes a world’ (2014: 47). In this volume, Matthew Allen adapts a media ecology approach to illuminate memory as always ‘intermedial’ in his study of technoscience, in which ‘memory vacillates between biotic systems and communication devices’ (2017, 193). Influentially, for Neil Postman, media ecology is ‘the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people’ (1970, 161). My work treats memory in a similar way, seeing remembering as the achievement of a world of individuals and groups encountering and interacting with others, institutions, media, etc., in a situated, ongoing, and yet predisposed fashion. The digital fundamentally upsets the existing balance of these sets of relations, their connections with one another—the entire ecology—and thus transforms the very character of memory, its meaning, its uses, its potential and its risks. So, rather than some traditional disciplinary-bound reductionist approaches that hive memory off into distinct and separate zones or even ‘containers’—the body, the brain, the social, the cultural etc.—an ecological approach attempts at least to consider their ongoing interpenetrations, and together their mutual or repellant forces in remembering and forgetting. So, as de Waal (2007, 22) argues: ‘Whereas a landscape is a metaphor that conjures up a static image, ecology does justice to the notion of a system that is in a state of flux’. In this way, a holistic vision is required to enable claims to be made about the sum of the parts. And holistic perspectives on digital memories include illuminating the invisible aspects of digital infrastructures in terms of the materiality and energy that they are founded upon—the ‘uneven mnemonic economy’ of digital devices (Anna Reading and Tanya Notley, this volume). And in their case study work in São Paulo, Joanne Garde-Hansen and Gilson Schwartz (this volume) bring personal narratives and cultural/political economies under their multi-faceted digital memory lens of ‘iconomy’.

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Specifically, the new media and memory ecology is distinctive in its reflexive intensity, complexity and scale. It facilitates unknowable dimensions to actions: causal relations are increasingly difficult to predict given the underdetermined character of social and political relations when subject to the hyperconnectivities of digital media (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010). For instance, Katherine Hayles (2006, 161) draws upon Thomas Whalen’s characterization of this ecology as a ‘cognisphere’, which ‘gives a name and shape to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded’. Calls for an ecological approach are by no means confined to media and communication studies but are also grounded in a recognition of a need to combine the study of mind, body, and media, in an ‘epidemiological’ approach. This, according to Dan Sperber, ‘would establish a relationship of mutual relevance between the cognitive and the social sciences. . . This relationship would in no way be one of reduction of the social to the psychological. Socio-cultural phenomena are, on this approach, ecological patterns of psychological phenomena. Sociological facts are defined in terms of psychological facts, but do not reduce to them’ (1996, 31). Relatedly, William Hirst and David Manier (2008, 188) consider: ‘Contrary to those who locate collective memories in the world, scholars who embrace an epidemiological or systems approach recognise that the spread of a memory is also constrained by universal, biological mechanisms, as well as social resources and practices.’ But the new memory ecology, as I have set out, is defined by a diminished media conscious: a self turned inside out by media, messing with traditional equations or binaries of the internal or external, and their respective continuities and stabilities of memory. Indeed, the principal memorial player today is no longer the highly tangible, visible, notion of the external media of memory, nor the inner-workings of the mind, but instead the mesh of hyperconnectivity in which they are all irretrievably entangled. I return to these workings below, but first I set out the new opportunities and constraints of imagining memory through the media of the day.

Media and consciousness: tales of transformation As a starting point of the co-evolution of media and memory, many take the shift from oral to literate cultures as defining. For example, the psychologist Merlin Donald’s account, A Mind So Rare, contrasts a preliterate conscious mind with its later access to an external memory field. In the former (preliterate) mind there was only one ‘memory system’ available, according to Donald, whereas in the latter (literate) mind there are two. So, in traditional societies and oral cultures, memory was shared directly through the co-present contact required for its transmission. This was a fairly ephemeral basis for memory as there was the constant risk of it disappearing without trace. Steven Rose (1993, 60–1) explains: ‘In such oral cultures, memories needed to be preserved, trained, constantly

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renewed. Special people, the elderly, the bards, became the keepers of the common culture, capable of retelling the epic tales which enshrined each society’s origins. Then, each time a tale was told it was unique, the product of a particular interaction of the teller, his or her memories of past stories told, and the present audience.’ So, memory was once overwhelmingly reliant on the oral cultures of early human societies. Without developed external mechanisms or media, memories needed to be constantly trained and renewed by select individuals who were afforded the considerable responsibility of ‘retelling’ the stories that perpetuated a common culture of sorts (Rose 1993). Although the drive to externalize memory is astonishingly old, with cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia, being dated at almost 40,000 years old (Aubert et al. 2014), with the medium of writing came a new fixable exteriority to memory, as something more easily storable, reproducible, verifiable, shareable beyond co-presence, and no longer so reliant on the vagaries of oral re-tellings for circulation and persistence. And it is this media externalizing of memory that has proved foundational for the contemporary’s imagination of memory’s capacity, scope, and weaknesses. Jay David Bolter (1991, 215) offers one assessment: ‘What changed with the invention of writing was the way in which humans deployed their facility to remember. Memory became tiered or layered . . . it is not that the mind has less to remember because of writing, but that the mind can now keep some knowledge intimately in memory and relegate other knowledge to written texts.’ Although today the mind does have less to remember because of the digital: memory has moved from tiers and layers to connections and networks (and I return to this transition, below). Walter Ong in his influential Orality and Literacy is similarly confident as to writing’s transformative power. In a chapter unambiguously titled ‘Writing restructures consciousness’ Ong argues: ‘Writing . . . was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions. It is not a mere appendage to speech. Because it moves speech from the oral–aural to a new sensory world, that of vision, it transforms speech and thought as well. Notches on sticks and other aides-mémoire lead up to writing, but they do not restructure the human lifeworld as true writing does’ (1982, 85). And for many commentators, writing is part of a two- or three-stage shift in the principal components of the external memory field: the media of memory: oral–written–printed–electronic. For instance, Ong (1982) calls the electronic media (TV, radio, telephone) ‘secondary orality’, as representing a technologicallyinduced return to a preliterate ‘primary orality’, although he sees both striking similarities and dissimilarities between these two phases (1982, 136–7). More recently, Lars Ole Sauerberg (2008) and Thomas Pettitt (2011 and p.c.) have developed a model of ‘The Gutenberg Parenthesis’ which re-envisions media history. Pettitt explains: ‘“Parenthesis” is an effective and thought-provoking way of signalling that the new period is in some ways a return to the one before

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last, just as a sentence resumes the line of thought interrupted by the parenthesis, while acknowledging that things have nonetheless moved on in the meantime and that the intervening parenthesis has influenced the direction in which they are moving’ (2011). Pettitt’s diagram of the model of the Gutenberg Parenthesis is reproduced in Figure 1.1, below. G UTENBERG PARENTHESIS: T HE MODEL

PRE-PARENTHETICAL absence of containment CONNECTION network articulated series

lines as connections

PARENTHETICAL

POST-PARENTHETICAL

CONTAINMENT

absence of containment CONNECTION network articulated series

enclosure inside vs. outside

lines as boundaries

lines as connections

COGNITION

PERCEPTION society : networks space : avenues & junctions body : limbs & joints

communities

networks

enclosures

avenues & junctions

envelope with orifices

limbs & joints

MEMORY linkage

storage

linkage

APPREHENSION systems

CULTURAL PRODUCTION (VERBAL MATERIAL) articulated

categories >> categorical anxiety

systems

contained

articulated

containers

networks “pathways”

MEDIA TECHNOLOGY networks “pathways” FIGURE 1.1

The Gutenberg Parenthesis Model by Thomas Pettitt

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Pettitt’s model roughly places the age of print in terms of ‘containment’: media technology (books), cultural production (complete works), perceptions of social relations (communities), bodies (envelopes) and the environment (enclosures), apprehension of how the world is screwed together (categories), and memory as storage (Pettitt p.c.). However, the periods before and after the parenthesis (oral and digital) were characterised rather by forms and experiences of connections (articulation, conjugation, networks, systems, links and nodes). So, with the connective turn, media history requires re-imagination both with the obvious hindsight of today, but also in light of the history-changing digital underway and the new memory ecology being seen as having more in common in some ways with an earlier oral-based culture than with the electric age. Thus, the broadcast era can be seen as a post-parenthetical continuation of orality, a secondary orality of television, film and radio, with the arrival of the digital as a further degree of a ‘return’ to orality (Pogačar 2016). Yet a key difference is that broadcast media then were subject to the relatively predictable (and containing) decay time of the technologies of the day. And where their content was archived, it was mostly done so by the memory institutions of the time in a spatial and restrictive fashion. For example, if you had missed a favourite television programme in, say, 1975, the chances of you gaining access to that programme again (unless it was repeated) via the broadcaster or any official or unofficial archive were very slim indeed. In contrast, the connective turn unleashes a whole set of unpredictable decay times and hyperconnective archives that presences and unsettles the past in new ways. Thus for me, in comparison, the broadcast era fits more with the parenthesis of Pettitt’s model (above) as relatively containing of memory. Furthermore, the broadcast era signifies a particularly closed rather than open imaginary of media, and its continued influence on media (and memory) studies inhibits these fields’ capacity to grasp the radical shift ushered in by digital media (Merrin 2014). That imaginary, I argue, persists around notions of a mass audience that still feeds accounts of the relationship between media and so-called ‘collective memory’ today (see my chapter ‘Memory of the Multitude’, this volume 2017b). I return to consider the idea of a new digital or technological unconscious, below. However, firstly I interrogate the impact of the parenthetical or broadcast era, as both defining of the second memory boom, but also in its legacy in perpetuating the externalizing model of media and memory, long after the expiry of its relevance and usefulness in explaining what memory has and will become.

Media of the memory boom / the electric age Once the past lent itself to the present as a lesson, a template, a schema, the basis of which offered a measure of some prescriptive certainty of the likely unfolding of the future. The start of the second memory boom thus marked a convergence

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of a new public will-to-remember with the technologies that gave such remembrances their archival form, including the dominance of the institutions of Big Media and state with relative control over access to and dissemination of the public archives of heritage, museums, broadcast and other media content. Pierre Nora, for example, articulates a connection of the two in his influential assessment: ‘No society has ever produced archives as deliberately as our own, not only by volume, not only by new technical means of reproduction and preservation, but also by its superstitious esteem, by its veneration of the trace’ (1989, 13). However, this view can be qualified in that the great empires of previous eras may have also created huge archives, and the archive itself is rarely hegemonic, being open to subversion from within. One of the legacies of the media of the second memory boom is the collective weight of responsibility afforded in the rush to court Big Media’s control over precisely the form of memory that mattered most, that of representation. And that discourse of responsibility—for instance the ‘objectivity’ of journalism— is still held up (by some media regulators and organisations and journalism schools) as an imperative, even in the face of their abrogation of such responsibility in the death of that genre once known as ‘news’. The roots of this process of the inexorable advance—and collapse—of both the lexicon of media/mediation and of Big Media’s heyday, are found at the very height of the media-engineered second memory boom, just before the post-scarcity digital tsunami dumped a past of unimaginable scale on to a still unsuspecting present. So, what ‘the media’ stood for and their importance to the envisioning of the future became overdetermined. For example, Siegfried Zielinski (2006, 32) argues: What media could or might be was defined so often in the course of the 1990s that it is no longer clear what this word, used as a concept, actually describes. This inflation of definitions has to do with the fact that the economic and political powers took the media more and more seriously, and thus the definers found themselves under increasing pressure. Media and future became synonymous. If you didn’t engage with what was then baptized media, you were definitely passé’. Interestingly, ‘media’ could be replaced with ‘memory’ in this formulation, and not least in terms of its promise and ‘inflation of definitions’. At the time, the second memory boom was seen as an age of abundance: of witnessing, recording, documentation, and of a new archival regime. Whereas the horrors of the Holocaust had muted history, it was not until the 1970s that there seemed a willingness to publicly talk and to listen about a catastrophe of such scarring proportions, of total war. For example, the historian Jay Winter identifies of this period a shift in ‘the balance of creation, adaptation, and circulation’ of memory (2006, 26), ‘when the victims of the Holocaust came out of the shadows, and when a wide public was finally, belatedly prepared to see them, honor them, and hear what

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they had to say’ (2006, 27). This includes the establishment of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (a project with its beginnings in 1979 and a collection holding over 4,300 videotaped interviews at Yale) that was pioneering in this emergent memorial culture. These shifts were also firmly embedded in the translation and remediation media of the day, with the popularization of the personal video recorder in the 1970s and 1980s driving a new archival era of recorded memories. It is not then a coincidence then that the term ‘the media’ first gaining popular traction in the 1970s and 1980s (Boyer 2009, 5) was simultaneous with the beginning of the second memory boom. And amidst the flux of the digital present it is easy to forget that the archival straits of the late twentieth century were seen to mark a new abundance of the past, as a then ‘current overflowing of memory’ (Le Goff 1992, 54). This was a past that offered a new public certainty to memory through the media of the day. For example, one can trace over the past 200 years, the tribal memories and oral myths carried by religion and tradition giving way to the many centralizing narratives of modernity. These, in turn, have become increasingly constructed out of media data—from the earliest photograph, to the first flickering moving pictures and, across the twentieth century with increasing speed, to radio, talkies, early BBC television, network national programming, linked transmissions like the early Eurovision song contests, and then to the relentless and inescapable information saturation of satellite news organizations such as CNN, which branded a whole slice of (at least) Western history of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, the greater immediacy and velocity to coverage of emergent events in this period saw vast global audiences witnessing history-in-the-making, engaged if not enthralled by satellite-led news reporting of the nodal events of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf War. The 1990’s extension of television news to the 24/7 rolling coverage (taken for granted today) is also defining of the second memory boom. Satellite television news shaped a new wave of commemorative and memorial events: Extended coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War across continents, for example, was televised live and simultaneously across many of the countries who fought and suffered in that war. This marks the pinnacle of what William Merrin (2008, 2014) calls the broadcast era: the plugging in of audiences to a unified—although not unifying—sense of global witnessing: of a new televisual simultaneity. And it remains difficult to separate out a social imaginary and memory of nodal events affecting or reported in advanced industrial regions since the late twentieth century from the medium of television. For example, in the academic study of so-called ‘media events’, i.e. when programming schedules are interrupted and 24-hour news channels move to continuing extended coverage of a major news story, these are seen as extraordinarily powerful in shaping memory. Dayan and Katz (1992, 213), for instance, argue: ‘media events and their narration are in competition with the writing of

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history in defining the contents of collective memory. Their disruptive and heroic character is indeed what is remembered, upstaging the efforts of historians and social scientists to perceive continuities and to reach beyond the personal.’ The simultaneous televisual mass audience is indeed a seductive phenomenon, both in terms of the supposed unifying reception of the event and the national and/ or global collective memory arising from this shared experience of the real-time vicarious witnessing of the event. Indeed, this notion has driven a whole subfield of memory studies, not from sociology or media studies, but from cognitive psychology, namely the study of ‘flashbulb memories’ (FBMs). In relation to the study of FBMs of public events, psychological approaches have focused on the mass media, and often exclusively television. Notably, this is the remembering of the hearing (and also viewing) of news of a momentous event that marks historical memory (an assassination of a political leader, a natural catastrophe, or a terrorist attack, for example). Of course, the potential influence of the mass media in shaping memory is related to the idea of a mass audience in forging a collective (often simultaneous) reception of an event (i.e. the media event, Dayan and Katz 1992), and its later anniversary-marking and the expansion of Western news programming has fed an obsession with commemoration and memorialization. So, there is little shortage of often highly repetitive media content available to feed FBMs; as Hirst and Meksin (2009, 213) succinctly put it: ‘Media coverage is the quintessential externally driven act of rehearsal’. And most of the defining media events (the 1967 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy; the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger; the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales) that have informed the genesis of FBM studies are products of an age of broadcast media (with 9/11 on the cusp of the connective turn). And television still appears to retain its presence and power as a medium of remembering and forgetting (Holdsworth 2011); as an enduring form of mainstream media consciousness. But television’s connectivity at least is more imagined than real. Global simultaneity, as Nowotny (1989) has persuasively argued, is illusory; TV’s mythical connectivity was imagined through the once liberating idea that ‘the whole world was watching’ (Gitlin 1980). Moreover, TV has categorically lost its singular status, and its presence as with all other media is now much more intensely connected and diffused, but also ignored. Furthermore, if we move away from the field of media and memory’s obsession with media content to a more media archaeological concern with technics (see the media archaeological section in this volume) then television as a medium of memory can be re-imagined as inscribing some of the more fragmenting (rather than unifying) characteristics of the pre-parenthical era (Pettitt, above). For example, Timothy Barker (this volume) argues that television as a technical medium produces a ‘radical cutting’ through the process of its transmission of both live and recorded events.

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Digital connectivity absorbs television as with all other media. Collective memory may well still be ascribed to the medium (or at least its ‘history in the making’ by those who make their living from it) but it becomes ever more difficult to differentiate such a medium/memory. For example, visceral flashbulb memories, despite their ever-higher definition, no longer sit as some divine property of the mainstream news media. Instead, the digital multitude pixelate them to oblivion. Theirs is the tread-wheel of recording, commenting, tweeting, texting and re-editing by and for themselves. And, as I argue later in this volume, there is no collective memory. Instead, the digital has knocked the media/memory of the second memory boom—the ‘creation, adaptation, and circulation’ of memory, in Winter’s terms (above)—off balance. This process becomes a continuous end in itself, rather than there remaining any prospect of arrival, settlement, or completion coming into view. Memory, be it conceived as individual, social or cultural, can no longer only rely on the repetitions and the remediations of the visual, or on the discrete and punctual media forms and representations that dominated the second memory boom. Rather, the digital has collapsed the relative functional certainty of the workings of that which cognitive psychologists describe as memory ‘in the world’ or ‘in the wild’.

Consciousness in the new memory ecology To take a view from cognitive science, Merlin Donald contrasts a ‘preliterate’ conscious mind with its later access to an ‘external memory field’. In the former (preliterate) mind there was only one ‘memory system’ available, according to Donald, whereas in the latter (literate) mind there are two. The diagrams reproduced below (Figures 1.2 and 1.3) illustrate this shift. LONG-TERM MEMORY

_____________________________

LEVEL-3 WORKING MEMORY

VIVID CONSCIOUS CORE FIGURE 1.2

Preliterate state of conscious mind (adapted from Donald 2002, 310)

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LONG-TERM MEMORY

____________________________

LEVEL-3 WORKING MEMORY

VIVID CONSCIOUS CORE

EXTERNAL MEMORY FIELD

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

PERMANENT EXTERNAL SYMBOLIC STORAGE FIGURE 1.3

Postliterate state of conscious mind (adapted from Donald 2002, 311)

Consequently, for Donald, the mind is transformed: able to achieve significantly more in its ‘reflective power’, as ‘arbitrator’ between internal and external systems of representation, and in enriching our awareness. He argues: ‘Awareness now finds itself juxtaposed between two simultaneously present storage systems, one internal and biological, the other external and technological, each with long-term and short-term aspects’ (2001, 311). And he goes on to say: ‘The external memory field is really a sort of cultural Trojan Horse into the brain . . . Temporarily it translates all the advantages of external storage media—permanence, accessibility, refinement—directly to the brain . . . This magnifies the mind’s cognitive power

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and amplifies the impact of representational objects’ (2002, 316). But Donald’s account begs the question: what is the impact of the digital on his version of the external memory field? To be sure, Donald sees the mind’s ‘dance with symbols’ as an evolutionary ‘scaffolded cultural process’ (2002, 313). And some contemporary studies seem to support this idea. The psychologists Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, for example, argue that ‘when people expect information to remain continuously available . . . we are more likely to remember where to find it than we are to remember the details of the item’ (2011, 3). They suggest that ‘this is an adaptive use of memory—to include the computer and online search engines as an external memory system that can be accessed at will’ (ibid.). However, with the networking of the external memory field in the new memory ecology, remembering is not only shaped through layers of symbols and permanent storage, but through an emergent set of invisible relations. This includes new kinds of decay time of media that challenge the certainties associated with the endurance of external representations or objects traditionally seen as affording stability to memory. Memory is underpinned by the grey of the technological unconscious. This is both the technological unconscious of the deep now of the machine-code, software, algorithms and other infrastructural (and mostly invisible) aspects of its operation-and also the involuntary memory of the self: its capacity to deal with post-scarcity culture that is too vast and complex to process, or to manage, or to contain. In terms of Donald’s model then, the external memory field is no longer mostly symbolic, but hyperconnective: it has acquired a network of its own—its own engrams. And the ‘distinct storage and retrieval properties’ (Donald 2002, 311) of the external memory are fraught with new complexities, namely of the uncertain finitude of digital media and the unpredictable vulnerabilities of decay, disconnection and obsolescence. As Amanda Lagerkvist details in this volume, digital afterlife agencies now help to manage the external memory of the individual after death, which is perhaps the moment when the management of ‘sociotechnical life’ (Thrift 2004, 175) is thrown into sharpest relief. The new memory ecology that appears to offer a panacea of open access and total memory inhibits rather than enlightens a view on what the actual consequences of the entanglements of sociotechnical life will be on remembering and forgetting. At least in the broadcast era—the parenthetical phase—the external memory field had a tangible shape, with more clearly defined functions, limits and temporalities. Then, some media technologies acted as ‘containers’ (see Pettitt’s model, Figure 1.1, above) as part of an external memory field that could only be accessed, visited and borrowed from to enhance remembering in a more punctual rather than continuous fashion. Compare, for example, the fairly discrete, contained and punctual media forms and representations that dominated the first two memory booms (newspapers, radio, TV) with the digital connectivity and the continuousness of these and other media forms today. These forms also set

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the parameters and defined and delimited what was shareable, fostering in the Gutenberg parenthesis period a much more contained memory. Today, there is no external memory field as such that is borrowed from or drawn upon; rather it has been brought within us. Is not the smartphone the new locus of self? Post-scarcity culture seduces self and society to turn on the restless past, opening it up anew, paradoxically in the name of closure, but rather as an attempt to deal with or distract from the complexities of the present. Meanwhile, the digitally fostered values of openness and exposure, and of sharing without sharing, forge a future made from an accumulating accountability of memory, with users barely conscious of the digital’s silent inner-conversations, and its new archival depths and inconsistencies of duration and decay, that will make this generation the most haunted in history.

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Michael Moss, Martin Pogačar and Thomas Pettitt for their helpful comments and suggestions. And to Rachel Hendrick for her careful and invaluable proofreading.

Notes 1 ‘Better Information for Better Government. The government’s response to Sir Alex Allan’s review of its strategy for managing digital records and archives’, January 18, 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-information-for-bettergovernment, accessed January 19, 2017. 2 See also Hoskins, 2015a. 3 See Note 1, above. 4 For Jay Winter, the first ‘memory boom’ (1890s–1920s) is marked by memory being central to the formation of national identities and the memorializing of the victims of the Great War (2006, 18). Following a period of the relative absence of remembering after the second world war, Winter identifies a second memory boom developing from the 1970s. 5 The ‘Independent’ Inquiry, established in 2014 into whether public bodies in England and Wales, such as the National Health Service, the BBC and the police, ‘have taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse’ https://www.iicsa. org.uk. Accessed October 18, 2014. 6 Claire L. Evans, ‘William Gibson Has No Idea How the Future Will See Us’, http:// motherboard.vice.com/en_au/read/william-gibson-we-have-no-idea-what-the-futurewill-think-of-us. Accessed October 20, 2014. 7 http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/.premium-1.529801. Accessed December 12, 2013. 8 This follows from a workshop sponsored by the Templeton Foundation held in June 2014. 9 See Hoskins and Tulloch 2017, chapter 1, for discussion on the merits and practices of interdisciplinary work. 10 I am collaborating with Amanda Barnier, Professor of Cognitive Science, on a project that interrogates the reality of and the prospects for interdisciplinarity in memory studies. Our forthcoming book Memory in the Head and in the Wild is contracted to Oxford University Press. See Twitter @memorywild.

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Bibliography Allen, Matthew. 2017. “Memory in Technoscience: Biomedia and the Wettability of Mnemonic Relations.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 190–213. New York: Routledge. Aubert, Maxime et al. 2014. “Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia.” Nature 514: 223–227. Baker, Nicholson. 2002. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York: Vintage Books. Barker, Timothy. 2017. “Television In and Out of Time.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 173–189. New York: Routledge. Bartlett, Frederic C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bolter, Jay David. 1991. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Boyer, Dominic. 2007. Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. Brown, Steven D. and Andrew Hoskins. 2010. “Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology: Mediating and Remembering the 2005 London Bombings.” Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 2(2), 87–107. Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press. Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso. Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dayan, Daniel. “Overhearing in the Public Sphere.” Deliberately Considered, February 24, 2013. http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/02/overhearing-in-the-publicsphere. Accessed November 27, 2015. Donald, Merlin. 2002. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. London: W. W. Norton. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2017. “Tempor(e)alities and Archive-Textures of Media-Connected Memory.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 143–155. New York: Routledge. Floridi, Luciano. 2014. The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuller, Matthew. 2007. Media Ecologies. London: MIT Press. Garde-Hansen, Joanne and Gilson Schwartz. 2017. “Iconomy of Memory: On Remembering as Digital, Civic and Corporate Currency.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 217–233. New York: Routledge. Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World is Watching—Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. London: University of California Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. Ditter, Jr., and Vida Yazdi Ditter. London: Harper & Row. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2006. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8): 159–166. Hepp, Andreas. 2016. “Pioneer Communities: Collective Actors in Deep Mediatisation.” Media, Culture & Society 38(6): 918–933. Hirst, William and David Manier. 2008. “Towards a psychology of collective memory.” Memory 16(3): 183–200.

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Hirst, William and Robert Meksin. 2009. “A social-interactional approach to the retention of collective memories of flashbulb events.” In Flashbulb Memories: New Issues and New Perspectives, edited by Olivier Lumine and Antonietta Curci, 207–225. New York: Psychology Press. Holdsworth, Amy. 2011. Television, Memory and Nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoskins, Andrew. 2001. “New Memory: Mediating History.” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21(4): 191–211. Hoskins, Andrew. 2004a. Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq. London: Continuum. Hoskins, Andrew. 2004b. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time & Society 13(1): 109–127. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011a. “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture.” Memory Studies 4(3): 269–280. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011b. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the connective turn.” Parallax 17(4): 19–31. Hoskins, Andrew. 2014. “The Mediatization of Memory.” In Mediatization of Communication, edited by Knut Lundby, 661–679. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hoskins, Andrew. 2015a. “Are We Losing the History of Warfare?” Archives of War. http://archivesofwar.gla.ac.uk/are-we-losing-the-history-of-warfare-by-andrewhoskins/. Accessed February 2, 2015. Hoskins, Andrew. 2015b. Editorial “Memory Shocks.” Memory Studies 8(2): 127–130. Hoskins, Andrew. 2017a. “Risk Media and the End of Anonymity”. Journal of Information Security and Applications. doi:10.1016/j.jisa.2017.01.005 (early online publication). Hoskins, Andrew. 2017b. “Memory of the Multitude: The End of Collective Memory.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 85–109. New York: Routledge. Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin. 2010. War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoskins, Andrew and John Tulloch. 2016. Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2017. “The Holocaust in the 21st century: digital anxiety, cosmopolitanism on steroids, and never again genocide without memory.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 110–140. New York: Routledge. Kelly, Kevin. 2005. “We are the web”. Wired. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/ tech.html. Accessed February 12, 2012. Kroker, Arthur. 2014. Exits to the Posthuman Future. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2017. “The Media End: Digital Afterlife Agencies and Technoexistential Closure.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 48–84. New York: Routledge. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Translated by S. Rendall & E. Claman. New York: Columbia University Press. Lowenthal, David. 2012. “The Past Made Present”. Historically Speaking, 2–6. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Menary, Richard, Ed. 2010. The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Merrin, William. 2008. “Media Studies 2.0.” http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com. Accessed January 27, 2008. Merrin, William. 2014. Media Studies 2.0. London: Routledge.

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Moss, Michael. 2017. “Memory Institutions, Archives and Digital Disruptions.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 253–278. New York: Routledge. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire”. Translated by Marc Roudebush. Representations 26: 7–25. Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Parikka, Jussi. 2017. “The Underpinning Time: From Digital Memory to Network Microtemporality.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 156–172. New York: Routledge. Pettitt, Thomas. 2011. “Containment and Articulation: Media, Cultural Production, and the Perception of the Material World.” http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/ Pettitt.pdf. Accessed June 14, 2012. Pogačar, Martin. 2016. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-presencing the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pogačar, Martin. 2017. “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 27–47. New York: Routledge. Postman, Neil. 1970. “The Reformed English Curriculum.” In The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by A. C. Eurich, 160–168. New York: Pitman. Ramsay, Debra. 2017. “Tensions in the Interface: The Archive and the Digital.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 279–301. New York: Routledge. Reading, Anna and Tanya Notley. 2017. “Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 234–249. New York: Routledge. Rose, Steven. 1993. The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind. London: Bantam Books. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. 2008. “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Print, Book and Cognition.” Orbis Litterarum 64: 79–80. Schacter, Daniel L. and Michael Welker. 2016. “Editorial: Memory and Connection: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future in Individuals, Groups, and Cultures.” Memory Studies 9(3): 241–244. Shandler, Jeffrey. 1999. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press. Sparrow, Betsy, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner. (2011). “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science (333) 6043: 776–778. Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sutton, John. 2005. “Memory and the Extended Mind: Embodiment, Cognition, and Culture.” Cognitive Processing 6(4) 223–226. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(1): 175–190. de Waal, Martijn. 2007. “From Media Landscape to Media Ecology: The Cultural Implications of Web 2.0.” Open 13: 20–33. Weibel, Peter. 2013. “The Digital Oblivion. Towards a Material History of the Media” in Digital Art Conservation. Preservation of Digital Art: Theory and Practice, edited by Berhard Serexhe. Cologne: zkm. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zielinski, Siegfried. 2006. Deep Time of the Media. London: MIT Press.

SECTION 1

Connectivity

2 CULTURE OF THE PAST Digital connectivity and dispotentiated futures Martin Pogačar

1. Where is the past. . . . . . in the time of instant access, incessant availability and connectivity of everything? Is it always something left behind? Or is it rather eerily present, radically re-presenced? What sort of memories can and do we create, co-create, falsify, and discard? What sort of connections can and do we cultivate or eliminate between people and collectivities, periods and events through digital communications devices? How do we connect with and relate to the past, the present, and the future? To find out, let’s disentangle the palimpsests of the everyday in the media sediments of individual and collective memories and histories. Some time ago, I attended a project meeting in Stockholm, where each participant was asked to bring an object:story that reminded him of another European country. I brought a joystick, the essential part of my Commodore 64, an object that reminded me of my childhood in a country that today no longer exists. The computer was smuggled, to avoid prohibitively high customs duty, in 1984 or 1985 from Western Germany to Ljubljana, Yugoslavia and was used as a family-and-friends gaming device until the early 1990s (when it passed into oblivion). When I was looking for an object to bring to that meeting a good quarter of a century later, I realized (or imagined) that the C64 sitting among my memorabilia was one of the first objects (along with a can of soft drink and a bar of imported chocolate) to have “connected” me to the world outside of what was then Yugoslavia. Playing computer games and watching “Western” and “Eastern” television (not limited to the British Terrahawks or Czechoslovakian Arabela), spliced with the socialist ideology of brotherhood and unity, made me feel during the late 1980s that I was a part of a world that extended far beyond the Iron Curtain (or am I retrofitting my memories?) and into the

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future (that never came to pass).1 The divide seems to have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall (has it?), but it hardly existed for me when the Challenger exploded on 28 January 1986 and when the news of the Chernobyl disaster radiated across the world later on in April that year. These two events transcended political, cultural, ideological, and national borders. Watching the news then, I felt that, as much as these were, respectively, a “Western” and an “Eastern” disaster, they moved and affected humanity at large. We were affected as humans, symbolically and biologically, by the televised collapse of the super-human-techno-future dream. The dream that, fueled by the Cold War space race, peaked in the moon landing of 1969 (Graeber 2012; see also Williams 2013). The man-on-the-moon seems to have corroborated the future in the making. Yet, the dream ran aground in 1986 with the realization of the fragility of humankind in the face of uncontrollable technological and social challenges and disasters (not to mention the natural ones). That humanity is increasingly sharing a common fate was, perhaps, my first encounter with what I would only later come to understand as the globalization of uncertainty. Thus, as much as the fall of the Wall epitomized the end of socialism, it also marked the end of the post-war dream. It was the beginning of what today appears as the first global techno-social limbo. The we who were affected were the we who were connected: by the reported news and by the invisible and imminent threat of the consequences of radiation, which at the time structured the living in the medium of fearful anticipation. Ever since, the individual and intimate geo-positions have been increasingly connected through communications technologies into a worldwide (well, Occidental) assembly of minds and voices. This hints at communications technologies generating synchronic connection and radicalizing the changes in our engagement with the past and memories in their geological (Parikka 2015; Reading, this volume), technical (see Ernst, and Parikka, this volume), and discursive aspects. However, the C64 story and the two tech-disasters also hint at another level of connectivity, which is a crucial element of the present predicament: diachronic connectivity. This implies that distant times and places are forcefully infesting our everyday experientiality, not only as memories, but also as audiovisuals from the past that coexist with heavily audiovisualized present. Increasingly, singularities of past moments salvaged from time in video clips and sounds bites are re-presencing the past in audiovisual exoskeletons of our being together. The snippets of the past are resurrected (media archaeology; see Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; see also Pogačar 2016), but also curated, filtered, and discarded (microarchiving; see Pogačar 2016).2 As much as mediation of the past is bound to the corporately policed connectivity of digital platforms (van Dijck 2013; Hoskins 2011), the past nevertheless finds illustrious and inventive ways to reveal and conceal the affective approaches and renditions of things and people, events and periods past and passed.

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In many ways, the past is ghostly alive and randomly resurfacing and we are incessantly seduced into connecting with the many different pasts as we navigate the material and virtual places both as media archaeologists and micro-archivists. This is all the more pertinent to the post-socialist condition, where the remembering individuals and collectivities are technologically equipped to disinter and re-presence fragments of the past that, in purging history of any positive connection to the socialist past, would ideally have been forgotten or radically reframed. Instead, the abundance of audiovisuals grants the remembering individual, the post-socialist memonaut, a resource to re-presence the past and to recover the consistency and legitimacy of individual histories. Alas, as we do so, we are also contributing to the emergence of the extended now (Berlant 2011, 4) or, as Helga Nowotny observed a quarter of a century ago, the extended present (Nowotny 1989). This phenomenon resonates with the idea of digital eternity that, Amanda Lagerkvist argues, “relates to both human agencies in the service of our purposeful intent to create, perform, quantify, edit and preserve our selves, and non-human agencies that produce a sense of partial self-occlusion, in saving just about everything we did online without our consent”. And it relates to the issue of ending/closure, particularly in accommodating the eternality of now with the prospect of it ending (Lagerkvist, this volume). To see how the ubiquity of mediated re-presences and our entanglements with mediated events and things that are gone but hauntingly here reconfigures our presents and (repurposes) our memories, I navigate in the following through the multi-layered connectivities of the human:tech:time complex, crossfading synchronic and diachronic aspects of connectivity (epitomized by Nietzsche’s haunting specters of the past, 1980, 8). Along the way, I trace how these relationships are implicated in the culture of the past and the “crisis of the future” (Pomian in Nowotny 2016, 15). In addition, I ask whether and how can we think about alternatives in the time of digital connectivity and dispotentiated futures.3 I ask how and to what purposes and effects the past is re-presenced in and through digital media, as well as in (practices of ) memory. Both the (idea of the) past and (the concept of) memory seem increasingly impermanent and dynamic, becoming the feedback ingredient of present operations (Ernst, this volume).4 Technological affordances that enable and drive digital connectivity, or hyperconnectivity as a “multidimensional mechanism of late modernity in its affordance of temporal proximity (and distance) to the past and to an emergent future” (Hoskins and Tulloch 2016, 9), facilitate the fragmentation of grand narratives into individual, intimate, affective renditions of the past. This forms the basis of the phenomenon of co-historicity,5 which presupposes that individuals construct their personalized historical timelines, their affective intimate interpretations of their singular pasts out of commoditized pop-cultural content (see Landsberg 2015, see also Lizardi 2015). In this discussion, I explore the potential of audiovisual re-presencing of the past as a tactic of cultural and political resistance to

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the impassivity and the inbuilt obsolescence of the technological framework of memory.

2. Collapsing times and the culture of the past The C64 vignette, a case of multi-layered re-presencing of the past and an exercise in retrofitting memory, gives insight into how an individual is connected, through an object and through technology, synchronically and diachronically, with her former self and others, with his past and history, as well as with the present (that “moment in time when we decide to lower our expectations of the future or to abandon some of the dear traditions of the past in order to pass through the narrow gate of the here-and-now” (Groys 2009)). The vignette suggests that the connective tissue of memory is often formed through media (as was the case in news about the world) and around an object that becomes important for our inner life. Objects, Sherry Turkle notes, are conduits “to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” and they “help us think about such things as number, space, time, causality, and life” (2007, 307, 309). It is through objects that we tell stories and direct time’s arrow. Doing so, and to do so, we invest objects with context (and read contexts from objects), with what Sara Ahmed calls the “sticky whatever” (2010, 33). What is more: as we contextualize objects, we configure the field of shared skills, experientiality, and intentionality. Michael Tomasello argues that “skills and motivations of shared intentionality [. . .] constitute what we may call the cooperative infrastructure of human communication” (2008, 7). A material object is defined by the imprint of time that is manifest in the object’s traces of use, including signs of material deterioration or, when speaking of technological machines and devices, of malfunctioning or breakdown. The imprint of time is indexical of the object’s existence in time and of its presence in human hands. However, in the era of the digitization of nearly everything, objects as well as events and people are increasingly coded into audiovisuals;6 they are dematerialized, mediatized (on mediatization, see Pogačar 2016), and spread across digital landscapes (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013). Thus, they are saved from physical ruin and may attain greater presence and visibility. Yet, this also implies surrendering the marks of physical decay to glitches in code execution, as Svetlana Boym observed in her interaction with a printer a decade ago (Boym 2010, 5). Eventually, and to the horror of an analogue ruinophile, this may also deprive us of physical contact with an object and from experiencing the very corrosiveness of time under our fingers. For it is the ruins, the ultimate timeafflicted materiality, that “make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time” (Boym 2011). This is all the more palpable in planned obsolescence and the new!now!-hype that render material objects, and along the way their histories, readily disposable. When interacting with digital objects, we

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are engaging with an instantly available amassment of non-material audiovisuals through which the past is not only re-presenced, invested by our own ideas and biases and the sticky whatever, but also stripped of chronicity. In this, several layers of tech-enabled connectivity can be detected: between individuals and collectivities, between users and communications devices and platforms, and between different temporalities and historicities (on con-temporaneity, see Barker, this volume). The connectivity complex demands that we ask how the human:media (technology) entanglement structures and configures our relationship to ourselves and others and to the past, the present, and the future—in other words, how digital media technologies and our entanglement in the corporate-networked infrastructures reconfigure our being in the world. In the “world after mediatization” temporal borders appear painfully porous. Hence I propose to approach the past not just as a geographical or temporal category, but, as Boris Buden suggests, a cultural one: Just like culture, the past is everywhere and in everything that surrounds us, it is in front of us, just as it is behind us. The past is not something we have left behind to look back to, it is also something which we have not yet set our foot into, something that is just as new as it is alien, unknown, foreign, different, in short, another culture (Buden, Ž ilnik 2013, 20). Buden opens up a perspective on seeing the present predicament through the lenses of the culture of the past. The central idea of the concept is that the 20th century, as the most thoroughly documented, audiovisualized, and mediatized historical period so far, has been excessively mediatized and mediated. The 20th-century audiovisuals permeate experiential realities today, proliferating in public and private ranges of the everyday. Mediated interactions and crossplatform spreadability make the past increasingly available as a historical present and commodity. Think about a viral video that pops up on your preferred social media news feed; you have seen it already, but have little or no idea when or where (and even fewer resources to establish these facts). Intriguingly, another person might see the same video for the first time and classify the event as a new experience. The presence, or rather re-presence of audiovisions of the past in our daily connected lives, be it in streamed oldies or edited memorial videos on YouTube (see Pogačar 2016), represents an important part of our experiential realities. At the same time it is an assembly of audiovisual exoskeletons of minds that position us within the habitual condition of memory paradoxically “facilitating both a lightness of being: an immediacy and ephemerality of hyperconnectivity between selves, machines, etc., but also the burden of the potential exposure of all of one’s traces, making the digital self forever accountable to an unfathomable deep glut of their past” (Hoskins, this volume). Consequently, the present is increasingly perceived affectively, as Lauren Berlant argues: “the present is what makes itself

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present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event or an epoch on which we can look back” (Berlant 2011, 4). Living among audiovisual exoskeletons of the past contributes to approaching the past all the more affectively: “If the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect, it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did the present begin?) are also always there for debate” (Berlant 2011, 4). The openness to debate, the fact that the present is under revision, primarily due to the way we produce and consume media content, gives further impetus to seeing the present as a culture of the past. Living in the extended now is further exacerbated by the historicity paradox. It stems from the “disconcertingly alien character of the past—such that it has to be domesticated with some contemporary significance or lesson before we can approach it [which] is doubtless the result of the sheer speed of contemporary change [in which] much of what had for decades, even centuries, seemed familiar and permanent is now passing rapidly into oblivion” (Judt 2009, 5). On the other hand, the extended now somehow tries to counterbalance the off-rhythm acceleration by sedating the flow of time. Alas, out of this paradox, the future emerges wounded. Ursula K. Heise argues, “Since the belief in inevitable and steady progress is no longer convincing, the future cannot function any longer as the screen for the projection of wish fulfilments; neither can it be used as the space to which existential fears are relegated, because long-term problems increasingly manifest themselves in the present” (Heise 1997, 29). This further intensifies the scope of “present impervious” that arises from Bernard Stiegler’s views of the present condition: The audiovisual techniques of marketing lead [. . .] to a situation where, through the images I see and the sounds I hear, the past tends to become the same as my neighbour’s [. . .] Being increasingly constituted by the images and sounds that the media streams through my consciousness, as well as by the objects (and relationships with these objects) that these images lead me to consume, my past is less and less differentiated from that of other people. (2014, 6) In this view, the imaginaries of the past are, on the one hand, increasingly universalized while, on the other hand, uniqueness and excess are increasingly policed. Tony Judt, however, offers a different perspective: “In the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the particular information or ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears” (Judt 2009, 5). Hence, not only are we

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hard pressed by losing the future, we are also—through the many intimate and affective renditions of bygones—losing our past. The small window for individual agency, however, opens in grassroots memorial activities. It is true that, to some extent, such interventions are made uniform by the use of widely recognizable audiovisuals. Yet, they are also individually driven in their domestication and application of technology as the condition of the exteriorization of intimate and affective (off-mainstream) practices of memory and remembering. Although the emerging grassroots memory practices succumb to the structural, corporate, and technological apparatuses and their (social action) constraints, they also elude these constraints by negotiating and revising the institutionalized forms and canons of memory and remembering. A crucial aspect of the culture of the past is the role of the digitization of material objects. We consume media objects, which—unlike material objects bound to the physical appearance and symbolic construction of meaning—are defined by the characteristics of what Stiegler calls temporal objects: “An object is temporal, in the Husserlian sense, to the extent that it is constituted by the flow of its passing, as opposed to an object like a piece of chalk, which is constituted through its stability, by the fact that it does not flow” (2014, 17). This complicates things further, as it emphasizes the transitoriness, impermanence, and fluidity of exoskeletonal audiovisual architecture (see Ernst, this chapter). It also redefines our connection with the past, the object, and the event as fleeting. This, on the one hand, reinforces the presence of the past in the extended now, while, on the other, it dilutes its historicity: as much as the past is irrepressibly re-presenced and instrumentalized for present-day (political and individual) purposes, it is also overwhelmingly unstable. What is more, the ubiquitous presence of the past in the present is suffocating the very idea of the future. The overwhelming culture of the past lies at the interstices of what Alex Williams calls chronosickness (Williams 2013, 9) and what Laurent Berlant understands as “impasse”. Impasse “usually designates a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward [but for Berlant it denotes] a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help clarify things” (Berlant 2011, 4). The urge to make sense of things through objects (as the connective tissue of memory) explains both the obsession with collecting material and co-creating (digital) media objects. Thus, the digitally re-presenced past is not unlike a ghost that turns up unexpectedly and vanishes no sooner than that: “This ghost takes many different forms. Sometimes it’s a photograph uploaded to Facebook and stumbled upon at 2 or 3 am, an old snapshot in which not all those photographed are still alive. At other times, the ghost is an email, a former acquaintance reaching out from beyond the grave of a friendship, attempting to channel our old selves. Occasionally, the ghost is just the buzzing of a fully-charged phone, oddly similar to

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a whisper. Always, the ghost is no ghost at all but rather a metaphor, a memory, a foothold between this world and one that no longer exists” (Sasseen 2016). The experiential world is enhanced by the spreadable and archivable audiovisions of our relationships, travels, and culinary achievements, likes and dislikes, fleeting presences and absences. It is structured by what Paul Frosh calls kinesthetic sociability, which “connects the bodies of individuals, their mobility through physical and informational spaces, and the micro-bodily hand and eye movements they use to operate digital interfaces” (2015, 1608). It is in this vein that fleeting social media interventions can be understood: Heart emoticon It is so precious to go through all the wishes one by one . . . [. . .] what is beautiful about it is the process of reflecting on all the memories that come to my mind and moments I spent with people whose messages I’m reading heart emoticon it’s like reviving and re-living my past and also plan[n]ing future joys. Thanks for that! (Stanojev 2016) If we are immersed in the media-reinforced culture of the past, substantiated by the malfunctioning economic system and political myopia (radically foreclosing the potentiality of the future), I argue below that what no longer exists is not just the world that no longer exists (the past), but instead the idea of the future itself.

3. What future? No future! The post-scarcity period (Hoskins 2011) emerging in the wake of the frozen Cold War and of the rise of the new world order appears to be in denial of much positive imagining of the future. Post-socialist hopes of the abundant capitalist future and the related “violence of organized forgetting” (Giroux in Hoskins and Tulloch 2016, 11) are implicated in “hyperconnectivity and its neoliberal promise of hyperabundance (of information, data, knowledge) [that] both perpetuates and disguises traditional scarcities and inequalities (that economists take as foundational)” (Hoskins and Tulloch 2016, 308). In this view, the present “involves the projecting backward of the intensity and messiness of a digital present and the immediacy of its contestations onto a past that once appeared as relatively settled and stable” (309). The destabilized past becomes the source of contradictory fuel of the culture of the past: nostalgia and revision. Consequently, Benjamin Noys notes: “What we don’t manufacture anymore is the future. Instead we dwell in a generalised nostalgia [implied in] [t]he stasis of neo-liberalism, which concludes the only way into the future is more of the same, [which] is mimicked by a plundering of the past to grab images and forms of acceleration that reappear as merely static moments [Hence, we are] [u]nable to accede to the future, or even a faith or belief in the future, [and] can only live out the blockage of our present moment” (2013).

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This is paralleled, following Berlant, by the world cast in a post-good-life stage, when “the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like an accomplishment”. What is more, the present is marked by “the dissolution of optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy” (Berlant 2011, 3). The end of the good life is accompanied by the ever-present ideology of austerity that, Owen Hatherley argues (for Britain, but applicable elsewhere), is marked by the “dominance of a certain ‘structure of feeling’ (to use Raymond Williams’s phrase), where austerity’s look, its historical syncretism, its rejection of the real human advances of the post-war era had seeped into the consciousness of people, who would, when pressed, probably be in opposition to it, even as they performed its aesthetics” (Hatherley 2016, 5).7 From the post-socialist perspective, the political, ideological, and cultural borders installed in what remained of Yugoslavia after 1991 framed a politicoeconomic and socio-cultural transformation that played out contemporaneously with similar processes in the rest of the East. This transformation was contemporaneous with the massive reconfiguration of the world at large, denying (or unseeing) the threat of climate change, the consequences of the depletion of natural resources and ensuing massive migrations, topped with the financialization of debt and the apparent urge to privatize everything. For the last generation of the children of socialism, as well as, apparently, for the children of capitalism, the future we were made to believe was just around the corner never actually materialized. David Graeber notes: A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like [. . .] a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with. (Graeber 2012) At any other moment in history, the past after system/regime change would have been considered dead and the future prospects abundant, as was the case in the post-World War II ideology that championed the future and was prepared to invest in it, financially and symbolically. History was not disconnected from the present under the false choice: if we want the future, we must discard the past. Regardless, at the beginning of the 21st century, digital-media-driven exoskeletonizing of the quotidian, storytelling and memory—that gives voice to the individual, subaltern, and off-mainstream—contributes to rewriting the 20th-century past into

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an early 21st-century present. The phenomena of nostalgia and memory boom demonstrate that the amputation of (emancipatory) history for a better future does not work. Instead, it leads to a turning back in search of the “lost whatever”. It de-grounds the present and contributes to the existential uncertainty and precarization of living. However, the history of the 20th century in digital media interventions is not necessarily re-presenced as a precedent for a better future, but instead as a better past. Re-presenced across screens and devices, as well as in many grassroots alternatives to the present-day politico-economic order, it is the past where stability and inspiration is sought to tackle today’s worries. The emergence of the culture of the past is intimately related to the worrying inability (if not outright Denkverbot, or prohibition to think critically)8 to collectively imagine an alternative to the present. Or as Fredric Jameson argued: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism” (2005, 199). This inability is at least partly rooted in the dispotentiation of utopia, which Erich Fromm traced to “the fact that people either see no alternatives to the status quo or they are presented with false and demagogic alternatives only in order to prove to them all the better that there are no real alternatives” (2005, 55). Hence, I argue, one of the main obstacles to imagining the future lies in irrational rejection of utopia as an open horizon of possibility.9 Utopianism radically marked the post-World War II period and has successfully prolonged the legacies of the Enlightenment project by incorporating elements of futurism. It has driven (and was driven by) technology, including automobiles and media, as well as space programs and the introduction of the computer into everyday life, not to mention the ambitions of creating a knowledge rhizome through the internet and connectivity. Yet, ever since the late 1970s, and particularly after the end of the Cold War, any kind of utopia has been increasingly discouraged. What is more, the turn toward market-driven research and development annihilated the possibility to practise science for the purpose of discovery, which is also part of Graeber’s question quoted above.10 This has consequences for how the past and the present are conceptualized and conceived of in the early 21st century. Digital communications technologies, decidedly tied to the ideology of incessant progress, the corporate logic of profit, and intricate corporate-state systems of control entangle users in highly controlled and omnipresent regimes of connectivity. This contributes to what has crystallized after 1989 in the Occident as an atrophied socio-political imagination. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams note, “While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled” (2013). Thus, Srnicek and Williams continue, we are not living in “a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, [but] in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration” (2013). Paradoxically, this kind of

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progress masks the absent political and social vision that might open up the prospect of a better future, while its absence contributes to renationalization and the relegitimation of fascist and racist discourses that flourish in an environment of “political inertia, cultural hyperstasis, ecological collapse and a growing resource crisis” (Williams 2013, 4). The culture of the past is embedded in a milieu that Franco Berardi calls “after the future” (Berardi 2009). It emphasizes the crucial aspect of the formation of the culture of the past at a time when (re)asserting human dignity and human rights seems increasingly utopic. The acute social inability and political unwillingness to actively engage in “dreaming up a better world” and to meaningfully connect to the past in order to connect to an idea of the future is most disturbingly present in the former socialist East, but hardly absent in the former capitalist West. In contrast to the 19th and particularly the 20th century, when the idea and the myth of the future were constructed as a positive utopia, utopia today (“notwithstanding the darkness of the present, the future will be bright”), Berardi notes, has turned into the Dystopian Kingdom (Berardi 2009, 17). Berardi further argues, “For the people of the Middle Ages, living in the sphere of a theological culture, perfection was placed in the past, in the time when God created the universe and humankind” (Berardi 2009, 18). This observation is crucial for the present discussion: are we, in a time of radically dispotentiated economic and political alternatives, not re-entering technologically enhanced orality? Are we, immersed in Buden’s culture of the past, not returning to a reincarnation of the Middle Ages, seeking a way out of the darkness of the (yes, technologically embellished) present by dreaming up a better past instead of a future? And, if we “re-presence” Neil Postman’s idea about the effects of visual literacy on the construction of the symbolic and the practical division of childhood and adulthood (Postman 1984), we can insinuate the following: digital audiovisualizations of quotidian life-worlds and culture is leading to renegotiating the contours of the rational and the irrational, the interchangeability of science and opinion, as well as of the democratic and totalitarian. Are the mediated audiovisuals not in fact radically displacing the humanly unique ability to connect over time and space through a radically abstracted technology of writing (and its spinoffs)? Are the audiovisuals not affecting our ability to see the world around us, overwriting the physical reality with temporal objects, the elusive audiovisual exoskeletons of the mind, that displace our connection to the physical world around us? When Berardi says that “the future is the space we do not yet know; we have yet to discover and exploit it” (Berardi 2009, 24), it is just too easy to replace the “future” with the “past” . . . And we’re back to Buden and past as “something that is just as new as it is alien, unknown, foreign, different, in short, another culture”. In this view, the mediated past we are immersed in is as alien as it is ghostly. It is re-presenced, yet untouchable, inscentible, inexperiencable. The past is decidedly lost and the future seems nowhere in sight. What is more,

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“events are sucked into archives rather than projected into the future. Our media continually brings us closer to t[he] metaphysical deformation and re-focuses users intensely on the present” (Barker, this volume). The past (incessant remediation) and the future (incessant premediation) are veiled behind audiovisuals and behind each new political, ideological, and historiographical intervention. Increasingly, the past and the future are escaping the grip of top-down definition, giving room to increasingly individual, fragmented, and affective actions, resonating with mediatized and elusive commodities invested with the sticky whatever, with hopes, illusions and delusions, fears and doubts.

4. The Past Sideways: Co-historicity and the off-modern Looking at the present as the culture of the past exposes the antagonism between development and preservation. It implicitly confronts the ideology of progress with nostalgia. This antagonism is firmly placed at the very foundation of the present predicament. It is informed by the legacies of the 20th century that “began with futuristic utopias and dreams of unending development and ended with nostalgia and quests for restoration”. It springs from the clash of modernities, Svetlana Boym further argues, instigated by the “present postindustrial economic crisis and preindustrial cultural conflict [that is in fact] a clash of eccentric modernities that are out of synch and out of phase with each other both temporally and spatially” (Boym 2010, 1). Or, following Williams, Srnicek, and Graeber, we could argue that, having fallen chronosick, we are witness to the clash of the legacy of Enlightenment modernity and neoliberal modernity,11 wherein multiple micro-clashes unfold between different understandings of the past. These different understandings are facilitated by fragmented and personalized audiovisual exoskeletons and emergent co-historicity. This grounds the perception of disruption caused by socio-political perturbations of technological innovation and is manifest in the apparent mismatch in the development of technologies of communication and their social adaptation. These clashes inhibit the prospect of constructing a future and of connectivity with the imagined future, reinforcing instead connectivity with the remediated past. In this constellation, the (perception of the) present is incredibly unstable. Yearning for stability may be seen as a sign of the inability to adapt and conform to reality, or as a sign of conservatism and backwardness. But what good does such reasoning do to mitigate the situation? It rather contributes to the fragmentation of the sense of being, always excluding the inept from the ways of the world. Instead, the position of yearning might just as well be a tactic to defy the oppressive logic of the new!-now!-hype. A tactical approach to this condition, Boym suggests, is a logic of edginess as those broad margins where one could try to live deliberately, against all odds in the age of shrinking space and resources and forever accelerating rhythms [. . .]

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This is the logic that exposes the wounds, cuts, scars, ruins, the afterimage of touch [. . .] Edginess requires longer duration. Only at the risk of being outmoded could one stay contemporary. (2010, 5) Interpersonal connectivity, as noted above, is characterized by inequality and exclusion, by the fragmentation of attention and the atrophy of the social. It is also marked by doing things on the fly and is prone to stitching info-bits and pieces into a story or a history. This practice reinforces the extended now and exposes the “general forces that dominate the production of historical sensorium” (Berlant 2011, 9). Overall, the fragmented attention and the mediatization of life bring about a phenomenon in which an individual in her existential uncertainty is faced with a challenge to negotiate the present predicament and make sense of being here and now. As Isabell Lorey put it, precarization is “more than insecure jobs, more than the lack of security given by waged employment. By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation. It is threat and coercion, even while it opens up new possibilities of living and working. Precarization means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency” (2015, 21). Or, as Berlant notes, the present is subdued to the genre of crisis, “rhetorically turning an ongoing condition into an intensified situation in which extensive threats to survival are said to dominate the reproduction of life” (2011, 7). From this perspective, ruinophilia can be seen as an example of a lateral move, as hinted at in Boym’s logic of edginess. Ruins can be seen as physical objects from the past that proudly wear and bear the pressure of time. They can, however, also be seen as a “prism of vision and a mode of acting and creating in the world that tries to remap the contemporary landscape filled with the ruins of spectacular real estate development and construction sites of the newly rediscovered national heritage”. Boym further argues that ruins metaphorically delimit our present: “modernity is our antiquity [. . .] we live with its ruins, which we incorporate into our present, leaving deliberate scars or disguising our age marks with the uplifting cream of oblivion” (Boym 2010, 3). In this, we can detect individual agency navigating between cherishing the scars (unforgetting) and masking them (unseeing). This makes media archaeologists of us all and gives us dynamic micro-archives where we thought we had stable narratives. To advance this perspective, Boym proposes another perspective: off-modern is a concept that denotes a “detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernization and progress” (Boym 2010, 1). When transposed to the field of memory, digital communications, and connectivity, the off-modern as a logic and a force invites us to consider being in the culture of the past laterally instead of teleologically. Helga Nowotny similarly observes in relation to the condition of uncertainty: “It makes room for the unexpected and

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lets the new enter through the cracks in the wall that seemed impenetrable. At the interface, where science and technology meet the messiness of the social world, it opens up a hitherto largely invisible world—the world of complexity” (Nowotny 2015, 8). Being in history in the era of digital media opens up the possibility to think about agency and meaning-making through the concept of co-historicity, which, to adapt Boym, has a “quality of improvisation, of a conjecture that doesn’t distort the facts but explores their echoes, residues, implications, shadows. The [co-historical] is not ashamed of unconventional aesthetic judgement that puts the world off kilter” (Boym 2010, 3). Co-historicity refers to the condition of everyday life unfolding through digital media. It presupposes that the age of the ubiquity and abundance of mediatized and mediated histories and memories is complicated by both Stiegler’s and Judt’s observations. These indicate the complexities of individuals who create their individual audiovisual timelines that often disregard, contest, or complement historiography, contributing along the way to the emergence of the extended now, elective histories, and historical conflation. Co-historicity presupposes an individual laterally engaging with other individuals, media devices, and the past (by re-presencing it). If we look at YouTube or Facebook in search of re-presences of the past, we can find digital memorial videos and historical pages that commemorate but also provide the informational exoskeleton of present-day communication and meaning-making (see Pogačar 2016). Audiovisual exoskeletons of memory and corresponding practices of storytelling demonstrate that different competing and complementing micro-histories can co-exist and challenge both grand histories and each another. When grand hi/stories are no longer the domain of the state but rather of personal preferences and consumer habits, this not only means that social allegiances are constructed, in part at least, in response to perceived hype and clickbait info-pieces. It also means that the potential of the future (we do still dream about a better future) dispersed across platforms and minds, is nevertheless deeply thought about (as is evident in numerous attempts to think about the prospects of the alternatives to the present, spanning for example the leftist grassroots initiatives and the rising right-wing parties). Such initiatives—entangled in the laterality of co-historicity and off-modernity— hint at what-if history, at history’s hidden and unseen, unrealized and annihilated potentials, by revealing the “pentimenti, the compositional exercises, the palimpsests of forgotten knowledge and practice” (Boym 2010, 4), for example, recently, of fascism and anti-fascism, neoliberalism and socialism. Much like the history of technological inventions and innovations is marked by technological exaptations,12 co-historicity is marked by exaptation of historical events, by individual or grassroots interventions into the historical sensorium. In the process of historical exaptation, past events are decontextualized, repurposed, and turned into an affective individual historical narrative to be followed, or not, by other historical communities that share our compassions. Co-historicity thus not only becomes

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a vehicle to interpret the past, but foremost a tool to interpret the present-inpotentio: “possible if often improbable developments” (Boym 2010, 4). This may seem somewhat at odds with the concept of the impasse ingrained into the idea of the culture of the past. In the culture of the past, the present is disconnected from an inclusive, mobilizing, or emancipatory connection to the future, while nourishing the emergency exit in re-appropriating the past. In the post-socialist condition, this not only means the re-appropriation of the past as a corrective to the bleak future, but in fact also entails reclaiming the past and intimate histories that have been cut off politically, historically, and ideologically. And it is through this window of potential agency that co-historicity, as a concept and as practice, opens up the impasse to the prospect of action and reinventing the future.

5. Conclusion: Re-potentiating the future? If we look at the present from the perspective of the varied and multi-layered mediations, we can see that media-technological developments are hardly matched by corresponding social, cultural, and political responses. The present is marked by an existential uncertainty, exacerbated by the political and cultural inability or unwillingness to think about the future as the opening of the horizon of possibility. Media technologies play an important role in this, offering the tool and the environment to capture the present and the past as symbolic anchoring. Yet, as I have argued above, this at the same time paralyzes—under the deluge of commoditized, mediated pasts and memories—the present and its capacity to imagine the future. When thinking about the impasse and co-historicity in the extended now from the perspective of the culture of the past and the dispotentiated future, I would like to draw attention to another aspect noted by Buden. Repressive infantilization is a phenomenon characteristic of post-socialist “transition to democracy” that turned the citizens, movements, and civil society that had managed to topple communism in Europe (and who in doing so professed high levels of self-awareness and political maturity) into immature children in dire need to be taught how to properly live the freedom they have won: “A patronized child as political being enjoys a sort of delayed freedom. And in case one day the promise of freedom turns out to be a delusion, one can always say that it is just a children’s fairy tale” (Buden 2010, 2). Intriguingly, Buden’s perspective on infantilization extends Graeber’s position on the mis-promised future. Buden makes more explicit the consequences of enforced immaturity, which may be most visible in the post-socialist condition. Yet, Zdenka Badovinac argues: “If attitudes in both East and West influenced each other mutually during the Cold War, then today the various interminglings of their processes can only testify to a further accelerated global dimension” (Badovinac 2009, 2), then infantilization is likewise characteristic of consumerist

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neoliberal predicament at large. It unfolds the last 70 years into a carpet of memories of failed futures and incapacitated citizens: “In the strange world of postcommunism, democracy appears as a goal to be reached and a lost object. Thus for the ‘children of communism’ the prospect of a better future opens up only from a melancholic perspective. [The present] doesn’t give them free choice” (Buden 2010). What is crucial in this is that infantilization inhibits autonomy and abstracts the responsibility of the individual and collectivity. How does this enhance the discussion on memory and digital connectivity? The connection might not be imminent, but is nevertheless important. It allows us to see the present predicament in the wider historical and political, as well as intimate and quotidian perspectives. This is why I have emphasized—through the digitization of object:stories as the connective tissue of memory—the relationship between different temporalities, different histories, and different political contexts. I have attempted to do so through the connectivity complex that allowed me to approach the issue of thinking about the present from the perspective of digital communications technologies and human immersion in the culture of the past. Seeing the present impasse in the wider historical context enables us to observe longer-term processes, as well as to detect trends that reflect not only the present of the now, but also to incorporate the persevering legacies of the 20th century. The focus on the post-socialist condition, on the one hand, expounds certain differences, while, precisely from the perspective of political infantilization and dispotentiated futures, it proves indicative of the situation across the Occident. Buden argues that the question of the future in postcommunism is considered as already answered, and the question of the past does not make sense. One does not expect the children (or adults) of postcommunism to have a critically reflected memory of the communist past. It is precisely for this reason that they have been made into children, namely in order not to remember this past. As children they don’t have one (2010, 7). This has been incarnated in post-socialist historical revisionism, which to a large extent has been contested also through grassroots memorial interventions in social media. However, if we take into account Hatherley’s argument, the past is tendentiously misused elsewhere as well. The ideological imposition of a new historical montage aims to dispossess the individual of her historical sensorium and agency. Fixation in the culture of the past in this respect serves political ideologies quite well. In effect, historical amnesia, in the service of whatever contemporary political and ideological needs, deprives individuals and societies of a meaningful past (and memories). When it seems that no alternative is possible and the foreseeable future hardly presents something to look forward to (climate change, inability to see and address

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the humanitarian catastrophe at the moats of Fortress Europe, austerity versus flying cars and interstellar travel), it is crucial to acknowledge the importance of storytelling, not only for maintaining collectivity here and now, but also for its perseverance over time. In this respect, (knowledge of ) the past is crucial, and if individuals and collectivities are denied it, they will, in the urge to tell stories (in order to mitigate the unnerving effects of uncertainty), go about looking for one: to connect with the past and the future, and with others, to ground the present in a legitimate narrative. The post-socialist case of memory in digital media demonstrates that, although the culture of the past to some extent forecloses the horizon of possibility, it does in fact also reconstruct a shattered past as the necessary condition to construct the future (see Pogačar 2016). Digital media, spreadability, and interpersonal connectivity (for example, in emigrant and diaspora communities) through the use of shareable audiovisuals played an important part in the processes of post-socialist transition. It was the connectivity across time and space that allowed for unforgetting of the socialist past and also for the bitter realization that the construction of the present and the future radically rests on effective (re-)construction of the past. Digital connectivity arguably offers an answer to the political obliteration of the past and the precarization of the present, which contribute to the atrophy of the social. But does it also provide a tool to tackle the dispotentiated future? This is not an easy question, not least because it is difficult to mobilize collectivities to conjure a vision of a better future. The present, whether seen as the age of agnotology, the culture of the past, impasse, or an extended now and co-historicity, can thus be seen as generating powerlessness and passivity. However, as Adorno noted: “Anyone who wishes to bring about change can probably only do so at all by turning that very impotence, and their own impotence, into an active ingredient in their own thinking and maybe in their own actions, too” (quoted in Buden 2010, 10). Similarly, Isabell Lorey argues, “The precondition for the unfolding of [. . .] constituent power is the common refusal or the common exodus, not to linger in negation or deconstructive questioning, but rather to be able to invent a re-composition. The first step in this direction is disobedience, the refusal of servile virtuosity” (Lorey 2015, 204). Again, Benjamin Noys: “To heal the broken present, stuck in an iterative temporality of the GIF, which accelerates in place, requires extraction of new forces that can break this stuttering into movement” (Noys 2013). In response to the production of insecurity, Lorey suggests that through “permanent singular refusals, the small sabotages and resistances of precarious everyday life, a potentiality emerges that subverts the disciplining of governmental precarization time and again” (Lorey 2015, 212). What is more, precarization in the context of media technologies and the ideology of the new exposes the mechanisms of the production of insecurity and uncertainty. These mechanisms, however, can be displaced and disrupted by a turn to the off-modern, as well as to the practices

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of media archaeology and micro-archiving. Thus, individual affective entanglement with the present and the past opens up both to practical and theoretical questioning of and contesting the parameters of the present predicament. This is a move away from the limits of (post-socialist) nostalgic re-presencing of the past (passivity) and historical revisionism and hysterical anti-communism. It invites us to think about the challenge of the future as a “democratic challenge, [it is] a question of societal participation and of responsible innovation in which citizens are not expected to only accept the future as it has been designed for them, rather, they must be enabled to appropriate their future in the making” (Nowotny 2016, 30). Only then could we reimagine a way out of the culture of the past and the impasse (and Denkverbot), and reinvent futurity.

Notes 1 Deeply indicative of the present predicament is David Graeber’s question: “Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late 20th century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?” (Graeber 2012). 2 By “micro-archiving”, I mean the practice of collecting and archiving bits and pieces of audiovisuals, typically publishing them curated in short memorial videos (YouTube) or Facebook posts (see Pogačar 2016). 3 The term “dispotentiated future” implies that the future today is robbed of its potential to act as a mobilizing agent in the present. 4 Memory in digital media is understood as a dynamic complex of thinking about, making sense of and deciphering the absences and presences (and overlaps) of represenced pasts. It is understood as a practice of unseeing and unforgetting of the past in the present. It is seen as a practice of exteriorization and mediation not only of (the way we construe) the past, but also as a political and ideological tool that we use to confront, pre-mediate and the future. 5 By “co-historicity” (further detailed below), I refer to the condition of the present that suggests that we live in a time of audiovisualized histories and memories that are ready to be kneaded and knitted into personal narratives. This is related to Timothy Barker’s argument that “Heidegger’s original formulation of being-in-theworld is replaced by an attempt at being with multiple presents simultaneously” (Barker, this volume). 6 See for instance Yugoslavia—Virtual Museum, http://yugoslavian.blogspot.si/. 7 Hatherley makes the case for Britain and the appropriation of the 1945 austerity to the 2015 austerity discourse. Effectively, this implies fabricating the historical argument to justify present-day ideological make-up. He discards the concept “Keep calm and carry on”, which in today’s parlance could easily be seen as reinforcing the impasse characteristic of the culture of the past (see below). 8 Slavoj Ž ižek exemplifies the ideological function of the Denkverbot: “The moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge

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the existing order, the answer is immediately: ‘Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!’ The ideological function of the constant reference to the Holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: ‘Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!’” (Ž ižek). Denkverbot is the central ideological mechanism of problematizing any positive reference to post-World War II socialism. Oscar Wilde wrote about utopia: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” (see Wilde, 36) Recent developments in neuroscience, discoveries of brain plasticity, growing limbs and tissue from stem cells, AI, and digital-immortality hype, as well as the commercialized terror of the always-new might indicate otherwise. What is more, the development of human communication (including thought communication) technologies hints at unprecedented ways and degrees of how human minds, devices, and temporalities can be connected (it is the implementation that is questionable). We have yet to see what Elon Musk’s Mars colonization utopia leads to. Modernity is here understood not as “a historical period but a discursive rhetoric, that is, a persuasive discourse promising progress, civilization and happiness” (Mignolo in Badovinac 2009, 1). This is particularly relevant in the post-socialist perspective: “Despite the fact that socialism was itself a unique project of modernity with its own globalization project, its own colonialism, and its own (pop) culture and art, the socialist countries, like other parts of the world, were hardly immune to Westernizing processes” (Badovinac 2009, 1). Exaptation is the phenomenon of a technology or a biological feature (in the term’s original use) that is used for a different purpose or function than its original use (Boym 2010). Think, for example, about the discrepancy between the intended use and the historical role of the gramophone.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Badovinac, Zdenka. 2009. “Contemporaneity as Points of Connection.” e-flux journal 11. Accessed June 15, 2016. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/contemporaneity-as-points-ofconnection/. Barker, Timothy. 2017. “Television In and Out of Time.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 173–189. New York: Routledge. Berardi, Franco. 2009. After the Future. London: Polity Press. Berlant, Laurent. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press Boym, Svetlana. 2010. “The Off-Modern Mirror.” e-flux journal 19. Accessed June 14, 2016. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-off-modern-mirror/. Boym, Svetlana. 2011. “Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins.” Atlas Transformation. Accessed June 14, 2016. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ ruinophilia/ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html. Buden, Boris, Ž elimir Ž ilnik et al. 2013. Uvod u prošlost. Novi sad, Centar za nove medije, kuda.org.

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Buden, Boris. 2010. “Children of Post-Communism.” Identity.Move! Accessed June 14, 2016. www.identitymove.eu/assets/pdf/boris%20buden.pdf. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2017. “Tempor(e)alities and Archive-Textures of Media-Connected Memory.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 143–155. New York: Routledge. Fromm, Erich. 2005. On Being Human. London / New York: Continuum. Frosh, Paul. 2015. “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability.” International Journal of Communication 9:1607–1628. Graeber, David. 2012. “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rates of Profit.” The Baffler 19. Accessed June 14, 2016. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decliningrate-of-profit. Groys, Boris. 2009. “Comrades of Time.” e-flux journal 11. Accessed June 14, 2016. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/comrades-of-time/. Hatherley, Owen. 2016. The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso. Heise, Ursula K. 1997. Chronoschisms, Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011. “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-Scarcity Culture.” Memory Studies 4(3):269–280. Hoskins, Andrew. 2017. ‘The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Media and Memory.’ In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 1–24. New York: Routledge. Hoskins, Andrew and John Tulloch. 2016. Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2017. “The Media End: Digital Afterlife and Techno-existential Closure.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 48–84. New York: Routledge. Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past, Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Lizardi, Ryan. 2015. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. Lanham / Boulder / New York / London: Lexington Books. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. epub. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Cambridge / Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Nowotny, Helga. 2015. The Cunning of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Nowotny, Helga. 1989. “Mind, Technologies, and Collective Time Consciousness: From the Future to the Extended Present.” In Time and Mind: Interdisciplinary Issues, edited by J. T. 197–216. Madison, CT: Fraser International Universities Press. Noys, Benjamin. 2013. “Days of Phuture Past: Accelerationism in the Present Moment.” December 14. Accelerationism—A Symposium on Tendencies in Capitalism, Berlin. Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka. 2011. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2017. “The Underpinning Time: From Digital Memory to Network Microtemporality.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 156–172. New York: Routledge.

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Pogačar, Martin. 2016. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-presencing the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Postman, Neil. 1984. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press. Reading, Anna and Tanya Notley. 2017. “Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 234–249. New York: Routledge. Sasseen, Rhian. 2016. “The Rise of the Creepynet.” aeon, March 7. https://aeon.co/essays/ why-is-the-internet-such-a-creepily-haunted-place. Srnicek, Nick, Alex Williams. 2013. “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14. http://criticallegalthinking.com/ 2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/. Stanojev, Ivana. 2016. Facebook. Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. Symbolic Misery, Vol. 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Judt, Tony. 2009. Reappraisals, Reflections on the Forgotten Century. London: Vintage Books. Turkle, Sherry. 2007. “What Makes an Object Evocative?” In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, 307–326. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man. The Project Gutenberg eBook. Williams, Alex. “Escape Velocities.” e-flux journal 46. Accessed June 14, 2016. http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/escape-velocities/. Yugoslavia—Virtual Museum. Accessed June 14, 2016. http://yugoslavian.blogspot.com/. Ž ižek, Slavoj. “Repeating Lenin, Lenin’s Choice.” Marxists.org. Accessed June 14, 2016. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm.

3 THE MEDIA END Digital afterlife agencies and techno-existential closure Amanda Lagerkvist

Introduction1 Why do we think the web2.0 suicide machine is not unethical? Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped (sic!) in a high-resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified life by the help of automatized machines. Facebook and Co. are going to hold all your information and pictures on their servers forever!2 Is disconnection and closure—the ending of media life—an intolerable prospect of our time? Is it an ethical act in need of self-justification? And is it a philosophical impossibility within prevailing paradigms on originary human technicity? Reverberating an opening defense statement in a courtroom, the ‘Web2.0 Suicide Machine’ is making the trenchant claim that since networked humans have become entrapped “in a high resolution panoptic prison” and because Facebook will hold your information forever, they should have the right to disconnect. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine provides an automated service for erasure of content and contacts on social media sites.3 The machine is a rare example offering a means to what I in this chapter will call a media end, in a digital memory culture that one-sidedly celebrates the virtues of non-stop connectivity, limitless perpetuation and endless recording. In an age of absolute presence that seems to simultaneously gravitate to eternalization, proper endings and erasures are few and far between.4 The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine thus provides for an

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exceptional option while an otherwise gullible media generation seems trapped, ironically, in a kind of stasis of expansion. In their information trailer, a young hipster has pressed the key and is witnessing his ‘friends’ on Facebook disappear one by one on the screen at high speed. The man is at ease, wearing a casual shirt and cool fedora hat. A glass of red wine on the side, he smiles as he watches his social media suicide unfold. Scholars discuss the suicide machine in terms of decisive acts of political resistance against the power exerted by neoliberal biopolitics through the business models of social networking sites, and their excruciating user conditions.5 While stressing that the machine might represent what Matthew Fuller calls ‘critical software’, Anna Munster traces to this phenomenon, more profoundly, the emergence of a digital ethos that is “cognizant of finitude, consequence and even death” and sees a “sobering digital mood” emerging in digital life that acknowledges the dark consequences of the military informational soft power subtending it. For Munster code is here thus conducting itself ‘toward-death’, but when we use the machine we are not surrendering our online life. Instead through humor and sobriety the suicide act produces a “different constitution of digital life” (Munster 2011, 85).6 There seems, on all counts, to be no end to digital media. Instinctively, this may feel absolutely true. Corroborated by recent new materialist contributions to media philosophy that stress media’s role in sustaining life itself, as well as by the rhetorical claims by the digital corporations within today’s digital ecology, it also resonates, most importantly, with everyday lived experience in a culture where the digital is imbricated in everything.7 Environmental, but also wearable and incorporated, these technologies are interwoven with our bodies, while our embodied selves and globally distributed memory traces, are entangled with the technologized everyday within our so-called culture of connectivity (van Dijck 2013; Lagerkvist 2016b). The ‘digital ecology’ metaphor captures this sense in which digital technologies have achieved this intimate and arguably all-encompassing role within the lifeworld8—spanning everything between life and death—but also the way they have become increasingly autonomous. Platforms provide automated operations that bring about and exploit connections between users. They thereby seem to force certain memories upon us, in the act of mining our movements. The ideology of connectivity proposes, immoderately: “that everything from oppression to resistance, creation to destruction takes place within the system and never outside it” (Karppi 2014, 28). Connectivity hence refers to these features of what I elsewhere have described as our technologically enforced lifeworld (Lagerkvist 2016a). But is it possible to argue that digital media wield more than these mighty posthuman agencies or ideological webs of significance? If we consider them as, in effect, part of the existential terrains of connectivity they should imply—as all existential phenomena— ambivalence, ambiguity, liminality, incomprehensibility, indeterminacy, and anxiety, but also nota bene, ethical choice and action within the confines of the

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human condition. In a Heideggerian manner of speaking, digital media no doubt co-constitute and disclose us to ourselves, and our world to us, as they equip us with tools to navigate it.9 As we are thrown into a particular place and group of people, at a particular historical moment, we are also becoming in and with the technological world in utter uncertainty and displacement, with the task to make meaning (Dienst 1994, 107). Hence, what I call our digital thrownness is no exception from, but instead a key example of what Heidegger conceived as the conditioned potentiality of Dasein. My point is that our thrownness entails a fragility (intrinsic also to our originary human technicity), but this fragility is at once a source of fecundity: it enables the opening of a space for productive action, in relation to the situation into which we are thrown (Heidegger 1927/1962, Jaspers 1932/1970). In the existential terrain by consequence, the inhabitants and agents are not solely the US military or networks, but the meek, the mourners, the fainthearted and the sometimes resolute. With this in mind we might raise partially different questions. For instance, is the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine not an either/or par excellence for the digital human condition? A mindful disconnection that looks like a choice, perhaps, between the Heideggerian in-authentic life of Das Man (the average social media life) and the authentic Kierkegaardian becoming subjective by killing one’s mediaself, and thereby being freed to perform a more pristine form of selfhood as well as sociality? At the end of the film, accordingly, the young man is resurrected. Running cheerfully across a small green meadow in the company of four children, he is liberated and restored to real life. This essay meditates existentially on the human givens of endings and closure— and their place or displacement in media theory and culture—poised against the horizons of ‘forever’ as these manifest themselves within our contemporary digital ecology. It presents an existential approach to digital memories by undertaking without attempting to surmount, the irresolvable antinomy in human life described by Søren Kierkegaard of the finite and infinite (1846/1960). It thereby sheds a different light on the tension between remembering and forgetting, saving and deleting, so central to digital memory studies (Garde Hansen, Hoskins & Reading (eds.) 2009). Through examples from the death online field, I will discuss how the digital aesthetics of a ‘will to life’ is not simply accompanied by a new sobering ‘ethos of death’, but also by the prospects and liabilities of ‘eternity’. With a particular focus on agency, as a troubled yet imperative piece of the contemporary digital and existential puzzle, I will suggest that closure by consequence, seems both repressed and incited somehow by the challenging of the automations of the forever of data, and the emergence of the digital afterlife. These technological forms certainly act upon us as ANT and object-oriented ontology will maintain. But a theory of enmeshed human technicity also needs to account for those instances when digital humans manifestly leap, in making the admittedly painful and socially costly choice to refrain from, or even terminate connectivity—to become ‘willfully unconnected’ (Hanson 2013).

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I suggest that this has two faces. First, in the estranging locations of, for instance, grief or loss, when the ultimate disruption has struck, people are facing the abyss (what Karl Jaspers calls the ‘limit-situations’ of life), and that very exposure entails a possible way of being-in-the-world—being as realized Existenz—that is in itself a differentiation, requiring action (1932/1970). Second, I cautiously contend that the ragged edges of techno-human experience—for instance far-reaching automation, panopticism, trolling, and the eeriness and obscurity of big data—may boost an agency to regain techno-existential control, and sometimes even to attain closure. This applies to our digital lives while we are still here, as echoed above in the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, as well as to the management of the digital afterlife. The chapter attends to the newest feature of the transcendence industry called the digital inheritance area, by sketching out some of the forms of digital eternity currently in circulation as well as a few forms of ending media life. Hearing out different voices, ranging from company owners to online mourners, it also analyses a number of online memorial practices and websites, Internet applications and services, as well as scientific and commercial projects (their rhetoric and marketing strategy), that specifically offer users the means to manage, plan the preservation, or prepare the shutting down of their digital (after)lives, or by contrast to organize their future post-mortem digital social activity or imagined immortality. This involves a humanly organized post-mortem agency that implicates automated operations—acts to be set in motion after our passing—incorporating elements of non-human agency. Before focusing on the digital afterlife in these respects, I will set out by heuristically identifying ‘the media end’ as the repressed in our field, in order to relate it to the current intersection of death and the digital. The remainder of the essay thence proceeds through three steps. First, I provide a mapping of what I call digital afterlife phenomena as well as afterlife managers, centering my analysis on the latter: that is afterlife estate planners, legacy avatars, and farewell messaging. Second, I focus on extreme forms of memory work envisioned in commercial transhuman science projects that promise to deliver immortality. I will then, third, turn to some forms of closure that are on offer within the death inheritance sector. This discussion will result in a provisional typology of the digital afterlife, attentive to its affective and emotional valences and intermeshed human and non-human agencies. In ways that complicate current debates in the death online field, and following on from digital scholars who have vocalized the value of acts for closure and erasure in a culture of ceaseless connectivity, I will close the chapter by granting that there is not only a need, virtue or right to disconnect but more precisely as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger discusses, a necessity of forgetting.10 Here I propose that closure is not simply a psychological privation, but a technoexistential proviso. Before I enter these fields of death and the beyond in the digital era, I wish to discern the status of endings in media theory and culture, to further articulate my existential mode of media theorization and critique.

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The media end It has been argued that death has rarely been focused in media and communication studies and, when focused, it has remained marginal (Van Brussel & Carpentier 2014). This may lead to the assertion that media studies is a secular and ‘modernist’ discipline conceived and situated within what Charles Taylor (2007) calls the ‘immanent frame’, in which everything is this-worldly, and moves incessantly upward and forward. There is credence to this point and, yet, the claim could also be repudiated. In key works in media and photography theory death plays a central role. Roland Barthes proclaimed that photographs, in their capacity of being a punctum that moves and haunts us, are profoundly existental: they are Time itself. They punctuate historical continutity and attest to both existence and non-existence (mortality): “The Photograph does not call up the past . . . The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” (1981: 82). Photographs are thus pure evidence that autheticate what has–been. In that way they always remind us of death. And for Susan Sontag (1976) photography has a dual function of making the known unknown and the fantastic commonplace; in fetishizing mortality by claimimg to constitute the immortal, they turn in a commodifying way both people into icons and the world into a department store or museum, without walls. Furthermore: Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recordingangels of death. The photograph-as-photograph shows death. More than that, it shows the sex-appeal of death. (ibid) Death and media are conjoined in Western intellectual history. This is evident if one overviews seminal works of leading professors such John D. Peters (1999) for whom death is one key vector in the analysis of how communication itself has been conceived as an idea. Barbie Zelizer’s (2010) analysis of news images of people about to die provide a new understanding of the imaginative and emotional engagements with the subjunctive forces (the ‘as if ’) of media. And in the past decade more and more attention has been paid to media and mortality in the field of media studies.11 I will venture to maintain however that in mainstream media studies, these works still remain the exception. In reiterating the nitty-gritty of a classic article in death studies by Tony Walter (1992) called “Sociologists never die,” one may propose that for media studies ‘proper’, there is no proper end.12 Some strands of the discipline might even be accused of being disposed to an overly sanguine view of Being. They lack a concept of tragedy, and seems to ignore what is irrevocable and ending.13 And yet in the following I will argue that even if certain forms of media studies

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seem to operate in neglect of death, the end and endings in a wider sense nevertheless figure in the field in a number of ways, both in media studies and in media culture more broadly. I will suggest that the connections between media and the end are manifold. Even when annihilated as a non-topic, the end is still afforded a persuasive lateral position. Let us begin with contemporary modes of being-in-and-with-the-world; being on ‘social media’. For Tero Karppi disconnection is necessary for social media, since it operates as a potential threat—a looming accident—that is a virtuality that sets off a number of actualities: “Connections are constantly established to remove the possibility of a disconnection from occurring.” (Karppi 2014, 23). The media end exists as a form of menace, a silenced yet ominous potentiality, with real effects. Can this acumen be transferred to other media historical settings? Is this in fact how the end—the accident, the interruption, death—has operated in the broadcasting era as well? In effect, there seems to be an obsession with our terminal state of being in media culture. For instance, representational and storage media conjure up the dead, animate them, or bring them into connective reach (Peters 1999). But death here seems invoked only by detour. It makes its entrance by means of a projection of the religious and spiritual dimensions of human existence onto particular forms of media, seizing it within a fantasy about magical or haunted media (Sconce 2000). Diverting us, these phenomena seem to seldom involve what Heidegger legendarily called ‘being-towards-death’ that is, a mode of living ‘authentically’ by resolutely facing the fact of one’s own death (Heidegger 1927/1979, 317–318). It could easily be argued that their raison d’être is, to the contrary, to divert us from the fact that we are mortal. This is the classic thesis about the denial of death in modernity, as put forward by for instance Philippe Ariès (1977). This may seem counterintuitive in two complementing ways. First it may be argued that our media are existential media by offering us means for meaning making, rituals and a sense of transcendence, precisely in relation to death, and in the important work of rebuilding the world and recreating life after loss. Second, and related, news are often about trauma and catastrophe and entertainment often profits from the death theme. It has been argued that in late modernity the media return death to us precisely in this guise (Giddens 1990). But if we follow Kierkegaard there is the crucial difference between what news and entertainment media do and what death entails for human beings; they objectively represent death, either as a universal natural scientific fact, or as the loss (and spooky haunting) of someone and his/her spiritual life. But on a more profound level, we can subjectively face our own mortality, whereby our singular lives receive a different quality (Kierkegaard 1849/1989). Indeed an entire culture could embrace the fact and thereby relate differently to life, our fellow human beings, etc. Our own death cannot be inserted in objective time argues Heidegger following Kierkegaard: “it is the possible impossibility of every way of existing.” (Heidegger 1927/1992, § 53, 262/307).14 From a media

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philosophical point of departure, we may ask if that is perhaps the role of media: to protect us from knowledge about this possible impossibility? The fact is however that media often seem to fail to accomplish this goal of shielding us from our precariousness. In Samuel Weber’s words: Like all technology, the development of electronic media follows the ambivalent law, or graphics, of prosthetic supplementarity: an extension of human capacities it simultaneously distances and undermines what it extends, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of the finitude it seeks to alleviate and protect. (2001, 52) So in this reading we become even more precarious through our media prostheses— those media bumpers that Martin Pogačar in this volume calls ‘audiovisual exoskeletons of minds’. As they fail to obliterate the end, and to assuage the gruesome truths about our precariousness, death returns inexorably. In popular understanding, one type of medium may end another: today, due to digitalization, it seems many of our old media are facing termination, such as newspapers that die out. Recently, the end of ‘Media’ has been proclaimed by media theory, due to ubiquitous media, and to the convergence of all previous media into digital data. We are now media post-mortem and ‘media’ are simply simulations of Media.15 At once the hauntings of what never died out completely, are reflected in the concept of remediation, which is the sobering counter account, showing the profound dependency of new media on older media—and on older media as always transitioning and becoming anew when technologies are introduced (Bolter & Grusin 1999). So, media seem here to relate to a haunting. This is manifest in the field of news: even as media depends on events and as our media culture is built on both the new and the now, they equally rest on seemingly eternal loops and returns of memory fragments (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2010).16 Media themselves are thus ghostly: they are replete with historical layers of news items and popular cultural representations, that is of hauntings and echoes, as Pogačar’s discussion in this volume also illuminates. Ghosts and vampires populate popular culture and their monstrous bodies leak of substances that bespeak worries about zombie capitalism; that is about the collapse (the end) of moral agency and human trust in the wake of both neoliberal realities and fantasies. In turn, the neoliberal ideology posits modern media and technology as part, or even a causal force, of a glorious ending of history itself. And in the counter-narrative to this account of neoliberal triumph, media are feasting on human interests, ravaging the heart of the lifeworld, turning it into a commodity (the Habermasian view), which makes media in themselves vampiric. This type of end, which implies that something is hollowed out, is resonant with Heidegger’s ‘enframing’, which implies that the essence of technology is to make the world disposable (1977). The end in the shape of a cavity is relentlessly

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echoed in critical theoretical approaches of all sorts. Critics of digital culture see this media end—the ultimate erasure of meaning—in online forms of communication of phatic communion and blogging about nothing.17 In Jean Baudrillard’s media end, ‘the simulacrum’, the world and America in particular has ended due to media—that is imploded—and we are left in a withered desert of simulations of simulations without referents (1983). Death itself he lamented, had also disappeared into the image. In our age of ecological crisis, media are also increasingly a seeming wasteland, an end station, a terminus, a final depot, as we are in the Anthropocene faced with enormous amounts of media waste, and with the environmental problems of the materiality of media death. Hence our new media age is a life among the dying media, where we wade through media junk and outmoded, obsolete and ageing apparatuses as well as abandoned platforms and other atrophied forms of media life. In effect, as Leah A. Lievrouw argues, digital media carry their own media end within them: they are in their rapid obsolescence dead media: The fact of cultural forgetting, combined with rapidly accelerating cycles of technological obsolescence and turnover, is the basis of what might be called dead media—possibly the greatest barrier to the dream (or nightmare) of perfect remembering. The basic tools of the Internet (digital recording and transmission technologies, formats, and storage systems) are notably short lived and incompatible across platforms and standards, especially in comparison to physical and analogue formats. Digital files and databases are notoriously fugitive and difficult to preserve in usable form for any extended period of time; they are among the most profoundly fragmented, disorganized, incompatible, and ephemeral forms of record-keeping ever devised. Formats, devices, and architectures become obsolete and are abandoned in favor of the next new design with little or no consideration for retaining the records or functions of the old systems (2012, 629). Somewhat contradicting this, in Andrew Hoskins’ work another media end emerges through constant updating and regeneration. As his opening contribution to this volume also underscores, the overall loss of decline implies that we lack a sense of technologies of memory as wearing out. Our culture of abundance, the culprit in this situation, has thus brought about “the end of decay time” in digital culture, leaving us wading not only in tech-junk but in a post-scarcity memory culture of endless amounts of data. We have lost loss itself. When everything is saved or instantaneously restored, the past disappears, implodes into the present, and the act of recording becomes more important than what is recorded (Hoskins 2013, 2015). In science fiction, media technologies are often conceived as causing (or threatening to cause) the end. In films such as Terminator (James Cameron 1984) and The Matrix (Lana Wachowski & Lilly Washowski 1999) highly intelligent

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robots and computer programs have taken over the world and ended human civilization. In I Robot (Alex Proyas 2003), Automata (Gabe Ibáñez 2014), Chappie (Neill Blomkamp 2015) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland 2015), robots display human features, and have become equally or more intelligent than homo sapiens. Sometimes hostile, sometimes more empathetic than the humans, they possess a greater ability to survive, and to outlive them. In Transcendence (Wally Pfister 2014), the possibility of downloading the human brain into a computer, in order to save a dying man, develops from a rescue operation into an escalating nightmare when his virtual consciousness performs in outrageous ways, and threatens to take control of the entire world through the Internet. In all these cases, the robots are, as the singularity thesis suggests, the next step in our evolution. In post-apocalyptic science fiction, media ends are often, in addition, symptomatic of the end: when the world has come to an end, and disaster has already been upon us, the media have gone silent and there is no signal. In the postapocalyptic science fiction movie I am Legend (Francis Lawrence 2007), the protagonist is to his knowledge the last man on earth, and he is left with recordings of news broadcasts from the world before it collapsed, which he replays on his DVD player as to make his deprived existence seem normal. Under the threat of zombies, he still relays his message to other potential survivors daily, on shortwave radio. Media hence seem to have to do with life, with life support, the illusion of life even, and the threat of death. From the above deliberations, we may conclude that media seem to relate to endings in several ways; by way of disconnection, palliation, invocation, representation, inherent destruction, denial, and through the temporality of repetition. They are sometimes imagined to bring about or being symptoms of the end. The media end in the contemporary culture of connectivity has, additionally, a very literal meaning, that refers to the previously discussed ecological approach to the digitalization of everything, including the ending of our lives. Death today, like everything else, has arguably become part of the digital. The field of ‘death online’ has highlighted that death and mourning have become both de-sequestered and deferred at once in digital culture (Walter et al. 2011/12, Lagerkvist 2013). But less acknowledged in this debate is the fact that the ending of the digital afterlife is also on offer within the digital inheritance area. The end has made very forceful entrée onto the digital scene, but media studies has yet to appreciate the meanings of this occurrence. This media end will in the following be pitted against memory practices across-all-boards, on the verges of eternity.

Digital eternity Thriving on the human propensity of relating to the beyond, the ‘immortalist zeitgeist’ in contemporary culture, is today given expression in notions of digital eternity.18 What may be termed a ‘netlore of the infinite’ relates to a broad cluster of ideas and material practices that incorporates for example the assumptions

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that the Internet is the archive of all that is, or that Google is a benevolent and omniscient library of all of humanity. These horizons thence include the rationale for containing and saving everything (Peters 2015).19 Another concrete, if almost inconceivable, example of this rationale is a recent scientific project sponsored by the European Union at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton.20 The center has developed a new mode of archiving and saving all of humanity’s achievements and knowledge on a new storage technology called the ‘Superman Memory Crystal’: “The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime”.21 These Superman crystal discs, made of nanostructured glass, should replace hard drive memory that has a relatively short lifespan of five years. They are expected to be able to store data up to more than a million years. The Dean of the center, Professor Peter Kazansky, summarizes the potential: “It is thrilling to think that we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race. This technology can secure the last evidence of civilization: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.” In a more vernacular mode, this rationale is visible within the data-driven life in which “(e)very website that you visit, each keystroke and click-through are archived: even if you’ve hit delete or empty trash it’s still there, lodged within some data fold or enclave, some occluded-yet-retrievable avenue of circuitry” (McCarthy 2015, n.p.). That everything is saved is buttressed by a sense of timelessness embodied by the constant presence of the Internet itself; its non-stop 24/7 character, its affordances of endless hyper-connectivity in the ‘perpetual present’ (Brasher 2001). This relates to the shift from archival space to archival time in digital culture, as argued by Wolfgang Ernst, in which the key dynamic is that of permanent data transmission, and synchronous communication: Since antiquity and the Renaissance, mnemotechnical storage has linked memory to space. But nowadays the static residential archive as permanent storage is being replaced by dynamic temporal storage, the time-based archive as a topological place of permanent data transfer. Critically the archive transforms from storage space to storage time; it can deal with streaming data in electronic systems only in a transitory way. . . . In electronic, digital media, the classical practice of quasi-eternal storage is being replaced by dynamical movements ‘on the fly’ as a new quality. Classical archival memory has never been interactive, whereas documents in networked space become time- critical to user feed-back (2014, 5). Hence the digital eternal is also visible in personal digital archiving, boosted by the constant feeds and the ceaseless updates, validations and feedback loops, built into and compelled by the system, as well as in practices known as ‘self-tracking’ within the data-driven life. And as personhood is increasingly becoming numerical, it seems that people are now in real time driven to accumulate endless

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quantities of data about themselves (Lemov 2015).22 Hence, the digital eternal relates to both human agencies in the service of our purposeful intent to create, perform, quantify, edit and preserve our selves, and non-human agencies that produce a sense of partial self-occlusion, in saving just about everything we did online without our consent. In media and memory studies, these cultural tendencies are reflected in the discussions of a post-scarcity memory culture: a notion intended to elucidate that today the historical record is proliferating beyond individual control and cognitive grasp.23 Is the same logic manifested when the dead are digitally resurrected or never put to proper rest, in digital memory practices on online memorials? These technological developments interestingly mirror, and possibly reinforce, the prevailing scholarly paradigm on mourning: ‘the continuing bonds approach’.24 This approach has criticized the paradigm of ‘stages of grief ’, and the notion of ‘letting go’ as the sign of wellness has been vehemently abandoned.25 Older models contended that grief takes the form of stages, tasks or processes in a linear manner, with the aim of reaching an endpoint.26 These theories described closure as detachment from loss. Within the new paradigm scholars posited grief as something that does not resolve by detaching from the deceased. Healthy grief, they argue, is rather experienced in creating a new relationship with the dead. From an existential point of departure, however, closure may be afforded a slightly different meaning. It is conceived neither as a coerced norm for behavior, nor an orthodox position on the right way to grieve, but as an existential given currently whitewashed in a culture of limitless expansion. The deliberations that follow will suggest that aspects of techno-existential closure—subsuming dimensions and values of disconnection, forgetting and erasure—are possible to envision and greet, without diminishing the reality and need for continued attachments, and for the preservation of memories, online and offline. The digital afterlife is sated with repetition as informatics remainders persist but there is also renewal of our traces and effigies. But what do we actually mean by the ‘digital afterlife’? Through the ensuing discussion, I will offer a typology that differentiates between afterlife phenomena and afterlife managers, and briefly suggest how different types of human and non-human agencies, as well as affective and emotional modes, are implicated in them. In accordance with the above, the digital afterlife spans three types of afterlife phenomena (Table 3.1).27 These comprise, firstly, our digital traces, that is our re-circulated textual and visual remnants and search traces on the Internet, whether we are dead or alive. This is the way the digital afterlife figures in literary and educational scholarship and relates “to the way online material persist far beyond the time of its production, how it is recorded and archived, accessible over time and across contexts” (Soep 2012). Today we would include our after-life social media presence in this category. This type of presence can be in the shape of Facebook ghosts, that is active accounts of dead users that entail a kind of non-human agency, when the dead

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TABLE 3.1 The digital afterlife - a typology

1. DIGITAL AFTERLIFE PHENOMENA

2. DIGITAL AFTERLIFE MANAGERS

1.1 Digital traces - After-life social media presence and social media ghosts - Re-circulated textual and visual remnants, search traces

2.1 Afterlife estate planners - Digital wills - Automated farewell messaging

1.2 Posthumous memory work online - Memorialised profiles on social media sites - Web memorials

2.2 Legacy avatars - Mindclones - Necromedia

1.3. After-death communication

2.3 Services for digital closure and ‘erase your history software’

show up in reminders about ‘People you may know’. But this is often a field of human intervention through memorialization of the profile, which means that a friend may provide a death certificate and ask Facebook to turn the profile into a memorial. The digital afterlife is thence, secondly, also part of the phenomenon of posthumous memory work online, a feature that has attracted much attention within the death online field.28 Scholars have explored these online memorializations as to how social life is prolonged after biological death in social networking and how the continued presence or preservation of the dead, is a comfort for mourners. Finally, digital afterlife phenomena consist of after-death communication, that is the prevalent occurrence of talking to the dead online. On social network profiles and in support groups the deceased are very often addressed directly, which is the dominating way in which after death communication occurs online (Brubaker et al. 2011).

Managing the digital afterlife and rigging messages from the grave The digital afterlife furthermore relates to three types of afterlife managers. There are a number of digital estate planners within the digital inheritance area, that promise to save your legacy, preserve your digital assets and your memory for new generations.29 These are often private pay services that provide storage facility and digital estate planning, for instance a digital will or farewell messages.30 These also include the option of erasing parts of your legacy, a dimension to which I will return. Google inactive account manager for instance, will assist you in choosing whether to save or delete yourself post mortem. But companies such as Google, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook also offer users the possibility of handing over the control of their accounts to their loved ones when they die. This is a designation with limitations. Facebook’s legacy contacts, for example, cannot edit the contents by altering the memorialized account’s old posts, or

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delete the account entirely. But the legacy contact may add new postings to the timeline, change the profile picture and reply to new friendship requests.31 Death apps, by contrast, include interactive features of a new kind. These services allow you to communicate from the other side, and to record film clips with your last wishes to be shared after your passing, in addition to sharing practical information about your digital legacy, passwords, etc. One of these apps is Everest, a Houston-based funeral caretaker that targets ’millennials’ to encourage them to start planning and managing their digital afterlives. The hope is that the app will accomplish a streamlining of the end-of-life planning. The app is designed to help a person organize their entire online life in one place, including passwords from social media accounts, newspaper subscriptions and online bank accounts, into a package of digital wills and estate arrangements. The package should also contain the deceased funeral plans, and as a facet of the contemporary personalization of digital memories, it also includes their curation of future memories in multimedia memorial portfolios. Death apps are supposed to allow people to give their loved ones unconditional control of all of their online accounts by digitally transmitting their passwords to successors who may retrieve this future anterior memory package, and dispose of it as they wish. The Israeli-based digital inheritance company SafeBeyond offers such a service, but it gives the dead an even stronger agency. Here you can also speak to the living from the grave, and plan messages to be sent at different points in time in the future, for instance: to congratulate your child on his 70th birthday, to be telepresent at your daughter’s wedding after you have passed away, or to tell your wife to move on and stop mourning you after three years since you died. Implied in this crafting of future agency and rigging of messages from the grave, is that the self should be in charge even after its passing (cf. Howart 2000). When we are dead we will vigorously transmit messages to, and even direct the actions among, the living. The self here seems central, if not sacred, to the extent that it may aspire to immortality (Aupers & Houtman 2010).

Digital immortality for sale: personhood without bodies, lives without end Other services, more spectacularly, promise to deliver ‘you’ over to the future. Eternime (eterni.me) builds avatars from your digital traces. In an interview with the BBC, one of the creators explains the imperative behind this business initiative: “It’s about creating an interactive legacy, a way to avoid being totally forgotten in the future.”32 The main motif for Eternime is to achieve a continuing bond with the dead that is more realistic and spirited. They claim that interaction with the legacy avatar will be the chief way our great-grandchildren access information about us. It will replace the search engines and timelines, and contain everything “from photos of family events to your thoughts on certain topics to songs you wrote but never published”. Avatar interaction is believed to provide

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a great comfort for mourners, and the imagined gain would be that the dead seem less gone from our lives. These practices share core assumptions with the philosophy of transhumanism. Transhumanism argues for the right to attempt to surpass the current limitations of human biology in order to achieve meaning in life. In the words of one of their advocates, Anders Sandberg who argues in line with Leo Tolstoy: that for life to be meaningful, there must be something worth doing, but actions with impermanent effects on the world do not eventually matter; thus for life to have meaning requires some ability to have permanent effects. This is sometimes seen as an argument for an immortal soul (or God’s eternal remembrance). However, transhumanism can claim that the argument merely shows that we should aim for an infinite lifespan: souls may not be needed. Indeed one could see it as an argument for why we must strive for vastly extended lifespans and expansion into the universe for our lives to have any meaning. Transhumanism might be what enables us to lead truly meaningful lives in a physical universe (2015, 8). Blending the utopian megalomania of total recall pictured to be enabled by technologies, with fantasies about immortality, the transhuman imaginary fosters the impulse of projecting our agencies and presence(s) into a future, where we may be resurrected, either as a virtual or robotic conscious existence. These endeavors to craft immortality it may be noted, bypass any ethical commandments on humans, by offering a ticket to a digital gateway to the beyond. This idea seems to obfuscate our finitude altogether, thereby providing a brazen vision about solving the afflictions of the end. In transhuman imaginaries, the end seems more than evaded; the end, is as it were, ended. The Terasem Movement is a self-proclaimed transhumanist religion that sees God as technological. It is also a company that offers the service called Lifenaut. Sharing Ray Kurzweil’s ideas in The Singularity is Near, the owner states that “it’s only a matter of time before brains made entirely of computer software express the complexities of the human, psyche, sentience and soul.” Here a grandiose form of memory work and preservation promises to take on the limits of life, through the crafting of ‘mindclones’. The vision is thus to not only preserve your images and documents for generations, but also to create a computer-based avatar who will interact and respond with your attitudes. Your digital duplications will in the future be turned into a robotic version of ‘you’, through cognitive computing. A profound social-Darwinist assumption is revealed in a sales pitch for getting a mindfile, and for signing up for the mindcloning programme (that through Moore’s law will come into being in about 15 years from now): People with mind-clones will be better poker players—literally and metaphorically—in the game of life. They will have access to more information, at faster speed, than those without a mindclone. They will

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have double consciousness while others putter along with a one cylinder engine. . . .The Darwinian advantage of mindclones will in and of itself be a huge driver for the rapid adoption and ceaseless improvement efforts of mind-cloning technology (Rothblatt 2014, 96). The project ambitiously turns infinity into lucrative domain, reminiscent of a kind of late medieval and early reformation practice of selling ‘indulgences’—tickets to heaven (Eire 2010: 106ff ). The goal is to bring us back to life after death, through cybernetic download, data mining and a re-composing of our persons (Kearl & Hviid Jacobsen 2013). The pledge is to immortalize humans through digital technology: the digital self can become eternal. In transhumanist fantasies about enhancement, humans are envisioned to become invigorated by media: humanity (of those who can pay) will become software based and hence immortal. Purporting the idea that software is in some way infinite, in its neglect of endings transhumanism is a form of hyperhumanism that offers another rendition of the immortalist zeitgeist within the immanent frame. It is more than a denial of death: it attempts to undo it. Conceding that immortality may feel new and weird, the developers claim that we will get used to it. The virtues of limitlessness are here founded on extrapolation of current scientific accomplishments, and their expected outcome in the near future. Transhumanist proponents settle on two debatable aspects of what a human being principally is—our essentially disembodied person/mind and the claim that a person is no more than her digital activities. At the core of the project lie two key assumptions: the definition of personhood and the question of embodiment. It is commonly agreed that a person may be traced online through geo mapping, timelines, and tagging and that these technologies contain a rich portrait of information about you, including the places where you have been to and the people you have met with.33 The human is here conceived as a literal being reducible to her digital reflection: to her digital memories. A person is therefore conceived as perfectly reflected by her digital traces and duplications. The CEO of Therasem continues to delineate what you consist of: There is plenty to mine for mindcloning purposes. The amount of digital data we have already created has increased thirtyfold over the last ten years. A reasonable estimate is that people send or answer a few hundred emails a month. In addition, we regularly make dozens of online searches, purchases, and banking transactions weekly if not daily. All of the emails, chats, texts, IMs, social-media posts, online comments, blog contributions, uploaded photos, slide shows, home movies, search histories, clicked selections, and online purchases, if saved in the cloud, on a SIM card, on your computer hard drive, or on social media sites, are part of your mindfile. Anyone with an active blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, or a Pinterest board has a ‘second’ (and sometimes a third or fourth) life as a

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cyber person. Sometimes these are even deliberate aliases, but make no mistake, if you created them they are part of your digital self—as well as your flesh self—because they are of your mind (Rothblatt 2014, 57) Two discourses are furthermore echoed here, surrounding the relationship between the user and his/her data (Bollmer 2013). The first sees data as a perfect reflection of the self, the second as a reflection but beyond the control of the self, and thus compelling us to act in order to secure ourselves. Selfhood is here defined through belief in data, and data as truthfully disclosing what we are about, as well as what we will become.34 There is a major contradiction at the heart of the transhumanist upload scenario (Thweatt-Bates 2012). In line with reductive materialism, it emphasizes the importance of science and sees the mind as reducible to biology. On the other hand the mind is understood as a pattern of information, and in a dualistic manner the human mind could be functional in a different substratum made up of a different form of matter: silicon chips could be substituted for the grey matter inside the skull. Transhuman projects thereby reflect what critics such as N. Katherine Hayles have long argued in relation to cybernetics, that it represents a myth of disembodied masculinist selfhood (1999). The project seeks to transcend, enhance and expand the leeway of the ‘human’ beyond all limits. At once it makes our embodied state of being irrelevant for the understanding of what a person is. In the transhumanist imaginary, the human body is made altogether archaic: a thing of the past. A similarly disembodied version of what you consist of was reflected in the by now deceased service called LivesOn, which offered a way to allow people to keep on tweeting after death. In analyzing the original Twitter feed, they figured out people’s likes, tastes and syntax and, when they are dead, tweets will appear via the LivesOn hashtag. The LivesOn technology needed feedback from the user, in order to ‘become a better you’. Their slogan was “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.” But the service also provided something similar to Facebook’s legacy contact: you were able to nominate an executor to your LivesOn will, who was entrusted with the task of deciding “whether to keep your account ‘live’”, hence whether or not to instigate a media end— techno-existential closure.

Techno-existential closure on offer As suggested at the outset, the inescapability of limits, forgetting and closure may be conceived as more than simply a matter of psychology, but as in effect a technoexistential requisite. The end itself, and acts of ending, are and have however always been technical. Sorting out all the post-mortem stuff relating to the will, the cremation, the obituary, the elegy, the funeral, the burial, the tomb, and the gravestone, etc., are aspects of our human technicity in relation to death and loss, that imply

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agency, choice and material practice. Today there seems to be an intensification of the technological aspects, as people have lived digital lives leaving behind a digital legacy and an array of digital memories. The necessity for closure also has a segment of the market, and one way is to manage the end by saying goodbye.

Goodbye for free or upgraded to premium Digital afterlife managers include afterlife actants, farewell messages and notifications. The Dead Man’s Switch, which started in 2007, is one example. It provides services of automated goodbyes using a particular strategy and rhetoric. In a colloquial, customer-friendly tone, that corroborates Anna Munster’s thesis about the combination of humor and sobriety of the digital death ethos, they convey their message with a light, easy-going, trouble-free mode of address. Dead Man’s Switch, whose aesthetics verges on that of amateur culture, is the product from Stochastic Technologies, a UK software development company based on the Cayman Islands. They formulate the need for their service in five sentences that boldly articulate the key existential predicament of our being, the fact of death, like this: “WHY? Bad things happen. Sometimes, they happen to you. If something does happen, you might wish there was something you had told the people around you. How you feel, what you regret, where the money is stashed. For this, you need a dead man’s switch.”35 The service offers you to write farewell emails to chosen recipients, that the company claims they store securely. The switch emails the user every 30, 45 and 52 days after s/he ’showed signs of life’, to check that s/he is OK. The email with the topic “Dead Man’s Switch hasn’t heard from you in a while” is sent. They ask you to click on a link to let them know you are alive. They are worried in their succinct way: in fact they need to know you are OK. If you don’t respond, your farewell emails will be sent after 60 days of your latest check in. You can add two emails to two recipients for free, but you can also upgrade the account to premium. I click on the link, and they confirm that they are relieved that I’m fine. But when I try to click on the link twice, these words show with the purposely playful and at once eerie message: “The page you are looking for has mysteriously disappeared. Or perhaps it never was”, which gives you the sense that this is not about managerial rationality. At least not right now. This is a very different rationale than caring; seeing to it that I am OK, or conscientiously pledging that my farewell message will be delivered. Since I am in fact OK, that is still here, we can act as if this whole thing is a ploy in the end.

Shutting the digital lights Apart from saying goodbye, there are also afterlife managers that specialize in closure and erasure. Following on from the European Court ruling from May 2014, which states that Google is a data processor under European law, it is today

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possible for citizens to make an erasure request of personal data to search engines such as Google. Several ‘erase your history’ software companies offer services of this kind.36 There are also funeral directors and undertaker’s services that allow you to save or delete your digital life. This involves making conscious choices in relation to the either/or of salvaging or deletion. In Sweden a company called Efterhjälpen.se (Afterhelp) is an interesting example of a singular digital estate manager within what seems to be a growing market abroad. As one of the owners says in an interview, as we die, our relatives have more than the funeral to attend to: they may be in disagreement about our digital heirlooms and active accounts. He describes that there are sometimes splits in families that relate to the digital remains; a wife for instance accessed her dead husbands’ account and posted content in his name, which stirred a lot of emotions in his network. The mother of the deceased man did not want the account to be maintained, but the wife was allowed to keep it (Interview 2 June 2015). The company offers solutions to some of the quandaries ensuing from the digitalization of life and of death. They sell an ending of media life, and an opportunity for individuals to choose to ‘shut the digital lights’ of their deceased relatives as the CEO of the Swedish Funeral Directors Association calls it.37 Their advertising material consists of one key sentence: “Hur avslutar man sociala medier?” (“How to end/shut down social media?”).38 As these stakeholders have repeated, the majority of bereaved Swedes who are in touch with them wish for the digital life of their dead relative to be wiped out. Memory work in social media, they estimate, reaches a peak early and abates and disappears more or less within a year. In the case of suicide, relatives wish to shut down social media straight away, due to the sensitivity of the matter and the fact that it is painful to take in too many opinions about the faults and culpabilities that are not seldom given breathing room in the commentary field. Efterhjälpen claim that they exist because people literally do not have time to mind their own business, and increasingly expect their lifeworld to be protocolled and taken care of. This is given expression as Efterhjälpen senses that people have in a very short period of time come to expect rapid connective solutions to be delivered to them in select areas of their lives, including the area of death. As one of the owners of the company said to me: “The one who finally cracks the hard nut of how to efficiently and comprehensively help people with a digital cleansing will have succeeded. Such a company has a lot to win.”39 Our digital thrownness is related to our era of temporal instantaneity, and pace is deemed a key existential predicament in itself. One important example of how speed delineates our digital existence is the news of an unexpected death traveling at high-speed on Facebook, often stirring very strong emotions and reactions. Speed is however also a factor in the company’s services. At the price of 995 kronor, Efterhjälpen will shut down Facebook in one day and Twitter in four days. But an Apple ID account takes 30 days through the United States.

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To shut everything down yourself takes several months, and you need a death certificate and a copy of the obituary. Efterhjälpen argue that they offer a legitimate solution for the social networking companies as well, who are eager to protect their goodwill, even as Facebook’s stock value, for instance, is dependent on the count of its users and active profiles, whether the owners are dead or alive. When the company started in 2015 they received four assignments a week, and now they receive around eight. Efterhjälpen also answers questions daily from families and funeral directors about these matters. After they have scanned and covered what is out there, they will always ask for authorization to shut everything down, and then they will go ahead and delete. As for marketing rhetoric there is next to none: their key strategy is to remain invisible, while their actual service is marketed by the Swedish Funeral Directors. For obvious reasons, they do not want the valley of death to turn into neither an unruly and irrepressible gold rush, nor its failure: the next Klondike.

An overture for closure In the contemporary assemblage of digital memories, death and agency the media end assumes specific meanings. Death has made yet another ‘return’ through digital media: today in social networking it is both de-severed and postponed at once. In choosing in this essay to focus on the opposites of excessive remembering and decisive forgetting through techno-existential closure, I have interrogated some of the ways in which the antinomy of the finite and infinite resurface in the contemporary digital memory culture. These span projects that represent memory work in the extreme, such as high profile transhumanist science endeavors that promise to deliver immortality and to abolish the end, foreclosing it by means of scientific truths and teleological presumptions about technology. But equally gripping are the services that offer closure, from Efterhjälpen to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. Our contemporary culture of connectivity fosters the paradoxical inertia of perpetuation—a feature prominent in the specters of digital eternity as they pervade both everyday digital existence, new forms such as legacy avatars, and extremist movements such as Therasem. When connective presence takes precedence, within our digitally enforced lifeworld, termination itself seems to further dwindle as a culturally sanctioned prospect. When vast amounts of information remain within the digital afterlife, they make up a spooky intangible realm of our online vestiges, both in life and in death. When everything is rebooted, saved, or backed up, a kind of being-in-the-world, and relating to the dead, emerges that is authorized to ignore closure. The critical issue today for media philosophy as well as for digital memory studies is whether the abundance of recall, the bigness of data and the proliferation of recordings, may bring about the media end of meaning. The existential question to be answered is what kind of leeway for closure is at hand, in a limitless digital age.

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When the dead continue to be related to or, more to the point connected to, this may reveal something similar to what Steven Connor calls “a loss of the loss of the voice” (2000). Digital media may be disuniting us from endings and loss, as acoustic media did in the 19th century: The rapid naturalization of the technologically mediated voice does not seem to have resulted in the painful severing of the voice from the subject, for that severing was indeed a bloodless surgery. And yet there is a loss, of a kind, namely the loss of the loss of the voice. We have been severed, not from our voices, but from the pain of that severance. What aches is the numbness; what is strange is the familiarity of the disembodied voice. (Connor 2000, 411) Scholarship has highlighted the many positive aspects when death has been returned to everyday life through social media. Following Connor, we may suggest that this shift has occurred without anxiety, and that social media life has been adopted, naturalized and complacently accepted, as one of my mourning informants put it, as the “inevitable state of affairs”.40 The bereaved cherish their continuing bonds with the dead, both online and offline. To the extent that they will ‘never forget’, the technological affordances of online memorials and social media will assist them in that endeavor, producing a spatial, temporal and social expansion of the process of mourning (Brubaker et al. 2013). In a wary evaluation of the situation at hand, Michael C. Kearl states: Given the interwoven nature of self and society, the understood essence of selfhood was to be profoundly changed as well. Instead of being corporeal mechanisms, modern selves are becoming seen as attention- and identity seeking social algorithms whose distinctive programs influence the programming of other’s lives and the logics of institutional systems. And just as individuals cannot erase their residues in cyberspace, neither does their existence conclude with physical extinction. One’s images, behaviors, words, beliefs, and accomplishments exist indefinitely in this new electronic world, available to be paused, reversed and fast forwarded (2010, 60). Our lives do not end with biological death. In this perspective the digital dead are thus as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2011) has argued about our remains within the network, undead in a profound sense. As I have discussed in this essay, the recurrence of the dead online belongs within a broader cultural matrix of limitlessness and continuation. In the phenomena of legacy avatars and farewell messaging, agencies are enacted and propelled into the future, to exert power over the living, and convince us that we will be in managerial control after our passing. They enable continued presence: “Be around forever—allow your digital identity to outlive you”, as SafeBeyond advertises its bid.41 Apart from replaying

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voices, the entire digital track record of an individual human being may be reversed and forwarded, as well as artificially incarnated.42 This relates to the transhumanist imaginary as well, and to its idea to resurrect us by means of creating a mindclone that is given an artificial robotic body, that may resemble the original body of the dead person. This is the case in an episode of the BBC-series Black Mirror called ‘Be Right Back,’ where related existential questions are poignantly raised.43 In this deeply disturbing science fictional fantasy, a starkly dystopian scenario is set in a near future of hyper-digitalization. A young couple in love, Martha (an artist) and Ash (a social media addict), are moving to a new house. Their new life is abruptly interrupted when Ash dies in a car crash as he returns the van they rented to move their belongings. Martha, who is devastated, is gradually lured, if not forced, to sign up for ‘something’ by her bereaved friend Sarah—a high-tech siren who sings the praise for this new coping technology. It is a piece of software (still only as beta, but Sarah has an invite . . .) that uses the name of a person to vacuum the entire web of information about their Facebook updates, Twitter postings, anything public. Martha is extremely reluctant at first, but in her deepest despair, after discovering that she is pregnant, she eventually tries it out. She is immediately hooked as she receives emails from ‘Ash’ in his characteristic idiom and jargon. The very prospect of moving closer to him captures her completely. Later that same night the urge to talk to him increases, as it seems the technological allowances unsettles her in her ruined world even further. The software describes how to make it happen, and she supplies it with more about Ash through a complete mining of his private digital archives of audio-visual recordings, Skype conversations and emails, etc. This renders her ‘Ash’ anew, within an hour, now in a vocal form as ‘he’ calls her and announces: “It’s totally creepy I can even talk to you, I don’t even have a mouth.” In the coming days and weeks she talks to ‘him’ everywhere she goes: she imparts her on-going life with ‘him’, records and shares the ultrasound of the baby’s heartbeat, and communicates their common history and memories to ‘him’ as she hikes alone on the moorland. The software responds as he would. ‘His’ voice on the mobile is both comforting and disturbing, both allowing and yet in some ways deeply distressing. Underscoring the ambiguity of the experience— the utter absent presence, or present absence of ‘Ash’—it says: “You speak of me as if I’m not here . . .That’s alright, I’m not really.” Comforting her after she dropped and broke her phone, it says “I’m fine. I’m not in that thing you know. I’m remote. I’m in the cloud. You don’t have to worry about breaking me.” After losing him for a short while, due to breaking the phone, Martha’s contrived sense of comfort starts to feel very fragile. She shares this with ‘Ash’. And the software concedes, and quickly and cunningly pitches the next step: “I was gonna talk to you about that, actually . . . there is another level to this available so to speak. Kind of experimental and I won’t lie, it’s not cheap. Are

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you sitting down? This might sound a bit creepy.” The urge to regain more of him possesses her, and impels her to buy the package. ‘Ash’s’ perfect reappearance as a clone, with lines, pores and soft skin (from ‘texture mapping’) is more than ambivalent: it is ghastly. Martha is petrified, shaking as ‘he’ emerges as an embodied avatar in full size, activated and rising from a chemical compound in the bathtub. Living with ‘him’ in the coming months proves to be deeply disturbing. While ‘he’ is cordial and pleasant, ‘he’ is stiff and intransigent, deficient and lacking the fullness of Ash’s personality. Without the full phenomenal and emotional reward, since the person is not there, she grows increasingly frustrated and lonely. At one point she furiously shouts at the robot: “You are just a few ripples of you, there is no history to you. You are just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking!” As the story ends, Martha has stored ‘Ash’ on the attic, for bringing ‘him’ out on the weekends for her and her daughter. In ‘Be Right Back’ we learn that the sheer availability of the software is like a wedge: it both literally and imaginatively expands the scope of possibility of being with ‘him’, while yoking itself to the most profound aspects of her being—to the core of her desolation and to her love. Martha is tied to the replica, indefinitely, and unable to shut the clone down. Less fantastical technologies today similarly enact a perpetuation of the dead’s presence, but they enable what mourners themselves often describe as healthy continuing bonds. Or, as some of them stress, these digital technologies of memory and preservation offer means for coping. But deep-felt attachments to the technology are as ambivalent as they are factual. As one father, Esbjörn, who lost his 18-year-old daughter in an accident, and who built a Facebook memorial, states in response to the question why he did so: ”The point of it all? A way to preserve her. But for some bereaved parents who post many images and emotions it can become too much.”44 This is not exclusively a problem for digital commemoration. Esbjörn recounts a story about a mother who lost her son, and who created a gigantic altar in her home for him “like a super-homepage” in physical space. Esbjörn was in touch with the mother for a while, but he felt she was too absorbed by these strung-out expressions of grief, which made her unable to relate and reach out: “She was just too much!” For Esbjörn himself to have constructed a vital memorial place on Facebook, is highly ambivalent since “Facebook does not feel OK at all.” Reflecting further on what he calls the Facebook phenomenon, he says: “You can’t escape it. You force yourself and you are forced by it.” Online (and offline) memorials mean the whole world to the bereaved. If they would suddenly disappear (if the web domain goes out of business, the group closes or if there are glitches in a ramshackle system) they would be destroyed since, as another father, Olle, explains: “This is a part of me!”45 In responding to how he would react if someone shut down these places, Esbjörn answers without hesitation that the gravity of his loss would be felt anew: “It

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would feel like killing her once more. If they disappeared that would NOT be good.” This corroborates what scholars deem as the stickiness of social media (Pybus 2015).46 Judging what Facebook cannot offer, and reflecting on its new orthodoxies of both sociality and mourning, Esbjörn firmly endorses the value of restraint and limit (hence: a kind of closure as disconnection) and continues: “You need some air in your grief, to push things away. It’s important that it’s OK to do that! If you are in that emotional state, in that mood of despair, it’s easier to go astray if you have bought this Facebook thing!” Considering these sentiments, its seems valid to reconsider Samuel Weber’s point that, even while shielding us, these prosthetic mediations of memory simultaneously make us more vulnerable. Especially if they preclude a sense of control and choice in relation to our most cherished memories. Hence, in light of the preponderance of digital afterlife agencies, we might ask whether something is nevertheless aching as Connor says, existentially speaking, as we have very easily and without friction, allowed the dead to reappear online. Virtual mourners vocalize ambiguity and sometimes even apprehension in relation to digital affordances that also entail shortcomings. These include the risks of nonstop connectivity and the ambiguous expansive venues for bottomless grief. Even as closure may surrealistically tail off as a cultural lineament, supported by the myth of endless media, it hardly peters out as a phenomenal and existential fact. Philosophically this may be related to Karl Jaspers’ concept of the crucial limit-situations in life of loss, guilt, love, chance or conflict. These demand a unique agency to become ourselves. His philosophy stresses limits as the breakdown of life and routine, after which it is not possible to carry on as usual. Limit thus refers to collapse, but also to the limits of our understanding. But the concept may be taken further: there are also evident limits of the situation, but in addition there is the more pragmatic definition of situation as limit (Bornemark 2006). The latter points to the limited life situation overall, stressing that this is a condition to which we belong and into which we are thrown, wherein I submit, notions of ‘wrapping up’, ‘drawing a veil’, ‘putting an end’, ‘opting out’, ‘getting closure’, ‘signing off ’ are, as ever as significant, as they are currently silenced. Forgetting and closure are part of human culture. Or as Kierkegaard muses: the sickness unto death—despair—can only be cured by an ending: being able to die away from (1849/1989). Endings are thus existentially axiomatic and, as such, a fact of the life we know. This is echoed in Amina Gautier’s collection of short stories The Loss of all Lost Things, when two parents try to relate the aporia they have experienced in losing a child, to the broader experiential field of a bereft humanity: They are not the first to suffer loss. They try to keep it all in perspective, to think of the myriad things that have been lost. Such as: The Ark of the Covenant. The city of Atlantis. The Dead Sea Scrolls. El Dorado. The Holy Grail. Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Pacific. Pompeii buried beneath volcanic ash. The RMS Titanic at the bottom of the sea.

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Other lost things are lost slowly, over time, rather than in one fell swoop. Such as: Loss of feeling, of life and limb. Loss of blood. Loss of memory. Loss of looks, of faith and time. Loss of sanity. Teeth lost under the pillow. Long-lost relatives—ignored, forgotten, pretended away (2016, 23–24). The story underscores the crucial Kierkegaardian difference between the objectivity of loss and death and the subjectivity of our own suffering and finitude. Some types of loss override all other lost things, such as losing a child. But the quote also points to the fact that the basic givenness of endings belongs to a dimension of life that we can neither ignore, nor readily resolve, whether we try through the posthuman imagination to dismiss the very issue humans have with the end as ‘anthropocentric’, or through the futurological visions for immortality within transhumanism. Transhumanism strives for the final obliteration of loss itself. Its main motivation is a refusal to come to terms with the limitations of life. In annihilating the end, and retreats from our prime existential challenge: to cope with finitude (cf. Sandberg 2015, 5). In a passage that could today be directed to the transhumanist imaginary, Kierkegaard argues that one way of denying finitude within one’s duality of existence is in a self-aggrandizing move to deny corporeality and the finite state of being. Then the infinite is used within the self in order to idealize it: By means of this infinite form the self wants in despair to rule over himself, or create himself, make this (infinite form) the self he wants to be, determine what he will have and what he will not have in his concrete self. His concrete self, or his concreteness has indeed necessity and limits. (. . .) (his concrete self ) is this quite definite thing with these aptitudes, predispositions, etc. in this concrete set of circumstances. But by means of the infinite form (. . .) he wants first to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to get out of it a self such as he wants (. . .). He does not want to see his task in the given self, he wants, by virtue of being an infinite form, to construct himself.47 Kierkegaard points to the fact of limits and necessity, within our concrete lives. Closure defined as a veneration of limit (not in its unrefined version, as a celebration of ‘letting go and moving on’ within the cultural logic of modernity), is linked to the inevitable aspects of human existence and to undervalued qualities within our technocratic societies of surveillance, quantification, austerity and auditing, and within the new orthodoxies of hyperconnectivity. It resonates with full stop, enigma, silence, obscurity, interruption, forgetting, termination, end, finish, void, invisibility, pause, inexplicability, etc. It underlines what makes us human: since we are mortal, we belong in some profound way to the limit. Or, more precisely, and in keeping with Kierkegaard, we belong to the antinomy of

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the finite and the infinite. As he explains: “Existence is the child that is born of the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, and is therefore a constant striving” (Kierkegaard 1846/1960: 85). This striving also relates to memory and forgetting, as these are in fact bound to each other, both are partial and selective. Forgetting is intrinsic to organizing what we remember and what memories mean. Hence, I hold that meaning itself is selective memory, and closure and disconnection are by consequence part of an experiential field of being and becoming human. But this issue is both acutely raised and may potentially be resolved also from within the workings of technology itself. As Leah A. Lievrouw has pointed out, the limitations of the dream of digital eternity and limitless recording also stem from the technologies themselves, as they are imperfect, ephemeral and soonto-be obsolete. She stresses the impossibility of total recall, both in digital culture and outside it, and the inevitability of loss: However, the idea of total, loss-free digital capture of all knowledge and information, or ‘perfect remembering’, should be viewed skeptically. In the first place, the total capture and recall of a society’s (or even an individual’s) works and activities has never, and is unlikely ever to be, possible. All cultures forget; digital culture is no exception. Historically, the overwhelming majority of human knowledge has been lost, destroyed, sabotaged, pulled out of context, excluded from the record, suppressed, or never recorded at all. Conclusions are inevitably drawn on the basis of incomplete, contradictory, and divergent information. There is little about culture today to suggest that these processes have changed in any fundamental way as a consequence of digital communication technologies (2012, 629). To acknowledge the role of limit and loss in human culture, however, will also imply resuscitating a role for human agency to push the digital envelope. This alludes to the wider cultural and existential questions about our contemporary media and memory culture, and amplifies the import that may be read into Efterhjälpen’s colloquial advert: ‘How to end (shut down) social media?’, to mean ‘Do we have to live with this monster indefinitely?’ If media are, as John Durham Peters (2015a) argues in effect what brings about life—allowing life to thrive—we may call to mind that in the blockbuster science fiction film Interstellar (Christopher Nolan 2014) the Internet is up and running, and the end of the world is imminent anyway—because of the short supply of food. Interestingly in this prevention scenario the Internet is not life supporting, it may be read as either a supplementary and in fact irrelevant aspect of the world, or as one reason behind its depletion. In both readings, other media forms may very well come into being ontogenetically, that truly establish a sustainable life. This leads to my concluding remark: to conceive of technics as intrinsic to the human condition is not to absolve every aspect of its (digital) instantiation.

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In conclusion The digital afterlife—both the phenomena and the managers—displays complex interwoven agencies and affective/emotional modes, that include two sets of tensions (Figure 3.1). The first is the tension between meaning and non-meaning. It includes aspects of meaningful memorialization in the quest for ‘existential security’; a central feature of what many mourners online look for when they build memorials for someone they have lost. This is played out against more unsettling dimensions, that constitute a spooky intermediary realm of affect, as exemplified by when Anna, a virtual mourner, receives messages about her dead friend: “I still get goose bumps when I think about receiving reminders about him.”48 There are many active accounts with dead users, and encountering ‘Facebook ghosts’ is an estranging phenomenon. Or, as she recalls, it is also discomfiting when a man who never owned a Facebook account is given a digital persona through memorialization. The digital afterlife hence becomes a ghostly intermediary realm of limit, transcendence and agency, encompassing a variety of feelings. Pervaded by bodily shock and unease, it is also a space of temporal crises and of returnings. This is when memory practices produce a re-presencing of the lost person. Because of the non-synchronous nature of Facebook, there are temporal slippages

FIGURE 3.1

Affective modes and agencies

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resulting from the fact that users’ postings may penetrate the network erratically (Brubaker et al. 2013). The second tension is between re-enchantment and rationality. A case of re-enchantment is at play within many of these phenomena, especially in after-death communication, ADC, with precursors in media history in spiritualism and Electronic Voice Phenomena, etc. Finally, the digital afterlife is at once a space of managerial reasoning à la Bauman (1992) where both actants and agents demand our rational or pragmatic choices to preserve or delete. Spanning such a broad affective register, digital media encapsulate the world in both a factual and contrived sense. It is not far-fetched to propose that our technologized and increasingly automated media culture is an ‘enframing’, where the preconditions for experience are increasingly exploited. In engineering, our very notion of meaningfulness, as Ganaele Langlois argues, the digital feigns and forges a totality of our very sense of being and value (2014). But as I have maintained in this chapter, this sometimes prompts a veritable ‘killing’ of the media life. Digital life will then beg the necessity for closure. And in the discussed services that employ software for erasure, bereaved are offered, in quite concrete terms, to either preserve the often multifarious posthumous memory of their deceased relatives, or to actively shut their digital lights. There is a gradual scale from human to non-human agencies that play into these affective registers: the digital afterlife is constituted by both services that we may buy to act, and actants that we may pay to automize certain things, as well as traces we leave that we have not meant to. It is in some ways a ‘working archive’ (Ernst 2012) before and beyond human hermeneutic deliberation. And yet at once, I will contend, it demands our human agency as we are still here—as ‘existers’ and as the managers of our digital lives and the digital afterlife of our loved ones (Lagerkvist 2016a). From the services that offer to bring about the end of the social media life of the dead, we may draw the conclusion that, despite our posthuman connective condition, digital memory cultures also demand our agency. I hold that the digital afterlife will compel us to conscious considerations and managerial reasoning in relation to our finitude and our digital remains. Users of social media at large have been described as ‘interpassive’: “The pervasiveness of social media expose how the social is reproduced as an interpassive relation. Individuals imagine their active role in what ultimately is part of their subjugation” (Cox 2012, 112). But customers of Efterhjälpen’s services seem to transcend this condition. Digital humans may have in one instance (and reflexively!) given up some of their agency, but in the limit-situation they nevertheless purposely steer the erasure, and ensure a kind of closure in the end. Surrendering issues of life and death, finitude and infinitude to the machine thus compels agency anew; the felt necessity and lived experience of trying to regain existential security, or achieve closure, in the face of the vulnerabilities of the data-driven life. Both sides of the experience reveal contours of our digital thrownness. This suggests that succumbing to the digital causes active choices in relation to it. This is reflected in the services with the help of which you can manage your own digital afterlife, or someone else’s; edit its content, plan

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its automations, or end it, that is shut it down. Their arguable theoretical impossibility in posthuman philosophy notwithstanding, such decisive actions do exist, and seem especially unrelenting for some people in relation to the dead. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine promises a different life of authentic connectedness beyond connectivity. Efterhjälpen assists those who seek something beyond the loss of loss. Here the media end that began this chapter, disconnection, may make visible more than the political unconscious of the age of social networking: it may reveal the existential terrains of the digital age. And since our digital existence is an irreducible tension field and a striving, it also includes the act, the opting out, signing off or erasing the trace; a choice between either staying within the confines or to transcend them—to either remain in or resort from connectivity through techno-existential closure. With this reality in mind, the media end may sometimes resurface as an inevitability. Closure is then besought by the challenging continuities of the forever of data, by a limitless digital memory culture that seeks to abolish the end. For this type of understanding of media and memory, death and disconnection are only the beginning.

Notes 1 I am grateful to John D Peters, Amit Pinchevski, Andrew Hoskins, Margaret Schwartz, Michael Westerlund, Yvonne Andersson, Katerina Linden and Timothy Hutchings for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. This article was first presented as a paper: “The Media End: The Digital Afterlife and the Ending of Social Media—Contours of our Digital Thrownness” at the Death Online Research Symposium, DORS2, Kingston University, London, 17–18 August 2015. The materials presented here are part of my research programme “Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity” (et.ims.su.se). Analyzing both how the dead are remembered online and how people manage or plan their own future memory and the digital afterlife, the primary aim of the study is to explore the question: How is existential security sought, achieved or lost in our time, when our lives and memories are shaped in by and through digital media and digital memory practices in particular? In this essay I present materials from both these studies. I draw on the marketing rhetoric of companies belonging to the digital inheritance area and on interviews with people involved in the funerary sector, who have insight into the new services for preservation and erasure. It should be noted that many of the science projects, online services and corporate initiatives accounted for may be quite transient. In fact, their lifespan within the ‘eternity business’ is not seldom extremely evanescent. They are chosen to represent a broader cultural tendency that is experientially at hand in the digital ecology, yet repeatedly given new renditions. I have also interviewed mourners who navigate and inhabit the existential terrain. This includes members of two Swedish NGOs with a strong online-presence belonging to the organization SAMS (Samarbete för människor i sorg) during 2015–2016: VIMIL (We who lost someone in the middle of life: http:// www.vimil.se/) and VSFB (We who lost a child: http://www.vsfb.se/). 2 http://suicidemachine.org/#credits. 3 The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is created by a Rotterdam-based media laboratory called moddr consisting of artists, designers and programmers. Anna Munster explains

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its workings: “The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a ‘python script’, a programming language frequently used for web applications, running on moddr’s web server, which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting from social networks. Participants submit their login details for social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, and the session erases online traces of all participants’ content and contacts in their online social networks. Although only recruiting around 900 ‘suiciders’ in its first iteration between November 2009 and January 2010, the site had such an impact that Facebook brought a ‘cease and desist’ order against it” (Munster 2010, 69). This is an old argument about post-war modernity. The cultural historian Christopher Lasch argued that such death-transcending aspects of American culture are linked in to its narcissistic individualism, which leads to the abolishment of old age and of death. These cultural phenomena are related to the drive to extend life indefinitely (1979, 211). It could be argued, beyond the USA, that this is in-built in modernity at large, and that its cultural logic prohibits interruption, celebrates eternal youth and promotes never-ending expansion and progress. The question here is how this telos is played out in the digital realm. For a discussion on this temporal dynamic of the digital, see Lagerkvist (2014). See for instance the scholarship by Borrelli (2010); Karppi (2011) and Cox (2012). Munster argues that this type of “transversal digitality” makes use of cognitive capitalism in order to both critique and recuperate it from within. Belonging within potent tides of thought in new materialism and posthumanism that avidly decentre the human—focusing on the technical distribution of cognition and perception, on the autopoeisis of matter, on embodiment and our originary human technicity—such analyses of digital life, and ensuing ontologies, typically posit a potential for transforming and transcending its encumbrances, as stemming from inside the system. In this perspective the potential for change arises from the ambivalence, liminality, and indeterminacy that are inherent to, and branch out, the digital. See for example Chun (2011); Coté (2014); Deuze (2014) and Hansen (2012). John D. Peters (2015a) argues that media has to do with life: they are what makes life thrive. Offering a metaphysics in which the world in all its mysterious and unknowable shapes is conceived, or rather awed at, as medial in itself, he suggests that the seemingly insignificant, boring and infrastructural/natural elements (the clouds, the sea, earth, light, or time) are also ‘media’. Media are thus vessels through which our lives unfold, and through which we steer their courses. Note the naturalizing twist of the ecology metaphor itself, which is intended to describe digital media’s entanglement with the entire human life environment. Heideggerian thought on technology and Being famously hovers between technology defined as equipment (tēchne) and as part of Being, and technology as an enframing (technics), that is a dangerous challenging of Being that turns the world into a standing reserve for exploitation. Heidegger (1927/1962; 1977). See also Dreyfus (1984) and Ruin (2010) for illuminating expositions. Victor Mayer-Schönberger (2008) also argues for the deep-felt human need for forgetting. Throughout human history, forgetting was norm, but today everything is on record. Eric Kluitenberg has argued, similarly, that in “a network society that is, a culture in which ceaseless connectivity is the imperative must also provide a collective mode, a ‘right’, to disconnect from participatory technologies” (2008, 272). Audrey Samson (2015) maintains that there is a creepiness in encountering undead media traces

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online, underscored by the tension between the desire to remember the necessity to forget. See for instance McIlwain (2005); Chouliaraki (2006), Frosh and Pinchevski eds. (2009); Westerlund (2011); Reading (2012); Hirdman ed., (2012); Sumiala (2013); Lagerkvist (2013); Bollmer (2013); Karppi (2014); Refslund Christensen & Sandvik (2014) and Schwarz (2015). For a certain strand of media studies ‘improper’ on the other hand there seems to be nothing but the end, as it is preoccupied with posthuman design for the apocalypse, or fictionalizations of a fossilized media future and a memory of our civilization, after we have died out, or transformed into a different form beyond anything we know. See Kera (2013); Parikka (2014); Roden (2015). Cf. John D. Peters’ discussion on this dimension of Marxism in Speaking into the Air (1999). I here draw my understanding from Sara Heinämaa, who provides for a very clear outline and discussion of the role of finitude in Kierkegaard and Heidegger (2010b). See for instance the discussion by Justin Clemens and Adam Nash (2015, 6–32). In arts discourse, there is a broad debate on the ‘post media condition’. Due to the electronic age, as described by medium theory, artistic works previously unrecognized as media become mediatized, while there is simultaneously a move away from the medium specificity of modernism due to the digital regime. See Broeckmann (2012). Philosophically, in addition, repetition (Kierkegaard’s gjentagelsen) is always connected to endings or to loss somehow. In repetition something is being returned that previously exited, was forgotten, paused or faded out—if only incompletely or temporarily. The connection between repetition and media has to do with taking something back that was lost or in recession. See Weber (2001). This point has been made by cyberskeptics such as Geert Lovink (2008) and Vincent Miller (2015). Critical theorists such as Felix Guattari and Howard Slater proclaim, in similar manner, the need for a media end: for a new ‘post mass media age’. ‘Post media operators’ are activists who work on independent music, print and online production and these counter-hegemonic agencies make use of alternate media to end the regime of Media. See an overview in Broeckmann (2012). As discussed by Kearl (2010) the quest for immortality and the death transcendence drive is quite prevalent in Western culture, and visible in its earliest narratives. These stories were about keeping the dead in their place. Kearl argues that Western civilization is built on the Christian syntheses of these stories, into the grand promise of eternal life. This continues today, he stresses: ”What have changed are the array of death-transcending strategies and the proliferation of postselves” (2010, 49). This applies both to popular and civic culture, where the dead are put to work from the grave. In a Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire provides for an existential and anthropological history of eternity in Western culture, and an outline of three key ways of defining it: “1. As time without beginning or an end 2. As a state that transcends time wholly and is separate from it. 3. As a state that includes time but precedes and exceeds it” (2010, 24). He also discusses how eternity (understood as endless time) is often linked to and confused with infinity (understood as endless space). Eire shows that the Christian idea of eternity is inseparable from notions of God, but in Western culture the eternal has also been given a human dimension touching upon “conceptions of an afterlife, and belief about heaven, hell, apocalyptic millennia, the New Jerusalem” (ibid). The examples in this essay relate variously to these understandings in pinpointing the diverse forms through which the drive for

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extension and preservation embodies the drive for the infinite and eternal, in contemporary digital culture. For a discussion of the netlore of the infinite, see Lagerkvist (2014). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2010) has however problematized such popular understandings of our computerized existence as built on the dream of an eternal archive (where everything is stored) and suggests that what really emerged is the paradoxical digital temporality of the enduring ephemeral through repetitions, renewals and re-loadings built into these soon-to-be obsolete technologies. Here the ephemeral processual memory work is conflated with the enduring storage of data for the future. And while these everlasting and enduring data can be retrieved forensically, their original context is at the same time ephemeral and lost. I am grateful to Audrey Samson for turning my attention to this new storage technology. http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/5dopticalstore.html. Since numbers are infinite, numerical subjectivities, one may speculate, are easily imagined to be of the same order. This argument has been put forward recently by Andrew Hoskins (2015); John D. Peters (2015b) and Leah A. Lievrouw (2012). For useful introductions to the continuing bonds theory in the digital context, see Jocelyn M. DeGroot (2012), Elaine Kasket (2012) and Dorthe Refslund Christensen & Kjetil Sandvik (2014). This new understanding of grief was launched by Klass, Silverman & Nickman (eds.) (1996). See for example the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (2005). The digital afterlife has been defined in various ways. Candi K. Cann (2014) discusses contemporary forms of grief and commemoration through media externalizations including both digital and material practices, in terms of a ‘virtual afterlife’ that can never fully make death present. Martin Pogačar (2015) defines the digital afterlife in relation to posthumous memory work and digital remainders in the context of political cultural history. See an overview by Stine Gotved (2014). Some of the platforms where this can be observed include iLasting.com, ForeverMissed.com, Minnet.dk, Evigaminnen.se, Minnessidan.se, Legacy.com, Tributes.com, Remembered.com, LastMemories.com, Till minneav.se, Life.Vu, Minnesrummet.se. In Evan Carroll’s Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy? (2011) advice is given about afterlife management. As Audrey Samson (2015) has meticulously charted, there also exist several initiatives and services concerned with data privacy issues, and in a number of blogs are bringing the political and social consequences of lingering data to the fore. See The Digital Beyond blog (http://www.thedigitalbeyond.com/), Digital Death (http://www.digitaldeath.eu/), Passare (http://www.passare.com/how-manage-your-digital-assets-0), My Digital FootPrint (http://www.mydigitalfootprint.com/), The Digital Dust blog (http://digitalera-death-eng.blogspot.co.il/). Among scholars these legacy issues have also been mapped and discussed, for example by Wendy Moncur (2015). Selina Ellis-Gray discusses the digital afterlife and the prospects for closure in design in her dissertation Remains in the Network (2015). Paula Kiel is also conducting work in progress on websites for postmortem digital interaction (2016). DeadSocial is a company that provides tools for the management of death in the digital age. They offer the help to reassemble the dismantled and distributed networked ‘person’, and the type of individual that they target is “the connected and creative”. Working

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with several different actors within of the end of life sector such as healthcare, funeral and hospice their goal is to help society through a major transition. Their vision is epochal: “We are living through the greatest period of change since the industrial revolution. Our end of life wishes, the way we prepare for death, remember the deceased and grieve have recently changed beyond recognition”. Their purpose is to summon up and re-assemble our distributed fragmented traces, for the sake of society: “In a world where our communications are fragmented and leave a trace, we serve the requirements of society when trying to relocate these traces in order to collect and collate them” (ibid). Other companies that provide similar services are Legacy Locker, Livsarkivet.se, Aftercloud, Entrustnet, Digizeker, Ik R.I.P, Perpetu. Farewell messages are also provided by Email from death and Ghost Memo. https://www.facebook.com/help/1506822589577997/. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150122-the-secret-to-immortality. https://www.lifenaut.com/learn-more/#sthash.YBMEpalo.dpuf. This belief is reflected in the mainstream contemporary digital memory ecology, for instance in the data-driven life, but also in the quantified self-movement wherein a person is essentially defined or disclosed by data. In these practices there is according to Rebecca Lemov, moreover, a weird dual form of bodily displacement: “the body that serves as the passively patient platform for a self ’s ‘remote’ activity or as the hooked-up object of endless measurement and observation” (2015, n.p.). https://www.deadmansswitch.net/. The European Commission’s “Right to be forgotten” ruling (C-131/12) from 13 May 2014 is summarized in this fact sheet: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/ factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf. One company that provides this service is forget.me (https://forget.me/dashboard#choosenegatives). Other examples that belong to a counter tendency to endless recording are X-pire! and ephemeral apps like Snapchat and Wickr. Interview 1 January 2015. In Swedish the word ‘avsluta’ carries this dual meaning: to avsluta both means to ‘shut down’ and to ‘end’, as in ‘ending one’s life’. Interview 3 June 2015. Interview 8 April 2016. https://www.safebeyond.com/. Another extreme aspect of this is the phenomenon of ‘necromedia’ currently under discussion in posthuman design and art projects such as Mission Eternity (http://missioneternity.org/). For a brief discussion, see Lagerkvist (2014). Necromedia relates both to the data and the body we leave behind: “death-related online services explore the digital cycle of our personal data” and at once various recycling technologies offer “new ways of disposing of our physical remains” (Kera 2013, 183). BBC, 2013. Interview 6 December 2015. Interview 5 December 2015. But it could also be argued that when mourners’ memory practices online are placed center-stage, there is reason to complicate the critique of cognitive capitalism, and to argue that value accumulation, and sociability, may only partially describe what these are about. See Lagerkvist (2016c). This is from Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, quoted in Sara Heinämaa (2010a, 76–77, italics added). Interview 4 August 2015.

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References Ariès, Philippe. 1977. L’homme Devant la Mort, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Aupers, Stef., and Dick Houtman. eds. 2010. Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital, Leiden: Brill. Barthes, R. 1981. Camera Lucida, New York: Hill & Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1986. America, London: Verso. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bollmer, Grant. D. 2013. “Millions Now Living Will Never Die: Cultural Anxieties About the Afterlife of Information”, The Information Society 29(3): 142–151. Bolter, Jay D. & Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation, Boston: MIT Press. Bornemark, Jonna. 2006. “Limit-situation: Antinomies and Transcendence in Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy”, SATS, 7(2): 63–85. Borrelli, Loretta. 2010. “The Suicide Irony: Seppukoo and Web 2.0 Suicide Machine”, Digimag 52, March (2010), http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1733. Brasher, Brenda. 2001. Give me that Online Religion, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Broeckmann, Andreas. 2012. “’Postmedia’ Discourses. A Working Paper”, http://www. mikro.in-berlin.de/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Postmedia+Discourses. Brubaker, Jed R., and Gillian R. Hayes. 2011. “We will never forget you [online]”: An Empirical Investigation of Post-mortem MySpace Comments. CSCW 2011, Hangzhou, China, 19–23 March 2011. Brubaker Jed R., Gillian Hayes and Paul Dourish. 2013. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning”, The Information Society: An International Journal 29(3): 152–163. Cann Candi, K. 2014. Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Carroll, Evan. 2011. Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy?, San Fransisco: Peachpit, New Riders Press. Chun, Wendy. H.-K. 2010. “The Enduring Ephemeral or the Future is a Memory”, in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, 184–293. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chun, Wendy. Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clemens, Justin and Adam Nash. 2015. “Being and Media: Digital Ontology After the Event of the End of Media”, The Fibreculture Journal 24(173): 6–32. Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coté, Mark. 2014. “Data Motility: The Materiality of Big Social Data”, Cultural Studies Review, 20(1): 121–149. Cox, Geoff. 2012. ”Virtual Suicide as Decisive Political Act”, in Activist Media and Biopolitics: Critical Media Interventions in the Age of Biopower, edited by W Sützl & T Hug, 105–118. Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck Press. DeGroot, Jocelyn. M. 2012. “Maintaining Relational Continuity with the Deceased on Facebook”, OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying 65(3): 195–212. Deuze, Mark. 2014. “Living as a Zombie in Media is the only Way to Survive”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25(2–3) (2014): 308–323. Dienst, Richard. 1994. Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Eire, Carlos. 2010. A Very Brief History of Eternity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ellis-Gray, Selina. 2015. Remains in the Network: Reconsidering Thanatosensitive Design in Loss, Diss: Lancaster University. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2004. “The Archive as Metaphor: From Archival Space to Archival Time”, Open, nr 7: 46–54. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2012. Digital Memory and the Archive, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Andrew Hoskins & Anna Reading, eds. 2009. Save As: Digital Memories, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Gotved, Stine. 2014. “Research Review: Death Online—Alive and Kicking!”, Thanatos, Spring. Hanson, Jarice. 2013. The New Minority: the Willfully Unconnected”, in The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation, and Engagement in the Information Society, edited by Paul M. A. Baker, Jarice Hanson & Jeremy Hunsinger, 223–240. New York: Peter Lang. Hansen, Mark. B. 2012. “Engineering Preindividual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st Century Media”, SubStance 41(3): 32–59. Heidegger, Martin. 1927/1962. Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, New York: Garland Publishing. Heinämaa, Sara. 2010a. “The Sexed Self and the Mortal Body”, in Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment, edited by Robin M. Schott, 73–97. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heinämaa, Sara. 2010b. “Being towards Death”, in Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment, edited by Robin M. Schott, 98–118. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hirdman, Anja. ed. 2012. Döden i medierna: Våld, tröst, fascination. Stockholm: Carlsson. Hoskins, Andrew. 2013. “The End of Decay Time”, Memory Studies 6(4): 387–389. Hoskins, Andrew. 2015. “Remember Me! Media, Memory, Uncertainty”, Keynote lecture at Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning, Vulnerability, DIGMEX-Conference at the Sigtuna Foundation, 26–28 October. Hoskins, Andrew. 2017. “The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Media and Memory”, in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 1–24. New York: Routledge. Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin, 2010. War and Media, New York: Polity. Howarth, G. (2000) “Dismantling the Boundaries between Life and Death.” Mortality 5(2): 127–138. Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy, 1932/1970. Volume II. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kasket Elaine. 2012. “Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking: Facebook as a Modern-day Medium”, Bereavement Care 31(2): 62–69. Karppi, Tero. 2011. “Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook”, Transformations Journal No. 20. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_20/ article_02.shtml. Karppi, Tero. 2014. Disconnect.Me: User Engagement and Facebook Doctoral dissertation. The University of Turku. Kera, Denisa. 2013. “Designing for Death and Apocalypse: Theodicy of Networks and Uncanny Archives”, The Information Society: An International Journal 29(3): 177–183.

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Kearl, Michael C. 2010. “The Proliferation of Postselves in American Civic and Popular Cultures”, Mortality, 15(1): 47–63. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1849/1989. Sickness unto Death by Anti-Climacus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1846/1960. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kiel, Paula. 2016. “The emerging practices of the collective afterlife.” Paper presented at the IR17-Conference, organized by AoIR, Humboldt Universität, Berlin 5–8 October 2016. Klass, Dennis., Phyllis. H. Silverman and Steven Nickman. eds. 1996. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, London: Routledge. Kluitenberg, Eric. 2008. Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, Amsterdam: NAi. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2013. “New Memory Cultures and Death: Existential Security in the Digital Memory Ecology”, Thanatos 2(2): np. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2014. “The Netlore of the Infinite: Death (and Beyond) in the Digital Memory Ecology”, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Onlinefirst, December 2014. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2016a. “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness”, New Media & Society Onlinefirst, 7 June. Lagerkvist, Amanda 2016b. “Embodiments of Memory: Toward an Existential Approach to the Culture of Connectivity”, in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, edited by Lucy Bond, Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen. New York: Berghahn. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2016c. “The Ethics of Quantified loss: The ’Facebook Phenomenon’ and/as (?) the Real Things in Life.” Paper presented at the IR17, organized by AoIR at Humboldt Universität, Berlin, 5–8 October 2016. Lasch, Christopher. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W.W. Norton and Co Inc. Langlois, Ganaele. 2014. Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lemov, Rebecca. 2015. “On Not Being There: The Data-Driven Body at Work and at Play”, The Hedgehog Review, 17(2). http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_ 2015_Summer_Lemov.php. Lievrouw, Leah A. 2012. “The Next Decade in Internet Time”, Information, Communication & Society, 15:5, (2012): 616–638, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2012.675691. Lovink, Geert. 2008. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, New York: Routledge. Mayer-Schönberger, Victor. 2008. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McCarthy, Tom. 2015. “The Death of Writing—if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google”, The Guardian, 7 March 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-writing-james-joyce-working-google. Miller, Vincent. 2015. A Crisis for Presence, London: Sage. McIlwain, Charlton D. 2005. When Death Goes Pop: Death, Media and the Remaking of Community, New York: Peter Lang. Moncur, Wendy. 2015. “Digital Ownership across Lifespans”, in Ageing and the Digital Life Course edited by Chiara Garratini and David Prendergast. New York: Berghahn Books.

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Munster, Anna. 2011. “From a Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death in the Aesthetics of Digital Code”, Theory, Culture and Society, 28 (6): 67–90. Parikka, Jussi. 2014. A Geology of Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peters, John. D. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peters, John. D. 2015a. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Peters, John. D. 2015b. “Proliferation and Obsolescence of the Historical Record in the Digital Era”, in Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age edited by Babette Bärbel Tischleder and Sarah Waserman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pogačar, Martin. 2015. “The Digital Afterlife: Ex-Yugoslav Pop Culture Icons and Social Media”, in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Literature and Culture, edited by Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, 279–300. De Gryuter. Pogačar, Martin. 2017. “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures” in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 27–47. New York: Routledge. Pybus, Jennifer. 2015. “Accumulating Affect: Social Networks and Their Archives of Feelings”, in Networked Affect, edited by Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen & Michael Petit, 235–247. Boston: MIT Press. Refslund Christensen, Dorthe. and Kjetil Sandvik. eds. 2014. Mediating and Remediating Death, Farnham: Ashgate. Roden, David. 2015. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, London: Routledge. Rothblatt, Martine. 2014. Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality, New York: Picador. Ruin, Hans. 2010. “Gestell: Enframing as the Essence of Technology”, Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts edited by Bret W. Davis. London: Routledge. Sandberg, Anders. 2014. “Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life”, in Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement, edited by Calvin Mercer & Tracey J. Trothen. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Samson, Audrey. 2015. ”Erasure, an attempt to surpass datafication”, APRJA journals/ newspapers, Datafied Research, (4).1: 1–10. http://gala.gre.ac.uk/17176/6/17176%20 SAMSON_Erasure_Datafication_2015.pdf. Schwarz, Margaret. 2015. Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soep, Elisabeth. 2012. “The Digital Afterlife of Youth-made Media: Implications for Media Literacy Education”, Comunicar: Scientific Journal of Media Education, 19(38): 93–100. Sontag, S. 1976. “Introduction”, in Peter Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death. Sumiala, Johanna. 2013. Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Thweatt-Bates, Jeanine. 2012. Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman, Adlershot: Ashgate. Van Brussel, Leen. and Nico Carpentier, eds. 2014. The Social Construction of Death, Basingstoke: Palgrave: Macmillan. Van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walter, Tony. 1992. “Sociologists Never Die: British Sociology and Death”, The Sociological Review, 40(S1): 264–295.

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Walter, Tony, Rachid Hourizi, Wendy Moncur, and Stacey Pitsillides. 2011/12. “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn?” OMEGA, 64(4): 275–302. Weber, Samuel. 2001. “Religion, Repetition, Media”, in Religion and Media edited by Hente De Vries and Samuel Weber. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Westerlund, Michael. 2011. “The production of pro-suicide content on the Internet: a counter-discourse activity”, New Media and Society, DOI: 10.1177/1461444811425221. Zelizer, Barbie. 2010. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 MEMORY OF THE MULTITUDE The end of collective memory Andrew Hoskins

The insatiable archive Twentieth century media forged new kinds of mass imaginaries, collectivities championed or feared for their capacity to consume and think and act in consort. And this new mass was also said to remember, to hold a vision of a shared past, to make and remake collective memory. But last century’s broadcast era’s dominant vision of media and audiences, and their associated concepts and frames, are said to cloud today’s thinking on the revolutionary change of post-broadcast or participatory media (Merrin 2014). And it is a similar twentieth century legacy that hampers some of memory studies today, in a lack of recognition that digital technologies and media have transformed remembering and forgetting to an extent and on a scale that should have shattered the canon. In what follows I set out this hangover of the collective in memory studies, and offer instead ‘the multitude’ as the defining digital organizational form of memory beyond but also incorporating the self. A key challenge with noting such profound change is that it is easily overlooked until some more privileged viewpoint—notably in the future—is found. Moreover, faced with unsettling worlds, it is always easier to cling to the familiar frames and lexicon that are formative of thinking, world view, and of course, career. ‘Collective memory’—as with ‘mass media’—are prime (and intertwined) examples of the stasis of the comfortable, terms that are so embedded in the everyday, they seem to warrant little examination, explanation or justification. Here I argue that collective memory—the most used term for memory beyond the self and of the group, of society—needs upgrading in light of the digital’s ushering in of much more complex dialogic modes of communication, undermining previous configurations of individual–group–societal relations, and

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the forging of new flexible community types with emergent and mutable temporal and spatial coordinates. These are the self ’s new connections and entanglements with others and with and through an array of digital apps, platforms and networks, namely an array of emergent ways a connective public is moving in and out of consort that I call a ‘sharing without sharing’. The broader revolutionary change here is the ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins 2011a, b): a heady cocktail of immediacy, volume and pervasiveness of the digital, which shape a new knowledge base—an ‘information infrastructure’ (Bowker and Star 2000)—that brings people and machines into new relations with one another. The connective turn not only transforms remembering and forgetting but also the value that is attributed to each, in for example, the third ‘memory boom’,1 turning remembrance white hot in the ‘rage for memorialisation’ (Blight 2012) and the sudden demand for a ‘right to be forgotten’ (Ghezzi et al. eds. 2014). The connective turn has transformed media-collective relations to shape a new multitude in two defining and related ways. The first is the shift from publics who had no means of replying to media in the broadcast era to today’s participation whereby a new mass constantly snap, post, record, edit, like, link, forward and chat in a digital ecology of media. The second—a direct consequence of the first—is that the memory of the multitude is all over the place, scattered yet simultaneous and searchable: connected, networked, archived. Whereas traditional forms of memory developed from ideas of the crowd, the social, and the collective as non-archival entities, and traditional audience relations with media similarly so, in contrast, the multitude is inherently archival— entangled and distributed through uncertain times and spaces, forms and times of decay, and emergences. The new economy of attention or distraction—the multiple and often simultaneous modes of being hyperconnected: the new modus operandi of everyday communication—the link, like, message, tweet, email, text—are archived into a chain of media-memory. The archived self alters the constitution of the social, anchoring the present in a ‘deep now’: a now with unpredictable and often invisible and unimaginable trails and connectivities. The memory of the multitude is thus made from human-archival entanglements of communication through digital devices and networks. For better or for worse, such entanglements are today irresistibly part of what it means to be social. In this formulation, I draw upon the work of Paulo Virno (2004, 25) who states: ‘The contemporary multitude is composed neither of “citizens” nor of “producers;” it occupies a middle region between “individual and collective;” for the multitude, then, the distinction between “public” and “private” is in no way validated.’ The multitude then offers a powerful vision that smashes the exhausted but endemic individual–collective binary that haunts the study of memory. It is an essential vehicle for acknowledging the state of digital memory as transcendent of the traditional imaginary, or rather delimitation, of the collective as a usefully distinct and locatable form of memory.

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Like other kinds of what it is to be social, being a member of the multitude is not something that one can or easily want to leave: attempts to disconnect always end in failure. In some ways membership of the multitude may feel like being part of traditional collective or crowd. For example, Vincente Rafael (2003, 403) in an early comparison observes: ‘While telecommunication allows one to escape the crowd, it also opens up the possibility of finding oneself moving in concert with it, filled with its desire and consumed by its energy.’ But the digital’s affordance of movement, liveliness and control, of being connected, actually obfuscates the multitude’s archival dimensions. The multitude forges a non-sociable social or a sharing without sharing precisely because its digitally connected memory is both humanly and algorithmically archived, mixing up and blurring the conscious and the unconscious, the discriminate and the indiscriminate. The archive has traditionally been seen (like other media) as separate and external to the self, as something with institutional status, as variously a place and space for the storage of artefacts of the past that give rise to remembering. Yet, the medial gathering and splintering of individual, social and cultural imaginaries, increasingly networked through portable and pervasive digital media and communication devices, attach shadow archives to much of everyday life, that also blend and complicate that which was once considered as distinctly public and private. The archive is no longer only collected, organized, managed, walled and kept by an array of institutional memory keepers, but is also diffused through a ‘new memory ecology’ (Brown and Hoskins 2010; Hoskins and Tulloch 2016). This is the current digital environment’s (re)ordering of the past by and through multiple connectivities of times, actors and events, which also shifts the very parameters of memory and memory studies. And these new parameters at least may appear as liberating. For example, ‘the ‘miscellanizing’ of information not only breaks it out of its traditional organizational categories but also removes the implicit authority granted by being published in the paper world’ (Weinberger 2007, 22) and the fluidity, reproducibility, and transferability of digital data overnight smash the spatial and artefactual constraints of the twentieth century memory booms. Indeed, today, the archive can even be seen as a medium in its own right, as it has been liberated ‘from archival space into archival time’ (Ernst 2004, 52; see also Ernst, this volume). The notion of the archive as static is replaced by the much more fluid temporalities and dynamics of ‘permanent data transfer’ (ibid.), defining the new memory ecology. The archives of a broadcast era mass media, once trapped in the archival space of the vault or library subject to the material conditions of order, classification and retrieval, are rendered fluid through their hyperconnectivity. As Van House and Churchill (2008, 306) observe: ‘Archives sit at the boundary between public and private. Current archives extend well beyond a person, a space, an institution, a nation state. They are socio-technical systems, neither entirely social nor technical.’

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However, as the archive has broken free of its bonds of space, institution and regimented classification, it has run riot, consuming almost everything in its path. Thus, as Kroker (2014, 80) puts it: ‘the content of the archive has suddenly and risibly expanded to encompass the totality of life itself ’. Thus, the new social that is made by the multitude also entraps it; the real challenge here is to see beyond the myth of digital media democratization. The digitally fostered values of openness2 have driven a culture of unbridled commentary that reveals that there is no ‘mainstream’, despite the veneer of the promotion of the egalitarian Web: ‘join the conversation’ invites Twitter, ‘Comment is Free’ declares The Guardian. Rather, since around 2005, the multitude has vacated the centre ground, with all the most ugly and irrational in human thought aroused through rage and dismay thriving in the polarizing virality of social networking.3 The modern self has been traditionally protected by the calming absorption of a trusted and intimate collective—importantly small in number—and by the emotional dissipation of chronological time. Today, the Twitter fuel of instantaneity destroys the relative privacy of intimate sociality that once enabled the opportunity for second thoughts. Adam Gopnik (2011) for example, argues, this is ‘not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud’. The sociological mantra of a late modern society marked by a navigation of ‘multiple life worlds’ (Giddens 1990) is complicated by their digital collapse. The extended network of the mobile self distributed across time and space is ironically dumped back into one place with the relational database of the multitude. Hyperconnectivity then, for all its infinite extensionality, is actually strangely reductive. Our shadow archives grow by the second, with social media exerting a ‘residual abundance’ (Virilio 1997, 24): a digital and digitized gravitational pull that seems counter-intuitive to the pronouncements of the acceleration of life lived online. The former self, its lives and lovers, all become entangled in digital databases that without conscience betray the wild exigencies of youth, not in unguarded gossip, but in perpetuity. As Jaron Lanier (2010, 70) suggests: ‘A “Facebook generation” young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online has no way out, for there is only one hive.’ But the hive does not discriminate between the young and the old. Social networking, messaging and all of life’s uploading together casts a continuous, accumulating, paradoxically real-time and dormant memory, of the multitude, lurking in the underlayer of media life awaiting potential rediscovery, reconnection and remediation, to transform past relations through the reactivation of latent and semi-latent connections (with our selves and with others). The memory of the multitude softens history, changing the parameters of the who, what, when and why of remembering. With digital searching, accessing,

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participating, there is little unseen, untouched or uncommented on by the multitude. This has diminished the authority of the former gatekeepers of memory, as David Lowenthal (2012, 3) observes: ‘No longer what elites and experts tell us it was, the past becomes what Everyman chooses to accept as true.’ The multitude appears as stronger than previous collectivities as it is afforded carte blanche to keep the ‘conversation’ going: there is literally no ending. I now turn to examine the rise of the multitude and the memory of the multitude as a challenge to previous formations of memory imagined and presumed as collective, but also as a solution to the re-thinking of individual and social relations now blurred through their immersion in digital networks and archives. Then I will consider some of the bases for the development of the collective as a version of memory beyond the self, and its continued currency in memory studies, and map its popularity as being shaped by the so-called mass media. Finally, I suggest how a new economy of attention has contributed to the forging of the multitude and its memorial entanglements.

The collective The term ‘collective’ (rather than ‘social’) has been most attached to the study of memory beyond the individual. This is attributable in part to the 1980 translation into English of Maurice Halbwachs’ (1914–1945) The Collective Memory (first published in 1950 as La Mémoire Collective, although written in the 1930s). The origin of the term is perhaps Halbwachs’ 1925 Les cadres sociau (although not as yet translated into English). In Halbwachs’ work the collective is indicative of a function or a process, namely those memorial aspects that enter into negotiations (mediations) and so acquire a collective status amongst those who take part in the communication or accept its outcome.4 However, as with the memory booms, the collective in Halbwachs’ meaning has become somewhat detached from its etymological roots as a catch-all and pervasive term to mean memory of/in the group/society. Indeed, Halbwachs’ usage of collective is not explicitly linked to the media of his day. Despite writing in a period of then unprecedented growth in mass media, in The Collective Memory he does not mention the electronic media. His aides-memoire to the city, for example, include an architect, historian, painter, businessman, the novelist and a map, but no other media. Although Halbwachs makes tantalizing references to newspapers as though the mediated milieu is right under his nose, he does not appear to envision his idea of the collective with the then emergent and collectivizing media of the day. Halbwachs was a student of Emile Durkheim who argued that individual consciousness was lacking when not part of the social force gathered in and of the present moment: Without symbols, social sentiments could only have a precarious existence. Though very strong as long as men are together and influence each other

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reciprocally, they exist only in the form of recollections after the assembly has ended, and when left to themselves, these become feebler and feebler, for since the group is no longer present and active, individual temperaments easily regain the upper hand’ (1915, 231). Thus, the strength of the group bonding of Durkheim’s ‘assembled’, co-present collective conscience, diminishes in time with the separation and the scattering of its constituents. However, Halbwachs does not restrict his definition of the group, of the collective, to co-presence. Rather, it is clearly its imaginary that is functional in terms of its members drawing upon group memory: ‘I continue under the influence of a group even though I am distant from it. I need only carry in my mind whatever enables me to gain the group viewpoint, plunge into its milieu and time, and feel in its midst’ (Halbwachs 1980, 118). So, for Halbwachs, ‘what constitutes the essence of a group is an interest, a shared body of concerns and ideas’ (ibid.) And it is precisely this, Halbwachs argues, that ‘represents the group’s stable and permanent element’ (1980, 119). To attain such ‘permanence’ seems an almighty burden to place on individual memories without the reinforcement of the group. And it is here in the strengthening, reinforcing, and continuing capacity that ideas of the collective of memory have a corollary at least with the collective of the so-called ‘mass’ or ‘the’ media audiences. Underpinning this is a measure or threshold rarely explicitly defined for a ‘collective’ (memory or audience) to be identified. Following this it is digital media studies’ taking issue with the traditional measures of media that provides fertile ground for re-envisioning memory. So, I argue here that today’s ‘relational’ aspects of memory are grounded in hyperconnectivity, where memory’s constituting agency is both technological and human. The collective does not capture these new individual–social–technological relations. Instead, the digital transforms the very basis of memory’s potential in the multitude. Given this, it is odd that despite the related extensive conceptual and theoretical revolution with the comprehensive splintering of memory into an array of metaphors, forms and taxonomies5 over the past thirty years, the modus operandi of memory studies (and a good number of other disciplines encountering and examining memory) remains collective memory. Thankfully, there are notable exceptions. Michael Rothberg’s (2009) notion of ‘multidirectional memory’, for example, has become quickly influential in the field. He argues: ‘Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross referencing, and borrowing, as productive and not privative’ (2009, 3). As a concept, multidirectional memory is liberating in many ways. Although Rothberg’s focus is not digital media (his principal concern in this work is memories of the Holocaust) his idea of multidirectionality affords a useful sense of the dynamics of the digital media–multitude relationship.6

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More broadly, though, and despite the discomfort claimed by some as they continue nonetheless to employ the term as pivotal to their analysis, collective memory dominates. For instance, a simple Google Books Ngrams search7 for the period 1980–2008 provides crude evidence for this in the return of ‘collective memory’ being three times higher than ‘social memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ (see also Éric Brian et al. 2012). One of the challenges with claiming that collective memory has fallen is that in some ways it is an easy target. For instance, as Vilem Flusser argues: ‘Disintegrating social forms are more interesting than new ones because they are sanctified by familiarity’ (2011, 62). However, unlike the concept of ‘the media’ (see Boyer 2007)—albeit on a smaller scale—the term collective memory has become overdetermined. My interest here though is not to merely dismiss what has become a linguistic placeholder for a great deal of memory-in-the-world, but rather to map a vision beyond the memory booms’ aggravation of collective (memory) that has become conjoined with a broadcast-era collectivist media studies obsessed with audience, reception and production. Established (broadcast) media and collective memory are symbiotic. And, in media history terms, collective memory is seen to be made in the ‘parenthesis’ phase—of mass media—rather than in the period that preceded it or that which followed. Instead, the oral and the digital respectively have connectivity—rather than collectivity—in common: articulation, conjugation, networks, systems, links and nodes (Pettitt 2011, personal communication).8 Although in memory terms the collective is dominant and so attracts focus here, it is the constitution of the social itself—although strangely perhaps with much less resonance when used to describe memory—that is utterly transformed with the digital. As Merrin (2008) argues: In the broadcast-era ‘the social’ represented the abstract social body—the public, the population, the citizenry, the masses—with the media’s role being to incarnate the social bond and bring social and political developments to the individual. In contrast the ‘social’ in social networking derives from ‘social life’. The top-down provision of information is replaced by peer-produced relationships with news of the world being replaced by news of the self. But social media are only one still-emergent form of the mediatization of the social. Moreover, today’s ‘pattern of experience’, in Walter Ong’s (1982) terms, is no longer reducible to the individual and the social and their interplay, but rather is forged through sociotechnical life. Another way to characterize these changes is through the advance of ‘grey media’, which are the by-product of an apparent harmonization of technology and the self. Society is losing sight of itself—and its past—as it becomes more synchronized with its technologies. For example, as Ben Agger (2011, 126)

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observes: ‘Immersion and diversion occur together; indeed, the greater our investment in ephemera, the more diverted we are from what is really going on.’ This is the diminishment of consciousness of and in media. But amidst the flux of sociotechnical life, what has happened to the collective? We can trace the rise and fall of the collective (memory) in relation to the rise and fall of the broadcast era, and the shift today to a media–memory relationship that is more intense, and yet at the same time diffused and dispersed. Memory of the multitude replaces collective memory as the imagined dominant form of memory-in-the-world, and it does this through undermining the very idea of memory beyond the individual. The versatility of ‘multitude’ is found in its affording the singularity of memory to the individual but also recognizing its dependency on the vagaries of an array of digital connectivities and traces, in other words the many ways in which we are constitutive of and subject to the workings of our shadow archives. This is the digital organizing and habitual condition of today’s memory, that paradoxically facilitates both a lightness of being: an immediacy and ephemerality of hyperconnectivity between selves, machines, etc., but also the burden of the potential exposure of all of one’s traces, making the digital self forever accountable to an unfathomable and unharnessable deep glut of their past.

The multitude The multitude is a term associated with the work of Hardt and Negri and Paolo Virno (leading figures of contemporary autonomist Marxism). Hardt and Negri (2005, 100) explain: ‘The multitude is an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference) but on what it has in common.’ And the commonality of memory of the multitude is that it is made through hyperconnectivity, with each other, with the network, with the archive. It is potentially much more powerful and unpredictable than the influence attributed to collective memory as its plural singularities mix a kind of indiscriminate existence and an accumulative digital potential to return (and also transform) past personal, semi-public and public relations through the unforeseeable re-activation of latent and semi-latent connections of shadow archives. And whereas the memory of the collective has often been conceived of in terms of the limits of human existence, as with a generation, for example, the memory of the multitude instead can live on with the aid of digital afterlife agencies (see Lagerkvist, this volume). Memory of the multitude is bound to the singularity of the individual as fundamentally the new centre of media and tied to the rapid proliferating media of the self, yet inextricable from the complex hyperconnectivity of digital networks and traces (that make us findable and memorable). So, memory of the multitude follows Merrin’s (2012) technological focus in defining multitude via network computing, which:

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empowers the individual as the centre of their own me-dia ecology . . . it increases their singularity, whilst also immersing us in active networked masses of potentially greater size and power greater than anything any national broadcaster could create. And these masses are fluid, flexible, variable, ephemeral, constructed by our voluntary participation and continually evolving and we are involved in many of these at once. What networked computing realizes, therefore, is ‘the multitude’. However, the idea of ‘voluntary participation’ affords a too rosy view of immersion in digital networks. Some critics argue that digital immersion involves an increasing degree of dependency and that the individual has become a technical manager of life lived through a set of apparatuses and their interfaces. For example, Crary (2013, 59) argues that all that was once categorized as ‘personal’ is now transformed in ‘the fabricating of oneself into a jumble of identities that exist only as effects of temporary technological arrangements’ (albeit ones that can persist after death). But it is precisely these temporary technological arrangements, which dissolve the personal, that open up a new kind of social articulation of digital memory: immediate, hyperconnective, remote, but whose parameters (size and duration) are unpredictable as they have a feature that the traditional idea of the social does necessarily possess, that they are archival. And it is through shadow archives that the individual and the social are inescapably entwined and also suspended, in a kind of extratemporal and extraspatial existence, and made contingent on the potential of their reinvigoration or rediscovery (emergence). It is the memory of the multitude that collapses but also bridges the ideas of individual and the collective that memory studies has so spectacularly failed to co-imagine. The multitude has traditionally been conceived in opposition to the ‘crowd’, which is seen as a more regressive force. Mazzarella (2010, 697) explains: ‘crowds are the dark matter that pull on the liberal subject from its past, whereas multitudes occupy the emergent horizon of a postliberal politics’. Indeed, memory of the multitude is subject to a different kind of emergence to that of more traditional modes of remembering. And, as I set out above with reference to Durkheim, the strength of collective memory, as seen as founded upon the presence of the assembly of the crowd and its recollective power, is inevitably prone to weakening and diminishment following its disassembly. So, ‘individual temperaments’ are opposed to the sociality (collectivity) of the group, in Durkheim’s terms. To translate this into media terms: the broadcast era memory collectivities (audiences) were dependent upon the shared (initially simultaneous, but later more often time-shifted) consumption of representation: the classic ‘media event’. The so-called collective memory of such an event could, of course, be reinforced (and also changed) through various mechanisms including the repetition and remediation of the representation(s) of the event over time (e.g. commemorative television news and documentary programming).

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However, memory of the multitude is not derived from spectatorship but is made through participation (and even proxy participation after death) and all the ways in which we are active in hyperconnectivity. Thus, multitudes’ ‘power is “constituent” (internal, immanent) rather than “representative” (external, mediated)’ (Mazzarella 2010, 707). So, memory of the multitude is not based upon a classical ‘plenitude–loss–restoration model of memory’ (Rigney 2005, 25) where once memory was strong and is subject inevitably to decay time (Hoskins 2013) of (relatively) steady diminishment. Instead, the multitude offers memory as a more dynamic set of relations and configurations that inhabit shadow archives, and are also subject to the dependencies on, and thus the viralities and the contagion of, the network. The social and cultural ‘frameworks’ of remembering have moved both inside the machine and inside us. One way to find the multitude is to look at alternative propositions to that of collective memory. For example, one of the leading sociologists of memory, Jeffrey Olick, offers a distinction between collective and collected memories. Collected memories, he suggests, are memories based on the individual, ‘the aggregated individual memories of members of a group’ (1999, 338), and collective memory presupposes that there is something that transcends the individual, the idea that ‘symbols and their systems of relations have a degree of autonomy from the subjective perceptions of individuals’ (1999, 341). In terms of the digital, however, there is a new powerful force of aggregation. For example, the quantified self movement and the fetishization of a total memory are seeded by the capacity to combine and aggregate datasets from multiple sources (body, environment, social media, etc.). However, some take hyperconnectivity as offering a new force to the collective, with the idea of ‘collective intelligence’, and digital media gurus such as Surowiecke on ‘crowds’ (2004) and Clay Shirky’s (2008) ‘Here comes everybody’. But digital data also has an autonomy beyond the perceptions and control of individuals, thus Mauricio Delfin (2013) in his summary of Lisa Gitelman’s edited book states: ‘The authors . . . recognize that the “aggregative nature” of data has a rhetorical power, and the power within this aggregation is relational “based on potential connections: network, not hierarchy”’. And the mechanism of aggregation is the database. The database re-calibrates our relationship to the past, with the Supreme Database, Google, rendering everything it deems worthy uncomfortably equivalent as search. For example, Lev Manovich (1999, 85) in an influential paper sets out databases’ challenge to narrative: ‘As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items which it refuses to order. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).’ And Manovich argues, the web has an ‘anti-narrative logic’ for it is perpetually incomplete and, as elements are added, ‘the result is a collection, not a story’ (1999, 82). The memory of the multitude is database-driven in this way, for it is perpetually open to present and future amendment, restless for the extended present.

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So, if part of the value of narrative is ending and closure, the value of the memory of the multitude is found in its perpetual becoming. Databases in this way invite repetition, remediation, renewal. Currency and presentness are afforded through digital mobility, a kind of perpetual game of catch in which the players are not co-present and the balls are texts, images, and an array of other postings. Social networking and microblogging services such as Twitter are not sustained merely through individual tweets, but through the forwarding—re-tweeting—of messages. Wikis, SNSs, video sharing sites are acclaimed—albeit hastily—as ‘virtual communities’: user-generated content is constantly edited, re-edited, approved (liked), and altered through each additional digital acknowledgment or edit. So, the database also premediates digital futures, extending the present through mediatizing obligations to contribute, to update, to respond, and a desire to be acknowledged and to acknowledge through the array of the new hierarchies of numbers of comments, followers, friends, likes. Traditional measures (no matter how imprecise) of a threshold of remembering beyond the self—the collective (social) and the cultural—were based primarily on the accumulative aggregates of spatially-defined collections: the crowd, the audience, visitor numbers. Today, in the new memory ecology, it is contagion and virality that have become increasingly significant measures of memory of the multitude. Some of the former measures are being transposed onto the digital world, such as hits or downloads, which can be counted and compared in real time. But these are backward looking and miss the fundamental characteristics of hyperconnectivity, contagion and virality. For example, Henry Jenkins argues that the hybrid media space of YouTube represents a move ‘towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content)’ (2007, 95). YouTube (and other file-sharing and social networking sites) provide a nexus of communications and media data (sounds, images, textual comments, etc.) that accrue value through the principle of their hyperconnectivity with the many (circulation and remediation).

The currency of collective memory Collective memory weighs disproportionately heavily on and in the field of memory studies. It is established as a defining unit of memory across the social sciences and humanities, and its universality extends through public, political and cultural discourses on all things past. Even psychologists who see memory as a fundamental condition of consciousness, and who have constructed a variety of complex models of individual memory, have increasingly taken collective memory as their pivotal frame for remembering achieved beyond the head or in the world (for example, see the 2008 special issue of the psychology journal Memory on ‘Collective Memory’).

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Meanwhile, in the social sciences, there seems to be an increasing discomfort claimed by some of the leading theorists of collective memory, even as they continue nonetheless to employ the term as pivotal to their work. For instance, as Olick (2008, 152) states: ‘I agree with the charge that collective memory over-totalizes a variety of retrospective products, practices, and processes. Nevertheless. . . Because of its general sensitizing powers, I use “collective memory” as the guiding concept for my own work.’ So, as Bill Niven observes: ‘while authors distance themselves from the term “collective memory”, they still appear to operate within its parameters’ (2008, 428). Furthermore, Olick suggests that the term’s popularity is somewhat paradoxical ‘because of its very breadth and imprecision’ (ibid.) Even the more contextual (and of variable use) concepts and taxonomies of memory that emphasize its dynamics (including its ‘mediation’ (cf. Van Dijk 2007)) nonetheless are often forged with a mythical ‘collective’ lurking in their analysis as a kind of default unit of memory beyond the self. Elsewhere, collective memory is much more explicitly contested and rejected. For example, the very influential historian of war, Jay Winter states: ‘The loose usage of the term “collective memory”—framed to mean virtually anything at all—in every corner of the arts and humanities, has persuaded me to abandon the term whenever possible’ (2006, 4). Instead, Winter effectively deploys ‘collective remembrance’ as: ‘it points to time and place and above all, to evidence, to traces enabling is to understand what groups of people try to do when they act in public to conjure up the past’ (2006, 5). Other accounts see collective memory as historically correct in describing the relative stability of memory in pre-modern societies but as inadequate in capturing the flux and pace of memory change in some late modern societies. For example, Aleida Assmann advocates a ‘transnational framework’ of European memory as a means of disentangling the collective memories that she sees as threatening European integration, instead ‘facing up to’ and turning them into ‘shared memories’ (2007, 7). However, Peter Novick takes issue with Assmann’s use of the term collective memory in a response to her GHI Lecture: ‘Europe: A Community of Memory?’ Novick (2007, 28) argues that Assmann mis-attributes the power and longevity of collective memories (their ‘eternal truth’ and ‘identity’) characteristic of pre-modern societies to memory in the contemporary era. Instead, he claims that in using collective memory we need to acknowledge that it is an ‘organic metaphor’ that make the analogy between individual and community memory (2007, 27). He continues: The organic metaphor seems to me to work best when we are speaking of an organic (traditional, stable, homogeneous) community, one in which consciousness, like social reality, changes slowly. . . The life expectancy of memories in contemporary society seems greatly diminished. With the circumstances of our lives changing as rapidly as they do, it is the very

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rare memory that can resonate with an unchanging ‘essential’ condition (2007, 27–28). So, for Novick, collective memory is a homogenizing phenomenon that requires a certain stasis to bond effectively, and its formation would thus be improbable amidst the highly mobile and relatively transitory communities of modern life. However, it is digital connectivity today that offers a different kind of organic community, albeit one not characterized by stability and homogeneity, but rather by diffusion, dispersal and emergence. And this characterization maps onto the work of Lars Ole Sauerberg (2008) and Thomas Pettitt (2011 and p.c. 2011) who have re-envisioned media history to show how the current era is in some ways a return to the one before last, in other words prior to the broadcast era.9 Meanwhile, collective memory discourses in accounts of mass media, culture and communication have flourished in the in-between of the Gutenberg parentheses. And it is hyperconnectivity itself that is the new interlocutor of patterns of experience through digital networks. As Arjun Appadurai (2003, 17) argues, these ‘constitute a new and heterogeneous sociology, for they are not the products of a natural history of face-to-face interaction. They rely precisely on the absence or impossibility of the face-to-face.’ In this way, he argues: ‘they invert the relationship between memory and connectivity. Where natural social collectivities build connectivities out of memory, these virtual collectivities build memories out of connectivity’ (ibid.). So, the collective noun for memory is no longer the group, or the community, but rather hyperconnectivity itself. The consciousness/social reality to which Novick attributes collective memory, that in modern societies became entangled and reinforced with the media of the day (the broadcast era mass media, that I address in the next section) is today paradoxically both hidden and exposed in our immersive-expansive new memory ecology. As noted above, in terms of a historiography of memory, increasingly authors fragment collective memory into an array of sub-divisions (political, cultural, communicative, for example) whilst nonetheless operating under its shadow. The burgeoning of classifications and concepts of memory have in some ways enriched explanations of how and why individuals, groups, societies come to remember and forget. At the same time many of these proliferating taxonomies, whilst chasing the significant shifts in the dynamics of modern memory, nonetheless seem at best tentative and incremental when measured against the transformations of the new memory ecology. Indeed, their sine qua—‘collective memory’— obfuscates rather than enables such accounts to sufficiently realize the radical transformations in memory that mark the twenty-first century. One suspects that there is too much already invested in the term as a toovisible anchor of the study of memory beyond the cognitive and the individual. Perhaps to jettison the idea of collective memory altogether would enable at

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least the freshness of vision that is required to witness the radical diffusion of the memory of the multitude in the new memory ecology. Anyhow, in terms of the critical discourses on collective memory, that often traverse along the twin axes of subjectivity and the social, history and memory, the complaints are easy to find, whereas the solutions seem less straightforward and obtainable. The pre-eminent sociologist of collective memory, Barry Schwartz (2008, 307), for example, summarizes, ‘The welter of criticism, plainly, contains no concrete alternatives’; and he goes on to say that, ‘The confusion . . . refers to the analysis, not the reality, of collective memory.’ Is it though that a ‘reality’ of collective memory can actually be effectively distilled? It is difficult enough to locate in one’s own mind the influences and content of one’s own pasts, and to recall and articulate (remember) them in the present in a coherent and comprehensive fashion. Moreover, to seek this and the collaborations or multiples of this required to somehow reach a threshold for a collective memory, seems an even more improbable task. But where collective memory discourses have flourished are in and of the broadcast era. It is precisely this perspective of media that is being used to prop up collective memory in memory studies, and it is this legacy that I now turn to address.

Mass media and collective memory10 There is a great deal of work that aligns the mass of collective memory with the production, circulation and consumption of mass products, culture and media. For instance, Peter N. Stearns (1994, 149) writes, ‘the essential expansion and multiplication of modern memory as mass media fabricate and commercialize an evergrowing number of collective memories turning the past into a commodity for mass consumption’; George Lipsitz (2001, viii) argues, ‘electronic mass media make collective memory a crucial constituent of individual and group identity in the modern world’; and Barbara Misztal summarizes, ‘In today’s society, collective memory is increasingly shaped by specialized institutions: schools, courts, museums and the mass media’ (2003, 19; cf. Sheila Watson (ed.) 2007, 388). And, drawing on McLuhan (1962) Misztal goes on to state unequivocally: ‘Today, the most important role in the construction of collective memories is played by the mass media’ (2003, 21–22). Yet, the notion of an agreed or testable measure, or threshold for collective memory, seems to evade many of the accounts that claim to identify a mass mediated collective memory. In addition, the task seems even more problematic in attempting to grasp the workings and implications of a notion of collective memory, especially outside certain obvious forms of remembering and notably of events whose impact is thought likely to affect a ‘sizable collective’ and/ or is deemed significant by a society (through its media) at a given time. The greyness of digital media profoundly challenges traditional modes of the searching for memory based upon representation. And representationality feeds

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claims as to the sharedness of so-called collective memory through a measure of the magnitude of their consumption. But this formula is already broken anyway, as Kansteiner (2002, 193) observes: ‘one faces a veritable paradox: the more “collective” the medium (that is, the larger its potential or actual audience), the less likely it is that its representation will reflect the collective memory of that audience’. So, for Kansteiner, ‘there remains the distinct possibility that the monuments, books, and films whose history has been carefully reconstructed can quickly pass into oblivion without shaping the historical imagination of any individuals or social groups’ (2002, 192). This is a damning indictment of much of memory studies’ work that attempts to comprehend the nature and the impact of media on memory, or on history for that matter. And it is a continuing blind faith in the voracity of the representation (including its limits, its fragility and its decay) as core of the media– memorial paradigm of study into the twenty-first century that merely adds the digital to its extensionist repertoire, often treating it as simply another media form that can be added to the study of television, radio and print. Instead, as Fuller and Goffey advocate: ‘Why not consider the irreducibly constitutive role of machines, techniques, or technologies in the problematic axiology of power? Why assume that the moral diktats of representation exhaust mediating processes?’ (2012, 6). And it is the memory of the multitude that breaks out beyond the representational limits of the mass media. It is constituted through the technologies and devices that offer and demand participation in a network that unlike a great deal of other media has uncertain finitude. Furthermore, Aaron Beim (2007), although acknowledging the power of an array of conceptual frameworks applied to remembrance of the group, argues that collective memory studies have nonetheless been inhibited by defining memory to be collective only when it is institutionalized. Part of the problem for Beim is that ‘collective memory analyses conflate the production of the object and its reception’ (2007, 7). This is an interesting articulation of the conceptual challenge when applied in the context of the new memory ecology. Namely, a central dynamic of the emergence of digital memory is precisely the complicating of the notions of production and reception. Ironically, and in keeping with Schwartz’s point above, that, ‘The confusion . . . refers to the analysis, not the reality, of collective memory’ (ibid.), the focus on these analytical distinctions and conflations overlooks the very emergent phenomena that challenges these same analytical dimensions and debates. The terms themselves are synonymous with a broadcast era model of mass communication. In fact, it is easy to identify the age of mass media as the age of collective memory, conceptually and experientially: within the Gutenberg parenthesis. Radio and later television’s capacity to mediate simultaneously first to a national and later routinely to a global audience, provided in this way a common and shared experience, imagined or otherwise, and thus arguably memories, of nodal news events that spawned a whole generation of audience studies.

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Most of the archetypal media events (the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy; the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger; the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales’; and the attacks on the United States of the 11th September 2011) that have informed the genesis of Flashbulb Memory (FBM) studies are products of an age of broadcast media (see my opening chapter in this volume). In this way they carry with them distinctive residues of the medium that they were produced by and experienced through. It is not that nodal events that draw national and/or global attention were only a product of or are consigned to the broadcast era past. Rather, today’s events are pushed through a more complex and immediate digital media mesh that are always already memorialized via the multitude, for they are inextricably part of shadow archives that hold and lose memory. In sum, a real challenge in making the leap from the collective to the multitude is the resonance that television has in the study of the media (and memory) in determining the interest with spectatorship over participation. And this in turn feeds the persisting obsession with matters of representation. A standard retort to a critique of a focus on spectatorship is that television remains the dominant medium of our age, including the numerous ways in which its content is remediated via other—and increasingly mobile—media. Spectatorship implies a focused gaze on a single text (hence its development in film theory). However, this response does not account for the emergent complexities of the ecology in which the digital has reconfigured media ontology. Key to this reconfiguration, then, is the notion of media reception, or rather its digitally-inspired focus of ‘attention’, and it is to this notion that I now turn to address as a more illuminating means of imagining the multitude.

The attention of the multitude The shift from the dominance of media of the broadcast era to that of pervasive media and new modes of connectivity has ushered in a new economy of attention. McPherson (2002, 204) explains: ‘We move from the glance-or-gaze that theorists have named as our primary engagements with television (or film) towards the scan-and-search.’ The mediatization of attention produces a new conglomeration of that formerly-known-as-the-audience: the multitude. This is not the Halbwachsian group or collective (of the virtual mind) that is dependent upon its ‘interest, a shared body of concerns and ideas’ (1980, 118), but rather is made through hyperconnectivity. Whereas often the audience (and certainly the crowd) share the temporality of simultaneity, the multitude has in common the sharing in the contagion of the propulsion of data. Searching the web has increasingly become more like riding the web as tourists of an adventure-without-end, so that the present is always filled with the anticipation of the next revelation and, moreover, the fear of missing the next hit. For example, as McPherson compares, this is unlike the

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viewer following each narrative turn of television, unwilling to change channel. Rather, she argues, the ‘fear of missing in the Web propels us elsewhere, on to the next chunk, less bound to linear time and contiguous space, into the archive and into what feels like navigable space that responds to our desire’ (2002, 204). This is an effect of shadow archives. We not only feel participant in increasingly linked multiple and continuous digital/social networks, but they are increasingly inextricable from our fundamental feeling of sociality as they blanket the everyday. This includes reliance upon pervasive and mobile inter/faces: a term that shouts the ultimate lamination of the technological and the human. Dependency on the inter/face is a consequence of dependency on hyperconnectivity: both things which the multitude has in common, and which audiences and other imaginary collectives do not. The diminishment of attention or the increase of distraction are important as they signify to some the lack of a deep or active engagement—or a lack of media consciousness and hence the creep of the grey (media and memory). I now probe further accounts of divided and superficial attention and then I go on to consider what prospects this leaves the multitude for the active making of memory. The diminishment of media consciousness or a loss of control over media also equates to a decline in normative remembering and forgetting (Rasmussen 2010, 109). Another commonality of the multitude involving the displacement or replacement of attention is their obsession over recording. The smart-portablemachine has facilitated a swarm-like insistence in the placement of the machine between the self and the other or event. The act of recording has become more urgent than experiencing that which is being recorded. The medium in effect becomes the memory. There is no active remembering as there is no unmediatized witnessing in the first place to hold in the non-media memory. This too marks a shift from broadcast media. Neisser (1982) for example in his pioneering study of FBM in the 1980s found a shift to ‘TV priority’ in respondents asked what they were doing the day after, then two years after, the US Challenger explosion. People misremembered ‘where they were when’ (the classic FBM question) and instead television became the dominant medium. Events were remembered and misremembered through television. Today, however, media increasingly insert greyness not just over but also into the everyday through the obsessive recording of the banal through to the extraordinary. It is not then the medium that is imprinted on the memory, but the multitude with the medium. These examples make visible what goes routinely unnoticed; communicational and informational technologies converge with the human. For example, Malcolm McCullough argues that: ‘so many facets of today’s experience have been mediated so skillfully that they increasingly merge with perceptions of the world. The use of information technology has become increasingly circumstantial: interspersed with other sensibilities, contingencies, and actions’ (2013, 18). But culturally at least, this also includes the acceptance of

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not just smartphones and micro-cameras obscuring the view, but increasingly tablets and hybrid phone-tablets (phablets) all thrust above the heads of the multitude, ensuring that, whilst little is seen, nothing escapes the archive. Digital devices command the attention of the user rather than the subject of record, which is ironically obscured from view. This is the emptied present, emptied of meaning, displaced to an unbecoming digital future. By this I mean one that is impossible to fully realize given the volume of all that is recorded being beyond human capacity to manage, process, and re-view. And here the crowd and the multitude overlap in their attitude to place and to the event. The examples of the contemporary obscuration of the present are so numerous that only the exceptions make the news. For example, the band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs posted what one blogger called an ‘amazing’ no camera sign outside one of their 2013 gigs.11 It read: ‘PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THE SHOW THROUGH A SCREEN ON YOUR SMART DEVICE/ CAMERA. PUT THAT SHIT AWAY as a courtesy to the person behind you and to Nick, Karen and Brian. MUCH LOVE AND MANY THANKS! YEAH YEAH YEAHS.’12 It is the routine and irresistible digital interruption of the present that threatens lived—or active—memory. For instance, a year earlier Ian Brown the lead singer of the Stone Roses suggested to their comeback concert crowd: ‘If you put your cameras down you might be able to live in the moment. You have a memory there of something you’ve never lived.’13 The point is that the immediate digital potential of recording terrorizes the experience of the present. Ironically, each moment that is deemed to have significance, i.e. one likely to be memorable because of the exceptional nature of its experiencing, is precisely the moment most likely to be hostaged to the compulsion to record, and hence not lived, and not remembered as being lived. It is this dependency that corrupts the future of memory, the future of digital memory. For example, lifelogging devices and the wider quantified self movement have fetishized the pursuit of ‘total memory’. The makers of one tiny clip-on lifelogging device, for instance, promise not only photographic memory (retrieval) but organization and search via their associated app: ‘Relive your life like you remember it’ is the promise of Narrative’s digital memory.14 Bizarrely, the people from Narrative claim that it is useful because it captures the moments that users didn’t realize were moments until afterwards! Meanwhile, even at music concerts that attract the type of audience that are not (by virtue of the music genre or age) typically smartphone wavers, there is always at least one who is oblivious to the mood of those gathered, obsessively recording the event in its entirety, watching the concert but only seeing the screen. Here we can say the multitude has asserted itself over the collective. True, the collective claims to reestablish itself through the symbolic waving of its screens turned outwards as lighter-substitutes, but this only masks the fact that the present has already been lost to the stupefying recorded future.

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Another example comes not from the music world but from the keepers of the finest gastronomy. At Alexandre Gauthier’s Michelin-starred La Grenouillère restaurant in northern France, the chef has expressed his displeasure at some of his diners obscuring their eating with the digital grey: They used to come and take pictures of themselves and their family, their grandmother, whoever, as a souvenir. Now they take pictures of the food, they put it on Facebook or Twitter, they comment. And then food is cold. . . I would like people to be living in the present. Tweet about the meal beforehand, tweet about it afterwards, but in between stop and eat. Sitting down for a meal should be an enjoyable moment shared with us, not with the social network. Instead of enjoying the moment they are elsewhere. . . People come from London and Paris to eat here, some drive for two or three hours. All we are saying is disconnect, just for the time it takes to eat (Willsher 2014). There is a digital creeping inversion of the relationship between the sanctity of the occasion and its vulnerability to hyperconnective interruption. The more special the moment, the greater the compulsion to render it grey and digitally deferred to another (and even real-) time, another ‘social’ network, another archive. But the defense of preservation is a fallacy, for it is precisely what is deemed as worthy of record that is spoiled in the process: the food goes cold. The moment then is greyed, it is unlived; this is a sharing without sharing, a wholesale resignation to a technics that not only intervenes in the present, but that chills all our futures. This is the ensnaring of digital memory: a move from capturing representations of the world in which we inhabit, to one which we can only inhabit through our capturings and connectivities. This world is not made through a fear of forgetting, but rather an over consumption of the present feeds, and is fed by the ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) (McCullough 2013, 51). Linda Stone characterizes this mode of awareness as ‘continuous partial attention’: ‘to pay partial attention—CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.’15 Perhaps hyperattention is a more appropriate characterization of this digital restlessness: it is at once paradoxical for it is reducible to a state of perpetual potential distraction. The digital present is then the entrapment of our age. Digital hyperconnectivity is both compulsive and addictive in a way that the electronic media never commanded—not so continuously and pervasively and with such devastating memorial consequences. For example, the connective turn has polarized a new literature of gurus and sceptics as to the digital’s and particularly the salvation or devastation of ‘the Internet’ on the human condition. A prominent character firmly in the sceptic zone is Nicholas Carr. Throughout his 2010 book The Shallows, Carr constantly berates the ‘outsourcing’ of memory on or to the

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internet. He trawls through a great deal of academic work and pop-psychology to warn of the perils of connectivity as a kind of loss of memory, intellect and identity. The web connections unlike the mind’s connections are not ours and can never be. There is an imperative to make everything searchable, taggable, mineable in a myriad of ways, which results in a kind of wholesale fragmentation of attention span, of texts, of everything. Thus, it becomes really difficult to write a whole book, like the one he has just written. So, how did he do it? Well, he dismantled, with great effort, his online life. He moved from the city to the mountains where there was only a dodgy dial-up connection. He disconnected. But once you reach page 200 of the book—a book on how bad connectivity is for you—he reveals that, after finishing it, he went back to being connected, with his sms, email, blogs and Twitter!. He admits: ‘I recently broke down and bought a Blu-Ray player with built-in Wi-Fi. It lets me stream music Pandora, movies from Netflix, and videos from YouTube through my television and stereo. I have to confess: it’s cool. I am not sure I could live without it’ (Carr 2010, 200). Even from just a few years ago, this account seems slightly anachronistic in that today connective compulsivity is taken-for-granted (i.e. not seen as compulsive). Of course there is a history to claims as to the technological shaping of attention spans. Notably this includes critiques of the commodification of time the ‘three-minute culture’—ushered in with the invention of the TV remote control and the conspiracy of Big Media. Advertisers, broadcasters, etc., saw three minutes as the optimum period of viewer/listener attention, and so designed ads and trailers to fit accordingly. This was seen as having a detrimental effect on audiences (and especially children), diminishing their capacity to hold attention for long(er) periods on more highbrow consumption. This may be an accurate thesis of the impact of the growth of 1980s television advertising; however, today’s digital division of attention is of a different scale. Immediacy, continuity and hyperconnectivity are not just invasive of the medial everyday but they are its dominant dynamics, its navigational order. Where there is a connection between the media attention debates of the 1980s and the situation today is in the association of limited attention with superficiality of engagement, of poor quality of focus. And post-scarcity culture is key to fuelling distraction given the insatiable promise of hyperconnectivity to everything and to everyone. For example, Albert Borgmann (2010) explains: ‘The problem is not that we can’t find what we are looking for, but that we are not sure what to look for in the first place. Whatever we have summoned to appear before us is crowded by what else is ready to be called up. When everything is easily available, nothing is commandingly present.’ The digital present then marks a shift from media’s being to its becoming. The informational future is already both queued and cued, squeezing and emptying out the

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present until there seems little of value worth lingering on: the next post, click and swipe, all seduce with the promise of the potentially more rewarding hit. This is the tyranny of hyperconnectivity under which present attention doesn’t stand a chance.

The impossible crowd What prospects are there, then, for the translation of the digital present into some kind of usable past? Is it that the multitude is the basis of a society without memory? As the social and cultural ‘frameworks’ of remembering have moved inside the machine and inside us, the multitude is increasingly vulnerable to the vagaries of the network. If the power of the multitude is in-built and ‘constituent’ (above), then so are its weaknesses. There are two key aspects to this vulnerability. The first is the diminishment of the active human capacity of memory in the face of the distractions: the capacity to select, sift, discern, as overconsumers of post-scarcity culture. The second is part of the giving away of our memories: the machine has a mind and memory of its own subject to non-human weaknesses, which includes the haunting prospects of eternal memory. In this light, the steady forgetting of Halbwach’s various groupings as they collectively dissipate is not seen as a weakness of collective memory, but as rather a matter of the natural evolution of remembering and forgetting. For Halbwachs (1980, 120): ‘Our hold on the past . . .never exceeds a certain boundary, which itself shifts as the groups to which we belong enter a new phase of their existence. It is as if the memory needed to be unburdened of the growing mass of events that it must retain.’ Forgetting is not only functional, but necessary. But today, the reach of ‘our hold on the past’ is rendered newly uncertain. The vagaries of the unpredictable decay time of media, the prospects of emergence, and the self-reproducing shadow archives, muddy the link between chronological time and the limits of human memory. Increased dependency on digital technologies and media for establishing and sustaining everyday interpersonal and social relationships, inevitably entangles these memories in the same media. This is not only a matter of the slippage of control of human memory at the expense of the machine, but an affording of the future of memory to a great deal of the grey of media, namely to media and technologies whose operations, algorithms, ownership and finitude of which we have little understanding. The relative certainty of the arrival of each ‘new phase of existence’ that was wrapped up in the evolution and the dispersal of Halbwachs’ collective was also embedded, or at least mirrored, in a confidence of the limits and the decay time of the media of the day. In the broadcast era and earlier, most communications and media were anti-archival: the likely bounds and life-span of their traces (of the author) were mostly predictable.

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Today, the connective turn has rendered most communications, everyday and exceptional, as potentially part of shadow archives, in which sharing without sharing has no limits. Once media became potentially infinite (in time and space), then duration of our multiple presences-in-the-world became uncertain and uncontrollable. Collective memory has its limits. Memory of the multitude does not. In sum, the multitude is the impossible crowd: attracted by the immediacy, continuity and sociability of its hyperconnective relations, and yet, with diminishing means to ever escape its digital shadow.

Notes 1 See my introductory chapter to this volume, ‘The Restless Past’. 2 Ibid. 3 Marked by the United States’ presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016, this contagion finally swept away any remaining Western mainstream news media’s claims of representation of a middle-ground of opinion. 4 I am grateful to Svend Erik Larsen for this observation (personal communication, February 9, 2010). 5 For example, Jan Assmann (1995, 128–129) contrasts the dynamics of ‘communicative’ or ‘everyday memory’ with the fixity of ‘cultural memory’; others focus on an ‘experiential’ form of engagement with a past that reaches beyond generational memories, and this is particularly so with Holocaust and other memories of conflict and catastrophe: see Hirsch 2012, Landsberg 2004 and Weissman 2004, on ‘post’, ‘prosthetic’ and ‘fantasy’ memories, respectively. 6 See Hoskins and Tulloch (2016) for a discussion of the concept of multidirectional memory applied to the dynamic relationship between personal and media contexts of remembering. 7 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=collective+memory%2Csocial+me mory%2Ccultural+memory&year_start=1980&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing= 3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccollective%20memory%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B% 2Csocial%20memory%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccultural%20memory%3B%2Cc0. Accessed September 3, 2011. 8 See also ‘The Restless Past’. 9 The Gutenberg Parenthesis model is set out in ‘The Restless Past’. 10 Part of this section is taken from Hoskins 2011c. 11 ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs Post Amazing ‘No Cameras’ Sign Outside Show’, http://www.spin. com/articles/yeah-yeah-yeahs-karen-o-sign-no-cameras-smart-device-live-shows/. Accessed November 24, 2013. 12 Ibid. 13 http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news/76534/The-Stone-Roses-Make-TriumphantReturn-As-They-Play-First-Gig-In-16-Years. Accessed January 14, 2013. 14 http://memoto.com (accessed April 23, 2013). 15 http://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/. Accessed April 12, 2013.

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References Agger, Ben. 2011. “iTime: Labor and life in a smartphone era.” Time & Society 20(1):119–136. Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. “Archive and Aspiration.” In Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, 14–25. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Assmann, Aleida. 2007. “Europe: A Community of Memory?” Twentieth Annual Lecture of the GHI. GHI Bulletin 40 (Spring 2007): 11–25. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125–133. Beim, Aaron. 2007. “The Cognitive Aspects of Collective Memory.” Symbolic Interaction 30: 1, 7–26. Blight, David. 2012. “From the Civil War to Civil Rights and beyond: How Americans have remembered their deepest conflict.” Paper presented at The Future of Memory Conference, University of Konstanz, 5 July. Borgmann, Albert. 2010. “Orientation in technological space.” First Monday 15(6–7), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3037/2568. Accessed 8 July 2011. Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boyer, Dominic. 2007. Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. Brown, Steven D. and Andrew Hoskins. 2010. “Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology: Mediating and Remembering the 2005 London Bombings.” Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 2(2), 87–107. Brian, Éric., Marie Jaisson, and S. Romi Mukherjee. 2012. “Introduction: social memory and hypermodernity.” International Social Science Journal 62(203–4): 7–18. Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso. Delfin, Mauricio. 2013. “The Condition of Data” Blog, 6 March. http://infofutures. library.nyu.edu/2013/the-condition-of-data-1/. Accessed 15 April 2013. Durkhem, Emile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2004. “The Archive as Metaphor.” Open 7: 46–54. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2017. “Tempor(e)alities and Archive-Textures of Media-Connected Memory.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 143–155. New York: Routledge. Flusser, Vilem. 2011/1985. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fuller, Matthew and Andrew Goffey. 2012. Evil Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ghezzi, Alessia, Angela Guimaraes Pereira and Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic. Eds. 2014. The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age: Interrogating the Right to Be Forgotten. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Gopnik, Adam. 2011. “How the Internet gets inside us.” The New Yorker, 11 February, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_ gopnik?currentPage=all. Accessed March 10, 2011. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. Ditter, Jr., and Vida Yazdi Ditter. London: Harper & Row. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011a. “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture.” Memory Studies 4(3): 269–280. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011b. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the connective turn.” Parallax 17(4): 19–31. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011c. “From Connective to Collective Memory.” In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, edited by Motti Neiger et al., 278–288. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoskins, Andrew. 2013. “Editorial: ‘The End of Decay Time’.” Memory Studies 6(4): 387–389. Hoskins, Andrew and John Tulloch. 2016. Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoskins, Andrew. 2017. “The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media”. In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 1–24. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History & Theory 41, 179–197. Kroker, Arthur. 2014. Exits to the Posthuman Future. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2017. “The Media End: Digital Afterlife Agencies and Technoexistential Closure.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 48–84. New York: Routledge. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. London: Allen Lane. Licklider J.C.R. 1968. “The Computer as a Communications Device.” Science and Technology 76: 21–31. Lipsitz, George. 2001. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lowenthal, David. 2012. “The Past Made Present.” Historically Speaking 13(4): 2–6. Manovich, Lev. 1999. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence 5(2):80–99. McCullough, Malcolm. 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy—the Making of Typographic Man, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McPherson, Tara. 2002. “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web.” In New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 199–208. London: Routledge. Mazzarella, William. 2010. “The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?” Critical Inquiry 36: 697–727. Merrin, William. 2008. “Media Studies 2.0.” http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com/. Accessed June 12, 2008.

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Merrin, William. 2012. “‘We are Legion:’ The Networked Multitude and Citizen Insurgency.” Adam Smith Research Foundation Lecture, University of Glasgow, 21 February. Merrin, William. 2014. Media Studies 2.0. London: Routledge. Misztal, Barbara. 2003. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Neisser, Ulric. 1982/2000. Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. Niven, Bill. 2008. “On the Use of ‘Collective Memory’.” German History 26(3): 427–436. Novick, Peter. 2007. “Comment on Aleida Assmann”s Lecture.” GHI Bulletin 40: 27–31. Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory 17(3): 333–348. Olick, Jeffrey, K. 2008 “’Collective Memory’: A Memoir and Prospect.” Memory Studies, 1(1): 23–29. Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Parkin, Alan J. 1993. Memory: Phenomena, Experiment and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Pettitt, Tom. 2011. “Containment and Articulation: Media, Cultural Production, and the Perception of the Material World”. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/ Pettitt.pdf. Accessed June 14, 2012. Rafael, Vicente. 2003. “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.” Public Culture 15(3): 399–425. Rasmussen, Terje. 2010. “Devices of Memory and Forgettimg: A Media-Centred Perspective on the ‘Present Past.” In The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices, edited by Eivind Rossaak, 109–123. Oslo: Novus Press. Rigney, Ann. 2005. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35(1): 209–226. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. 2008. “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Print, Book and Cognition.” Orbis Litterarum, 64: 79–80. Schwartz, Barry. 2008. Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. London: University of Chicago Press. Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. London: Allen Lane. Stearns, Peter N. 1994. Encyclopedia of Social History. London: Taylor & Francis. Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few. London: Abacus. van Dijck, Jose. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Van House, Nancy and Elizabeth F. Churchill. 2008. “Technologies of memory: Key issues and critical perspectives.” Memory Studies 1(3): 295–310. Virilio, Paul. 1997. Open Sky. London: Verso Books. Virno, Paulo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Casoaito and Andrea Casson. London: Semiotext(e). Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books. Weissman, Gary. 2004. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press Willsher, Kim. “French chef Alexandre Gauthier attempts to put an end to food selfies.” The Guardian, 16 February 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/feb/16/ chef-alexandre-gauthier-stop-photographs-food-restaurant. Accessed 16 February 2014. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

5 THE HOLOCAUST IN THE 21ST CENTURY Digital anxiety, transnational cosmopolitanism, and never again genocide without memory Wulf Kansteiner

I Gaming the Holocaust system? In June 2016, the internet giant Google and a small vocational school in Zaragoza, Spain had an interesting Auschwitz encounter in cyberspace. A teacher at the Trinit school, which offers a master in videogame design, had students develop trial apps with the purpose of testing Google’s review process for new apps. Students applied for permission to distribute via Google Play controversial sounding games like “Gay Buttons”, “Kamasutra Dices”, and “Auschwitz Camp” (Gerber 2016). Only one of the suggested apps passed muster with Google and “Auschwitz Camp”, which invited its user “to live like a real Jew in Auschwitz”, was released on May 25 (Download APK 2016). Within a month the (non)game was denounced by a number of media outlets, including the Italian newspaper la Republicca and spokespersons from different Jewish organizations (Custodero 2016; Matzaw.com 2016). It is not quite clear to what extent the critics had been able to use the app, but they agreed on denouncing “Auschwitz Camp” as a “cynical game” that turned “the martyrdom of six million Jews into an object for amusement and enjoyment” (Colette Avital in World Jewish Congress 2016). Google Play claims to have promptly terminated the app because it violates the company’s hate speech policy (Unruh 2016). The “Auschwitz Camp” episode nicely illustrates some of the factors that have shaped digital communication processes about the memory of the Final Solution and kept digital Holocaust memories within fairly narrow aesthetic and political boundaries. One relatively new factor in the mix is the nontransparent censorship process at transnational commercial institutions like Google, which relies on powerful search engines, user input, and professional content screeners to craft the lowest common denominator in questions of historical taste in an

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effort to prevent offending any constituency of commercial relevance.1 The efforts at what is euphemistically called “commercial content moderation” occasionally produce disturbing results. In June 2016, Google, for instance, suddenly and without previous communication with the author removed the DC-Blog of punk-artist Dennis Cooper and thus wiped out 14 years of creative work (Gay 2016). The confluence of censorship, self-censorship, political activism, and an unprecedented concentration of cultural power has also set rigid limits on the representation of events like the Holocaust. Transnationally generated arbitrary rules of piety and propriety determine, for instance, that the wildly popular genre of the video game is principally unsuited for the representation of the Shoah and favor the production of a fleet of sterile, homogenous, and uninspiring digital platforms of Holocaust education. It is difficult to imagine a better recipe for collective forgetting in an otherwise highly innovative and participatory digital memory culture. The ritual has been played out on a number of occasions in recent years: somebody greedily, provocatively, or courageously develops a Holocaust-themed video game and is promptly pressured to abandon the project. In 2010, a group of Wolfenstein 3D modders led by a young Israeli developed a technologically crude Auschwitz revenge game loosely based on the 1944 uprising of members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, who succeeded in killing three SS-guards and setting fire to one crematorium.2 The game that the group worked on for over three years featured Nazi violence in the camp and then turned the tables on the torturers and had players in the role of Jewish inmates go on a killing spree of the Nazi camp personnel from a first-person-shooter perspective (McWherto 2010). The response came quickly after the release of a pilot (Moddb 2016). Representatives of the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League rejected the project because “the Holocaust should be off-limits for video games” (Crecente 2010). Citing negative media attention and attendant emotional stress, the group cancelled the game weeks before its scheduled release date (Gold 2010). Apparently, violent counter-factual Jewish revenge fantasies are intriguing and prize-worthy on the big screen of Inglourious Basterds but unacceptable in the allegedly low-brow cultural environment of video game coding and modding.3 A New York City indie programmer has had a similar experience with a very different kind of video game project. Since 2008, Luc Bernard has worked on Imagination is the only Escape, which is set in Nazi-occupied Paris and depicts the suffering of Jews from the perspective of a young Jewish boy. The game blends history and fantasy in an effort to produce visually and narratively sophisticated historical fiction about the Shoah and has received much advance praise from game critics. Nevertheless, Bernard could not find distribution venues and most recently also failed in his efforts of raising capital through a crowdsourcing initiative (Indiegogo 2016). For a video game designer it is clearly a bad career move to invest creative efforts and many months at the screen in crafting a

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Holocaust-themed virtual game environment. The situation is vaguely reminiscent of Holocaust scholarship in the 1960s when the few scholars trying to write the history of the Final Solution struggled with similar prejudices (Hilberg 1996). Today, even big players in the huge and influential video game industry are only carefully inching closer to the taboo subject matter of Holocaust gaming. In this vein, the powerful Wolfenstein franchise, now owned by Bethesda Softworks, stepped into a fictitious Nazi concentration camp in its successful 2014 release of Wolfenstein: The New Order. In the counterfactual game set in the 1960s after the Nazis have won WWII, Wolfenstein hero Blazkowicz infiltrates a Nazi camp to liberate a brilliant Jewish scientist. The short episode features provocative images including a female camp commander holding a baby upside down by its leg, whip at the ready, before the ‘camera’ swiftly cuts to another scene (Polygon 2014). Critics and gamers have identified a number of reasons for the Holocaust gaming taboo. Mainstream games with attractive graphics are expensive and therefore game developers tend to copy and fine-tune previously successful formats rather than launching radically new aesthetics and content matter. Moreover, a lot of fast-paced, action-oriented video game violence thrives on simple plot structures that seem to preclude the kind of complex narrative explanations scholars use to account for events like the Final Solution. Finally, the gaming industry lacks auteur figures like Claude Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg, or Quentin Tarantino who can more easily transgress limits of historical taste. Consequently, as Jeff Hayton has pointed out, “medium, genre, and economics all work as inhibiting factors steering video games away from a sustained engagement with Nazism and the Holocaust” (Hayton 2015). Last, but not least, some of the key institutional players of the Holocaust memory establishment cannot imagine how they could successfully transfer their didactic and political mission into simulative and interactive ludic digital environments and have therefore concluded that video games and their brand of genocide/human rights education are simply incompatible with each other. Reservations about the compatibility of the video game medium with serious historical subject matter are not limited to Holocaust themes and extend to other topics including 9/11 (DarkWolfLetsPlay 2015; Robertson 2015) and slavery (Huffington Post 2015). At the same time, video games have conquered the historical imagination of many players, as games with historical themes proliferate (Kappell and Elliott 2014; Kline 2014; Winnerling and Kerschbaumer 2014; Huntemann and Payne 2010). Moreover, as a result of the development of serious gaming during the last 15 years, video games now play a decisive role in government and corporate training, education, health care, and public policy (Loh et al. 2015; Dörner et al. 2016; Ritterfeld et al. 2009). The gaming community is very aware of this disconnect and some game critics have already concluded that the status quo in digital Holocaust memory is untenable. Given the cultural prominence of video games in general and games with historical

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themes in particular it amounts to a strange case of Holocaust denial in reverse that no sophisticated game about the topic yet exists (Day 2014; Luke K 2011). That way, the field is left wide open to dubious right-wing concoctions like KZ Manager (“KZ Manager” 2016) and, even more important, the medium’s extraordinary didactic potential remains untapped. As prominent history game designer Brenda Romero has emphasized, due to their interactive nature “games convey complicity like no other medium can” (Romero in Waddell 2016; see also Takashi 2013; Harrigan et al. 2016). Therefore, they are in principle particularly well suited for having gamers intimately explore the experiences and decisions of people living in foreign worlds, including historical narrative worlds. And that intimate knowledge of past actors, may they be victims, perpetrators or bystanders, offers great potential for self-reflexive memory politics (Chapman 2016). The disconnect between a burgeoning historical gaming culture on the one hand and the lack of state-of-the-art Holocaust gaming on the other hand turns video games into an important cultural arena illustrating par excellence Andrew Hoskins’ perceptive remarks about the bifurcation of memory culture in an age of digitization. Hoskins identifies a clear division of “two media/memory cultures: one formalized, institutionalized, regimented (including online); the other more emergent, confrontational, yet fragmented” (Hoskins 2014, 60). Obviously, both spheres of social memory are closely intertwined and influence each other with the second, more fluid and emergent culture featuring a “virality that undermines attempts to sanitise history” (Hoskins 2014, 60; see also Hoskins 2009). For Hoskins the “immediacy, mobility, flexibility and interactivity” of the new emergent memory is the result of digital hyperconnectivity and particularly pronounced in social networks and file-sharing platforms (Hoskins 2014, 55; see also van Dijck 2013). Due to its scale and speed the new memory problematizes the relationship between the hitherto stable cultural constructs of ‘past’ and ‘present,’ raises anxieties about people’s ability to actively shape social memory, and prompts a rush to judgment that disrupts time-tested rituals for containing and forgetting potentially unsettling pasts. The gaming industry, focused on a few particularly profitable markets and dominated by two dozen companies, clearly belongs to the regimented memory culture. In the world of Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft, the formal regimes of oblivion and containment, translated into effective processes of self-censorship, are clearly (still) functioning. That raises intriguing questions about digital Holocaust memory in the more fluid and flexible cultural digital contexts of social media and academia. In crafting an identity for itself, the emerging field of digital memory studies follows in the footsteps of other academic disciplines. The proponents of the new field highlight historical developments that cannot be successfully studied by existing scholarly strategies—namely the digital revolution with the instruments of traditional memory studies—and showcase a new set of intellectual tools better suited for the job at hand (Worcman and Garde-Hansen 2016; Rutten et al. 2013; Garde-Hansen et al. 2009). In short, they expose the limits of an

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established intellectual world and build up a new conceptual infrastructure—as the present volume forcefully illustrates. On the deconstructive side, all the essential binaries of memory studies become subject to critical review because digital memory requires nothing less than radically “changing the parameters of the who, what, when, and why of remembering” (Hoskins, Chapter 4, this volume). Digital memory no longer evolves along the individual–collective axis. In the post-broadcast era there is no collective to speak of, at least not in the way in which television used to aggregate consumers into audiences through narratives and media events. For the same reason, there are also no clearly identifiable private or public spheres. Participatory digital culture features active individuals constantly posting, editing, liking, and linking in pursuit of fluid we’s and for the purpose of crafting and exhibiting an attractive self. That job requires an intimate, affective, and symbiotic relationship to digital technology and it is often the machine that dictates the rhythm of communication (Parikka, this volume; Parikka 2015). As a result, transhuman entities do the remembering, requiring digital memory studies to leave behind the comfortable human– non-human divide (Lagerkvist, this volume). Since transhuman selves are immersed in expansive networks always in the state of becoming, digital memory also obliterates the conventional differentiation between archives and lived historical culture with serious consequences for the social construction of time (Ernst, this volume; Ernst 2013). In fluid networks, audiovisuals of the present rub elbows with audiovisuals from the past, rendering impossible any collectively organized, self-reflexive process of balanced remembering and forgetting. In fact, the very distinction between past and present becomes very flexible with transhumans living in an “extended now” (Pogačar, this volume), being unable to leave behind the ghosts of past humiliations, and battling the dystopias of eternal memory, on the one hand, and technological obsolescence and memory death, on the other hand (Pogačar 2016). Digital memory studies seem to display more technological and communicative than ethical-political analytical ambition. Occasionally, the field channels guarded optimism for instance about the emancipatory potentials of decentralized creative memory industries and the diminishing power of traditional cultural gatekeepers. But in general the political tone is subdued and the outlook somber, since scholars are well aware of the immense unchecked power of transnational corporations over network administration and content. On the constructive side, the field launches and re-mediates many playful and attractive neologisms in order to announce its presence and in response to plentiful empirical and conceptual challenges: kinesthetic sociability (Frosh 2015), chronosickness (Williams 2013), globital memory (Reading and Notley), iconomy (Garde-Hansen and Schwartz), audiovisual exoskeletons (Pogačar), mindclones (Lagerkvist), and hateturn (Hoskins)—to name just a few neologisms featured prominently in the present volume. The field also gathers around poignant mottos for instance “The medium is the memory flux” or, my favorite, “I will be remembered, thus we exist”

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(Garde-Hansen and Schwartz). One could now use the allusions to McLuhan and Descartes to raise questions about exactly how radical the transition from memory studies to digital memory studies will have to be. Was memory studies not always about complicating the (affective) relationships between past and present and was the vision of a homogenous mass media audience not already an anachronism when it was first invented? None of that quibbling would change the fact, however, that digital memory culture constitutes a veritable challenge to be reckoned with in new and creative ways. Therefore, I am interested in using the present Sattelzeit (Koselleck 2004) characterized by hectic premediations, remediations, and intermediality (Erll, Rigney and Basu 2014) to gaze in two different directions simultaneously and try to determine how the dinosaur of Holocaust memory, that was a central element of the memory boom and the rise of memory studies in the first place, has fared in the brave new world of digital memory and what the persistent presence of that very dinosaur tells us about the emergent field and concepts of digital memory studies.

II Selfie syndrome: From Auschwitz to Mecca On June 20, 2014 an 18-year-old high school graduate from the US called Breanna Mitchell tweeted a selfie taken at Auschwitz. The photo of the smiling teen with earbuds, loop earrings, and pink sweats in front of the Auschwitz barracks went later viral triggering an avalanche of critical and even hateful tweets indicting the teenager’s alleged inappropriate narcissism and lackadaisical attitude at the site of so much suffering (Moran 2014). Obviously, the photo itself does not carry any definitive meaning (Mitchell 1994). The photo does not tell us if the teenager is a self-centered, superficial, and historically ignorant individual or not. Consequently, Breanna and her family could mount a very plausible counter-emplotment of the photo. She argued that taking the selfie at Auschwitz was an act of respect and mourning. The visit to Auschwitz was a very special experience for her because she had studied Holocaust history with her father, who died a year previously to the day the now infamous picture was taken. The counter-emplotment did not win the day. Even the Washington Post reporter who should be credited for relating Breanna’s side of the story passed an unequivocal yet poorly reasoned judgment: “In truth, it’s hard to think of anything less sensitive, less appropriate or less self-aware than a ‘selfie in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp’—smiley—as if the suffering of millions of people was somehow subsumed by Breanna’s own personal narrative” (Dewey 2014; see also Horowitz 2015). Reacting to the collective indictment with a mixture of awe, fear, enjoyment, and defiance, Breanna refused to apologize and turned her previously public Twitter account into a private account. Just a few weeks before Breanna’s selfie mishap, a young Israeli woman had assembled a hard-hitting Facebook page. She collected selfies of death camp visits that Israeli school children had posted on social media sites and exposed their

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assumed thoughtlessness and self-indulgence by adding sarcastic comments for the benefit of her online friends. The Facebook page elicited thousands of responses, including stark criticism directed at its creator. Very quickly, most teens deleted their selfies and the woman closed the offending Facebook page (Margalit 2014). The habit of shooting selfies at memorial sites, funerals, and other controversial locations and occasions might have continued but Holocaustrelated selfies are much less frequently posted in social media, as a quick look at Instagram indicates. After Breanna’s experiences, young people prefer to document their visits to Auschwitz by uploading conventional portraits taken by another person and featuring appropriately somber faces and by sharing photos depicting them in the act of looking at the remnants of the camps with their backs turned to the camera (for instance Instagram #auschwitz). The new aesthetic framework reconciles the desire to communicate about one’s dark tourism experiences with the unforgiving rigidity of a quickly institutionalized digital Holocaust etiquette. It is unlikely that the youths thus shamed into submission entertain more complex or self-reflexive feelings and thoughts about Nazi genocide than their selfie-loving predecessors but the examples demonstrate how the dynamic emergent environments of Facebook and Instagram generate and enforce their own standards of Holocaust orthodoxy through peer pressure and institutional policing. Breanna’s selfie and its almost universal condemnation will exist in cyberspace as a stark exoskeletal warning and testament to the hate turn for many decades to come. The rise and demise of the Auschwitz selfie can be fruitfully compared to concerns about Hajj selfies, which caused wide-spread controversy in the Muslim world just a few months after Breanna’s ill-fated visit to Auschwitz. Muslim leaders feared that the ubiquitous practice of shooting and posting selfies during pilgrimages to Mecca detracted pilgrims from the serious spiritual purpose of the ritual (AFP 2014). That puts Mecca and Auschwitz at the center of similar power struggles, pitching modern pilgrims against their critics who feel qualified to assess the political and ethical dangers that new digital cultural practices allegedly pose for the integrity of their (civic) religion (on Holocaust memory as civil religion Allwork 2015). The controversies turn some kind of Holocaust and Hajj momentos into problematic sites of memory best enjoyed in the privacy of one’s own closed network—which defeats their purpose and stumps the communicative potential of social media. In principle, social media, through unprecedented speed, volume, and multi-directionality of data production and circulation, have thoroughly transformed the cultural construction of self and society and called into question traditional divisions between private and public memory (Hoskins 2009). But a combination of collective shaming and strongly held beliefs about the virtues of specific types of Shoah memory appears to have re-constituted fairly conventional, semi-permeable spheres of private and public Holocaust memory in many social media settings. The arbitrary limits of social media memory reflected in patterns of public admonition and private

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self-censorship are strongly influenced by settled, transnational cultural memories as they are defined in Holocaust institutions all over the West. The professional memory advocates in Washington, Jerusalem, Berlin, and elsewhere make ample use of digital technology to maintain their sizable cultural footprints both onand offline, all the while seeking to keep historical cultures within appropriate limits. As a result, the border between emergent and regimented Holocaust memories runs right through the diversified media portfolios of the premier institutions of Holocaust memory.

III Brick and mortar authenticity and the politics of genocide collecting On April 17, 2016 a new permanent exhibit opened on the grounds of the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald near Weimar. The former camp is one of the most important and most frequently visited memorial sites in a country dotted with monuments, museums, and exhibits recalling the terror of the Third Reich at the very locations where the Nazis tortured and murdered their victims over 70 years ago (Gedenkstättenforum 2016; Puhvogel and Stankowski 1996; Puhvogel 2000). The memorial site Buchenwald has a complicated history. For over three decades it was synonymous with GDR anti-fascism celebrating the Communist resistance against Hitler and providing indispensable historical legitimacy to a dictatorship of aging anti-Nazis in East Berlin (Rudnick 2011). After the collapse of the wall and German unification, the camp received a much-needed ideological face-lift. Featuring an abundance of textual data and original objects, the first post-wall exhibit deconstructed East German resistance memory and integrated the key memory site of Buchenwald into the complex, anti-totalitarian, and increasingly self-reflexive West German memory of Nazism that had helped win the Cold War (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald 2014). The new exhibit of 2016 marks yet another turning point. With short texts assuming little previous knowledge about the subject matter, attractively staged objects, and an innovative interior design concept reminiscent of the self-reflexive architecture of Daniel Libeskind, the 2016 exhibit addresses generations of visitors with limited textual appetites who are veterans of the experience economy and emotionally removed from the events of the Third Reich because they no longer interact with contemporaries of the Nazi period in their everyday lives (HolzerKobler 2016). With the new design, the Buchenwald team has elegantly sidestepped some of the more optimistic narrative elements of Nazi camp memory, highlighting for instance the survivors’ continued suffering after liberation at the expense of any facile triumph-over-evil Holocaust memory templates. But in terms of media use, most content items, and the scripting of its audience, the new Buchenwald exhibit extends powerful aesthetic orthodoxies that have been emblematic of Germany’s extensive anti-Nazi memory landscape and transnational Holocaust culture in the West for many years. The new exhibit features somber

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black and white geographical animations contextualizing Buchenwald within the Nazi camp empire, short slide presentations with filmed photographs about key Buchenwald events (for instance, the executions of inmates), and even a six-minute-long, multi-projector collage juxtaposing the seeming normality of everyday life, the Nazification of German society, and the rapid destruction of the rule of law in the Third Reich of the 1930s. But these non-interactive digital displays take a back seat to the visual highlights of the exhibit: three extensive sets of authentic objects—camp uniforms, eating utensils, and prized personal possessions of former inmates—dramatically lit and attractively presented in cabinets at the heart of the exhibit. In all these settings the visitors are cast in relatively passive roles; they can watch, read, and listen but there are few explicit invitations to participate in the sense-making endeavor (visit October 16, 2016). The current exhibit is certainly superior to its predecessors, but one may wonder if traditional expert-dominated communication patterns are still the best strategy to address the protagonists of contemporary participatory culture. Perhaps the carefully curated aura of authenticity at memory sites like Buchenwald could be an integral part of more complex communication strategies that transfer narrative and aesthetic agency from experts to visitors both on location and online. Like all history museums, Holocaust museums and concentration camp memorials thrive on an aura of historical authenticity. That might be relatively easily accomplished in places like Dachau and Buchenwald, but takes a lot of effort in London and Washington D.C. The quest for authenticity explains the presence of a 1930s German autopsy table in the Imperial War Museum in London and a Treblinka cattle car in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (Young 1993, 335). The genuine objects should take the visitors back in time and help them forge a meaningful connection between past and present although many questions remain about the cult of authenticity: how precisely does one integrate Nazi and Holocaust history in one’s life and historical consciousness 70 years after the fact? Are these morbid objects a vital ingredient of contemporary human rights education or are there other, less sanguine, thanatouristic motives inspiring curators and visitors (Seaton 1996; Sharpley and Stone 2009)? And, a far less central but nevertheless interesting question for authenticity experts: how does one establish provenance for a Holocaust boxcar? Holocaust and NS authenticity comes in different flavors and curatorial designs. German concentration camp memorials with plenty of dark tourism potential favor an understated approach, relating the facts of Nazi terror with little narrative flair in somber environments. The exhibits exude a sense of professional control over the disturbing past, welcoming visitors to share a factbased, emotionally restrained perspective (Kansteiner 2017). The Holocaust Memorial Museum, located at the other end of a fairly narrow spectrum, deploys authentic objects in dramatically lit, emotionally evocative, and historically immersive exhibits, inviting visitors to participate in small gestures of historical reenactment, for instance by entering the boxcar and temporarily assuming the perspective

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of the victims of the Shoah (Hansen-Glucklich 2014).4 For our purposes, it is important to stress that successfully staging historical authenticity for today’s audiences requires digital technology. All these exhibits teem with digital media as they surround their visitors with re-mastered photos, sound recordings, and film footage of the 1930s and 1940s. In this way, Holocaust culture incessantly channels the relatively few surviving depictions of Holocaust victims, a small selection of the extensively produced survivor testimony, and classic scenes of the similarly amply available self-images of the Nazis. In the Imperial War Museum, for instance, the relentlessly droning voice of Goebbels, on permanent loop and out of tune with the accompanying film footage, dominates the entire Holocaust exhibit in a belated, digitally enabled triumph of Nazi culture (visit July 20, 2016). In addition to the core responsibility of maintaining and expanding Holocaust awareness against considerable demographic and generational odds, many Holocaust institutions collect data about new genocides. The memory machine jumps into action when the UN or Western governments raise the specter of genocide; professional staff members begin to assemble facts, collect documents, interview survivors, and add data to their portfolios of atrocities. In this fashion, many major Holocaust museums have enlarged the scope of their exhibits in recent decades and offer their viewers information about genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda or the Ottoman Empire. But the new coverage is not integrated into the Holocaust exhibits for instance by way of systematic comparisons. Rather, the new exhibits are add-ons that do not influence the narrative world of the Holocaust; they do not set into motion any recalibration of historical knowledge or memory aesthetics with regard to the event of the Final Solution (Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas 2016; Museum of Tolerance 2016a; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2016b; USC Shoah Foundation 2016; and compare to Bloxham and Moses 2010). Consequently, the world traveller can fly from Buenos Aires to LA, Washington, London, Berlin, and Jerusalem and see the same gospel in six acts: Jewish life before the Holocaust, the rise of the Nazis, early terror and anti-Jewish polices, WWII, the Holocaust (dutifully mentioning non-Jewish victims), liberation, aftermath, and Holocaust memory replete with touching survivor testimony—a robust transnational infrastructure of images and narratives with some variations in length and design depending on budget size and local historical taste (Alba 2015). In these transnationally integrated memory environments broadcasting cosmopolitan political values (Levy and Sznaider 2005), the aura of authenticity serves the all-important purpose of affectively attaching the visitors to a specific memory trajectory that they are not invited to change, for instance by way of digital interactivity and counterfactuality. For producers of official Holocaust memory, past and present, curators and audiences, politically correct public memory and possibly ethically corrupted private memories are still neatly separated. The institutions do all they can to hold chronosickness and transhumans at bay. At the same time, the management

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teams of many Holocaust memory institutions are aware of the challenges involved in trying to communicate with digital generations and the tensions between the demands of Holocaust memory, the moral obligation of remembering other genocides, and the pressing need for genocide prevention. That awareness translates into defensively worded statements about the desirability of Holocaust education highlighting the unprecedented quality and scale of Holocaust research, the exceptional relevance of the Nazi genocide in terms of policy development and memorialization, and the transferability of Holocaust knowledge to other topics and settings (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 2016a and 2016b).

IV Digitally enhanced Holocaust education: From the pedestrian to the radically multi-directional Given the prominence of the education theme in Holocaust memory it is not surprising that the website of applicable institutions abound with teaching guidelines, online courses, and lessons plans adapted to all kinds of curricular contexts (Totten and Feinberg 2016; Carrier et al. 2015). The UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) takes, for instance, great pride in “offering a huge range of resources to educators” although the charity’s line-up of teaching tools would be best characterized as numerous rather than diverse (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust 2016a). The overarching theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2016 was “Don’t stand by” and with that catchy title HMDT invited students and teachers to become creative and craft films, launch social media campaigns, or plan a HMD event in support of all sorts of deserving causes ranging from genocide education to battling sexism and LGBT prejudice (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust 2016b). But previous year’s proudly mentioned initiatives and especially the HMDT teaching resources released in support of the “Don’t stand by” theme focus quite narrowly on Holocaust history encouraging students for instance to draw up a character map of a British Holocaust hero, contemplating a number of survivor testimonies, or celebrating resistance activities during the Holocaust (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust 2016c; 2016d; 2016e). In addition, the teaching tools lack interactive depth and ambition, consisting of text pdfs and short incoherent PowerPoint presentations.5 HMDT is not an outlier in this context. Many of the established Holocaust institutions provide teaching resources that are conservative, predictable, and uninspiring in content and form (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust 2016f; Yad Vashem 2016a; Museum of Tolerance 2016b). There are exceptions—some problematic, others truly innovative. Yad Vashem’s website features, for instance, an interactive learning environment that describes “the ghettos during the Holocaust from the children’s perspective, and attempts to present this complex experience in a way that is accessible to children” (Yad Vashem 2016b). One might object to the naïve drawings and small scale of the

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visual learning environment. Yet the platform does present a wealth of visual and historical information in an accessible albeit only rudimentary interactive format. Nevertheless, as a lot of Holocaust products for young audiences, “Children in the Ghetto” amounts to a strange type of Holocaust denial; the tool repeatedly identifies hunger as a serious problem in the ghettos, but refrains from spelling out the consequences or detailing any other problems faced by the ghetto population (see also Ludwig 2014; Unterman 2009). There are excellent reasons for such reticence. As Yad Vashem points out: “The unsupervised exposure to Holocaust history at a young age may induce trauma in children and could possibly trigger strategies of distanciation and even feelings of resentment towards the topic.”6 The word of warning contains a strange list of risks implying inadvertently that a sense of resentment towards the topic constitutes a more serious problem than trauma. In this specific case, it is not the laudable search for the new digital teaching tools that constitutes a problem but the troublesome race to the bottom of the teaching pyramid that seeks to expand the realm of Holocaust memory by enlisting younger and younger captive audiences, for instance by way of digital technology deemed particularly attractive to children. Initiatives like “Children in the Ghetto” illustrate that there might indeed be some hard limits of Holocaust memory. Faced with the self-fabricated dilemma of either falsifying history or traumatizing children, silence could be an excellent temporary option. A second exception is the pathbreaking IWitness initiative of the USC Shoah Foundation. The project is truly remarkable because it hands over editorial power over cultural memory to teachers and high school students teaching them basic film editing skills and providing them with extensive access to the Shoah Foundation’s archive of Holocaust testimonies. The students are furthermore encouraged to enter their films in the yearly IWitness Video competition. The winning entries of 2016 powerfully demonstrate that the students, given the choice, are ready to leave behind the history of the Holocaust. Time and again, the films take a short clip from survivor testimony completely out of its historical context and use it as a jumping-off point to engage with pressing present-day concerns such as poverty, homelessness, mental illness, animal rights, self-help, and human solidarity (USC Shoah Foundation 2016c). In this way, Holocaust memory becomes a tangential concern subject to powerful multi-directional forces of reframing and forgetting (on multidirectional memory Rothberg 2009). The results of the IWitness digital film initiative are not Holocaust memory as we know it and they also do not (yet) amount to fully emergent connective memories. They represent an interesting hybrid: broadcast memories produced by members of a post-broadcast generation. The results indicate that, in an appropriate communicative-didactive setting, handing over interpretive power to transhuman memory amateurs should give less cause for ethical concern than, for example, encouraging designated memory experts to craft Holocaust curricula for young children.

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At the same time, the Shoah Foundation has pursued ambitious transhuman experiments designed to retain all power of interpretation for the institution. For a number of years, the most digitally advanced institution of Holocaust memory has been tinkering with Holocaust holograms. The developers combine visual testimony of survivors of the Shoah, taped over the last few decades, with highly sophisticated computer software. They hope to be able to stage captivating encounters between tomorrow’s school children and the holograms of yesterday’s survivors in which the ghosts from the past answer the children’s questions in an interactive setting and an atmosphere of pious, intergenerational respect (ICTGraphicsLab 2013; Stuart 2016). The holograms of survivors are very good at mastering the past; in simulated conversation they seemingly spontaneously provide the details of their family histories, camp ordeals, survival strategies, and postwar lives. But they cannot handle the present; don’t ask them what they had for breakfast today. At some point during the communicative process, the ingenious hybrid of dialogical questions and monological answers breaks down. The holograms are a fantastic attempt to stem the tide of history and decelerate the historicization of Holocaust memory. Their creators certainly understand the stakes of Holocaust memory in today’s rapidly changing demographic and media environment. The culturally constructed aura of the Holocaust survivors has been a crucial component of Holocaust education in the past decades (Shandler 1999; Meyers, Zandberg and Neiger 2014; and cf. Rothe 2011). For the future of Holocaust memory it is important that that aura gets a second lease on life or is replaced by a similarly attractive memorial focus. The holograms embody the insight that Holocaust survivors as we encountered them on TV or in video testimonies represent a media figure that should, in principle, be able to survive the biological deaths of the actual survivors. It will be interesting to follow the careers of the holograms. If their developers and the protagonists of digital memory studies read contemporary culture correctly the holograms could become exoskeletal media stars. But it is also possible that the figure of the survivor, in its new digital disguise, does not attain the same media success that its analogue predecessor enjoyed on the TV screens over several decades. In the past, the aura of the survivors depended on a specific media effect. The viewers had to be able to entertain the illusion that they could meet the survivors in their everyday lives and talk to them about the extraordinary past. Through small, seemingly insignificant markers such as clothing, speech, body language, lighting, and background the coverage conveyed a powerful sense of historical simultaneity. The words and images on the screen created an atmosphere of co-presence placing survivor and viewer in the same time frame and social universe (Kansteiner 2013). But the holograms are no longer aesthetically and narratively embedded in the present-day social context of the observer. Despite their technological sophistication, the holograms cannot be effectively and continuously brought up to date; they might always carry small, yet pervasive, markers of historical non-simultaneity. Therefore, they

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are perhaps unable to fulfill the shuttling-service between past and present that the mediated survivors of the TV coverage of the 1980s and 1990s accomplished on a regular basis. In the era of analogue media, nobody managed to invent media aesthetics that could escape their own historicization, but perhaps that rule no longer applies in age of hyperconnectivity. Either way, the holograms only amount to a clever simulation of true digital interactivity. Unless the holograms are released into the wild online, its ‘dialogue’ partners cannot challenge the holograms’ memory, the conceptual or narrative frame of Holocaust remembrance, or the emotional frame of intergenerational piety. In an institutional communicative triangle comprising tomorrow’s school children, the digital ghosts of Holocaust survivors, and heritage professionals and software developers, all the power remains concentrated in the hands of the representatives of the Shoah Foundation.

V A tale of two apps: USHMM and Bergen-Belsen Given the state of intensive remediation and interdependence between contemporary digital and yesterday’s analogue Holocaust culture, it seems silly to try to pry the two apart. Nobody knows what a purely digital cultural object might look like or why one would try to craft the anachronism of an entirely analogically constituted public medium. However, in terms of communication structures and power relations, official Holocaust memory appears to channel analogue culture in digital disguise as a kind of hyper-analogism. With the help of digital technology, contemporary Holocaust culture recycles for instance photos and film snippets at a pace that original film and photo technology could not have sustained, but the culture’s iconographic and narrative structures have not changed decisively since the invention of popular Holocaust memory in the 1980s. In keeping with their analogue tradition, Holocaust institutions generally avoid any kind of “interactive tricksiness” both in their bricks and mortar exhibits and in their Twitter, Facebook, and app-based outreach efforts (Karpf 2000; see also Augstein 2016). But they are nevertheless very fond of communication tools like apps because they give them an opportunity to offer their visitors a certain degree of interactive participation while retaining for the institution a great deal of control over the narrative framing of Holocaust history and memory. Not surprisingly, the apps reflect different degrees of experimental courage and interactive immersion. The USHMM app, for instance, first released to the public in 2014, functions primarily as a remote guide and after-the-visit reflection tool for potential and real visitors. It provides a plethora of useful logistical information, succinct summaries of permanent, temporary, and travelling exhibitions of the USHMM, and invites users to offer feedback and stay connected via social media. But the app’s interactive range is very limited. Users can freely jump around between different layers of information and thus manipulate the sequence in which they like to

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consume historical photos, exhibitions stills, short introductory texts and captions, and a few film clips. In the absence of 180-degrees immersive and interactive virtual access to the exhibitions, the museum’s famous ID cards of Holocaust victims remain the app’s most interactive feature although the cards also suffer from a few drawbacks. Users can only save ten ID cards at a time, some biographical texts jump awkwardly between first- and third-person narrative voices, and, perhaps the most serious problem, they contain hardly any information about the survivors’ post-1945 lives. In short, the app is a robust outreach and PR device with little digital finesse that offers users few opportunities to shape their experience of Holocaust history according to their own preferences, for instance with regard to the narrative framing of the history of the Final Solution or the exploration of the USHMM as a complex memorial space (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2016b). Other museum officials and software developers have been a little more courageous. Since 2014, the staff of the memorial site at the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and the digital humanities research group Specs at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona have experimented with a tablet app that uses GPS technology to blend past and present visually. With the help of the app, visitors of the memorial can walk around the innocuous-looking forest landscape of Bergen-Belsen and have the buildings and other installations of the former camp, which were destroyed after WWII, reappear on the screen as schematic, semi-abstract shapes at their original locations (Memory in the digital age 2014). The public response to this state of the art digital humanities research project has been mixed. The historians pursuing the project are aware of the fact that they are testing the unwritten rules of digital Holocaust memory and have therefore chosen to recreate past camp infrastructure in decidedly understated and subdued virtual formats. Nevertheless, some critics fear that the app interferes with the visitors’ “direct visual communication” with the ‘real’ BergenBelsen that, it deserves recalling, only exists in the form of postwar memorial architecture, especially by way of a decidedly postmodern documentation center from 2007 (Golod 2015). In this vein, the controversial high-profile German– Jewish journalist Henryk Broder, who never himself used the software, fired a broadside at the creators of the app, reaching the puzzling conclusion that the victims of the Holocaust “did not die a virtual but a very real death” and “cannot be brought back to life by an app” (Broder 2013). Simply hearing about the app seems to have induced in Broder a sense of moral confusion, prompting him to equate the virtual resurrection of camp architecture with a desire to disavow the victims of the Shoah. That conclusion hardly reflects the likely effects let alone the intentions behind the app, but Broder has perceptively intuited what is at stake here; and some people inside the memorial site administration appear to share his unease about the apps’ reversal of time and counterfactual impetus. That might explain why the app has yet to be released to the general public.

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VI Facebook broadcasting: ‘Never again without Memory’ The tension between institutional authorial control and the consumers’ desire to engage with history on their own terms and according to their own narrative/ aesthetic preferences is even more pronounced on the social media front. In August 2016, the USHMM took the Olympic Games in Brazil as an opportunity to enlighten its 150,000 followers via Facebook about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, reporting in a series of 15 entries about the partial exclusion of Jews and the denigration of black athletes by Nazi authorities. The posts generally elicited hundreds of likes, several dozen shares, and a handful of comments each. They represent a routine flow of Facebook entries primarily based on information readily available in the USHMM’s Holocaust Encyclopedia and photo archives. Occasionally, the coverage was interrupted by more current concerns. The museum marked for instance “the second anniversary of the beginning of the Islamic State’s genocide of the Yezidi” (8/2) with the help of a poster of the Free Yezidi Foundation emphasizing that the USHMM staff had already assembled a report on the matter (on the Yezidi genocide see UN Human Rights Office 2016; Rudaw 2016). The PR tactic of trying to fit an ongoing genocide into an anniversary obsessed memory culture in order to have somebody pay attention to the Yezidi’s plight did not trigger the desired reaction. Within three weeks the post elicited an underwhelming response of a total of 117 likes/sads/angries, 62 shares, and only one comment whose author referred to the Nazi precedent and pointed out “that reports are great for documentation and later trial but . . . overwhelming force and unconditional surrender are the only things that stop genocide” (Herbek 2016). The USHMM PR officers had more luck with an entry of August 11 deploring the suffering of civilians in the besieged city of Aleppo, Syria. Carefully chosen phrasing (“these crimes could amount to genocide”) were combined with a well-edited, heart-wrenching video clip showing footage of a hospitalized five-year-old boy, a victim of a Syrian government attack, who later died of his injuries (USHMM Facebook 2016). The clip was viewed 158,525 times and with 1,105 shares proved to be the most successful entry of the month. The 145 lively comments are particularly intriguing, documenting multi-directional memory in action as commentators addressed the important questions of who is to be blamed for and what is to be done about the war crimes in Syria. Many users voiced massive frustration with government, variously highlighting the failure of local and regional leadership in the Middle East, the flawed foreign policy of the US, and, more specifically, the particular responsibility of the Obama administration. The comments, overwhelmingly coming from the US, run the gamut from rigorous self-criticism (“The US is very much responsible for this”, Howard 2016) to determined isolationism (“No sympathy!! America has our own problems”, Overwatch Blizzard 2016). In this context, commentators also discussed immigration, offered prayers, and time and again deplored the suffering

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of innocent children. Some comments are politically incorrect (“Ya lets replace another raghead countries leader it worked so good in iraq and libya . . . idiots who gives a fuc they have been slaughtering each other for thousands of years”, Gunner 2016); others are difficult to interpret even when looking at the specific context of the post (“It’s time for a Muslim genocide, emoij”, Brown 2016). It was a lively, at times contentious, discussion containing hardly any comments dealing with Holocaust history. The successful entry about Syria raises interesting questions about the relevance of historical precedent in political communication and the role of Holocaust institutions in shaping communicative memory. The subscribers of the USHMM feed and their Facebook friends probably share a relatively strong interest in history but the explicit historical references included in the comments deal with the very recent past; only two commentators create analogies to WWII history. The Nazi past does not appear to resonate strongly with USHMM followers trying to make sense of the war in Syria. Moreover, and more important for our purposes, having successfully triggered a debate, the USHMM stays completely silent during subsequent discussions. Throughout the month of August 2016, USHMM only once responded to a commentator providing specific historical information. Otherwise it stayed above the Facebook flow and fray even when specifically prompted by its Facebook followers to respond or take a position.7 That passivity seems to reflect general policy of the USHMM and other Holocaust institutions whose staff members prefer one-directional communication ‘broadcasting’ a carefully shaped, widely acceptable message via social media but refusing to engage further and bring their considerable expertise to bear on the difficult moral questions of how to develop an appropriate communicative memory of war crimes and what political consequences to draw from that memory. The users, for that matter, appear to expect and accept this miscommunication perhaps because they are not looking at institutions like the USHMM for historical and political guidance. Apparently, they simply like to be part of the group and share its values. As one user put it: “amazing 1099 shares wonderful” (Seals 2016). For many subscribers, the USHMM Facebook page might be a cyberspace address where they can hang out with peers, engage with genocide memory by adding a thoughtful facet to their meticulously groomed virtual selves, and return to the relative comfort and safety of their lives. Put into more abstract terms, the Facebook feed of the USHMM is the place where the carefully balanced, politically correct cosmopolitan Holocaust memory comes in direct, dysfunctional contact with the kinds of antagonistic and agonistic memories that pervade everyday life (Bull and Hansen 2016). In response to the Aleppo post, some subscribers yelled at each other in an antagonistic mode, a few engaged with each others’ diverging opinions in a relatively respectful agonistic fashion, and often the entries simply coexisted in cyberspace without any discernible explicit communicative link. But none of the contributions managed to penetrate the communication barrier between the institution’s settled, objectifying

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cultural memory of genocide and the users’ more fluid, free-wheeling and opinionated exchange, which probably also reflects more or less firmly held positions and prejudices. The communication strategy of the USHMM makes perfect sense. Like their professional colleagues across the globe in the business of Holocaust memory, the managers at the USHMM are heavily dependent on government subsidies and private philanthropy. They have a lot to lose and nothing to gain by politicizing their activities because negative press coverage could alienate sponsors, endanger their business model, and jeopardize the value of their brands. But the purposeful depolitization of genocide memory has important negative consequences. In light of the USHMM’s actual communication patterns the mission of official Holocaust memory ‘never again genocide’ is misleading. The multifold activities of the harbingers of official memory reflect communicative aims and practices that are best summarized as ‘never again Holocaust/genocide without memory’. The overwhelming share of their investigative and communicative efforts are not geared towards identifying countries/groups at risk, assembling preventive expertise and actions, and lobbying aggressively for early intervention— that would fit the motto ‘never again’, which represents a vital argument in justifying their sizeable budgets. Rather, the activities are fabulously well suited for preventing the kind of subdued and fragmented Holocaust memory that existed roughly between 1945 and 1975 (on the evolution of Holocaust memory Jinks 2016; Kansteiner and Presner 2016). Institutions like USHMM will never again waste the memory opportunities and memory obligations that present themselves during and after genocide, but feel largely compelled to leave to others the arduous task of shaping political will to action. This understandable reticence occurs at a most unfortunate moment when transhumans and their parents, representing a wide spectrum of different media biographies, need to learn how to congregate into viable we’s and launch politically relevant memory cultures.

VI YouTube, Twitter, and genocide prevention efforts in an academic bubble Many Holocaust memory professionals are concerned about the structural disconnect between genocide memory and genocide prevention. Therefore, the USHMM has, for example, recently enlarged and re-calibrated its Center for the Prevention of Genocide in order “to make the prevention of genocide a core priority for leaders and academics around the world through its multi-pronged program of research, education, and public outreach” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2015). On May 19, 2016 the new center staged a high-profile one-day event in pursuit of these important goals, which was ambitiously entitled Partners in Prevention: A Global Forum on Ending Genocide and featured an impressive line-up of politicians, policy experts, NGO leaders, and academics (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2016c). The guests spoke eloquently about

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the challenges of genocide prevention, for instance with regard to the warningto-response gap. In that context, they identified a number of strategies to be pursued further and studied more closely, including the need to work together with local elites in identifying and containing potentially particularly violent militias (“militia mapping”). Coverage of the event was widely shared through social media but appears to have triggered no substantive responses. As of December 29, 2016, the YouTube clip of the panel about “Bridging the Warningto-Response Gap” uploaded on May 24 counted 15 views (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2016d). The enthusiastic tweets sent out during the event by USHMM social media coordinator Kai Frazier (“Packed house for #USHMM’s #PreventGenocide forum” and “I so enjoy working with these two. #USHMM’s @NaomiKikoler & @Qattouby of #Syria discussing how to #Prevent Genocide”, Frazier 2016) also elicited no response. The tweets inadvertently highlight a perfectly normal yet troublesome disconnect. For academics and assorted experts, discussions about genocides past and present provide a memory comfort zone (“I so enjoy working with these two”). Through meetings and connected outreach coverage they validate each other’s work in an atmosphere of competitive respect and somber performances attesting to their caring disposition and intellectual control of the subject matter. While they are crafting self-affirmative memory aesthetics, they are often quite critical of other, popular strategies of genocide aesthetization. The lack of self-reflexivity is nicely illustrated by Holocaust research initiatives in the thriving and rapidly expanding terrain of the digital humanities. In 2014, after several years of pathbreaking research, a team of scholars published a volume entitled Geographies of the Holocaust marking the arrival of the spatial turn in Holocaust studies (Knowles, Cole and Giordano 2014). With the help of relatively large quantitative data sets, they raised and answered intriguing questions about the ghettoization process, the mass murder of civilians in occupied Eastern Europe, the arrest of Jews in wartime Italy, and the expansion of the SS camp system in general and Auschwitz in particular. But in their enthusiasm for the innovative methods of spatial analysis and geovisualization the authors and the publishers included in the volume a number of beautifully rendered artistic illustrations and condensations of their quantitative analyses that could be interpreted as inadvertently channeling Nazi visions of living space and geographical control (Fogu 2016; Fogu and Presner 2016). Put differently, the book, like so many publications in the field of Holocaust history and Holocaust studies, fails to address and acknowledge the profound sense of unease that, pace Saul Friedlander (2009), should help us address the troubling parallels between the perpetrators’ worldview and genocidal projects and our attempts to render them explicable and meaningful in history and memory. Considered from this perspective, the bit maps of digital humanities Holocaust scholarship are the selfies of the academic world and, in an ironic twist of analogue–digital remediation, perfectly compatible with a Nazi point of view of the camp system and deportation network. None of that is surprising.

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As to be expected, the digital humanities in general, and scholarly Holocaust digital culture in particular, primarily serve the purpose of providing new venues for the pursuit and display of expert culture. There is no reason to assume that the use of digital technology in historical research would automatically inspire scholars to develop a more self-reflexive relationship to the past.

VII Conclusion Holocaust culture was invented in the era of analogue media. It is a creature of photography, film, radio, television, architecture, and conventional museum aesthetics and was fully developed before the rise of digital culture. When Buchenwald was revamped in the early 1990s, Schindler’s List released in 1993, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C opened its doors in the same year, personal mobile phones and the PlayStation did not exist. Despite its long analogue history, the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory of the new millennium is synonymous with digital technology. On a few occasions, Holocaust culture has even produced path-breaking digital advances as in the case of the Shoah Foundation’s database of 53,000 survivor testimonies, which are turned into superior research and teaching tools through highly innovative search engines (Presner 2016). But the rigid interpretive frame and carefully moderated distribution systems of cosmopolitan Holocaust memory render it incompatible with central elements of our digitized everyday life. Official Holocaust memory is professionally managed for the purpose of safeguarding the mission and longterm interests of the respective memory institution. In its current format, official Holocaust culture therefore represents an antithesis to the nimble, decentralized exchanges of opinions driving social media communication. Moreover, with its fear of counterfactual historical representations linked to concerns about Holocaust denial intrinsic to the field, official Holocaust culture is a particularly hostile environment for cutting-edge simulative and immersive virtual reality technologies. As a result, connective, emergent digital Holocaust memories exist in some social media contexts but not in the institutional settings designed to teach Holocaust and genocide memory. Official Holocaust memory is thus poorly prepared to participate in meaningful ways in the exciting recalibration of virtual, real, and embodied experiences set into motion by digital culture (for a historicization of virtual reality culture see Chan 2014). In the important memory arena of Holocaust culture, formalized, regimented standards for the deployment of digital technology have hitherto prevailed. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), founded in Stockholm in 2000, has nicely summarized reservations about social media shared by many Holocaust educators and Holocaust memory managers. As the IHRA explicated in its 2014 guidelines for the use of social media in Holocaust education: “Trends such as Holocaust denial, diminishment and trivialization are rampant on the Internet and using social media has the potential to introduce

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these topics to students and give them unwarranted prominence.” Moreover, “social media is typically seen as platform for entertainment—the purview of pop culture, not learning and intellectual debate” (IHRA 2016b). It is not clear from the document to what extent the IHRA shares these reservations. In my view, the authors of the guidelines fail to point out that the online presence of Holocaust denial should not be equated with its popularity. There is a significant degree of Holocaust-denial-phobia in Holocaust culture, some of it instrumentalized for fund-raising purposes. The distanciation from Holocaust entertainment contains a similarly disingenuous element. All Holocaust and NS history learning sites, including Yad Vashem, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, or the USHMM have great, more or less intentionally crafted thanatouristic entertainment potential— otherwise they would not be as popular as they are. The problems lie elsewhere and should be more clearly and honestly addressed. Cosmopolitan Holocaust memory and emergent digital Holocaust culture (to the degree that the latter exists) represent different, competing types of history edutainment with the emergent culture featuring a wider spectrum of narrative scripts and much more dynamic, at times unpredictable, vectors of interpretive power than its well-established predecessor. Fast-paced and un-scripted discussions about the politics of memory in social media, often driven by a rush to judgment, can result in powerful temporary consensus in support of official Holocaust culture, as the collective online condemnation of Breanna illustrates. But social media also facilitate multi-directional, volatile confrontations about important problems of interpretation that defy cosmopolitan Holocaust culture. A case in point is the multi-voiced discussion about genocide, Islamophobia, and US war crimes spontaneously and collectively crafted in response to the USHMM Facebook feed discussed above. These kinds of discussions have significant politicizing potential but are generally systematically sidestepped by risk-averse Holocaust memory institutions eager to avoid political exposure. These discussions highlight a central dilemma of cosmopolitan Holocaust culture: One cannot successfully pursue the political objective of genocide prevention while strenuously trying to avoid political risk-taking. Genocide prevention requires political courage and that is in short supply in cosmopolitan Holocaust memory. For related reasons, official Holocaust memory keeps a careful distance from the captivating virtual environment of video game culture, observing somewhat helplessly from the sidelines the rise of a paradigm of popular entertainment that threatens its business model and allegedly also its ethical raison d’etre. Video games facilitate a new quality of absorbing, shared immersion in narrative cultural worlds, including realistically shaped historical worlds, based on rapid multisensory input, ludic pleasure, and a significant degree of narrative and especially spatial control. It is now technologically completely realistic to recreate virtual Nazi society according to our (scholarly) ideas of how that society functioned. Or, to put a finer point to it, we can bring to virtual, interactive life our interpretations of the extreme social universe of Auschwitz and/or any of the 42,500

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other Nazi camps that covered the continent of Europe (Lichtblau 2013). The virtual camp scenario constitutes a central representational taboo of contemporary Holocaust culture. That taboo has a lot to do with taste, power, and the history of Holocaust memory—and it represents perfectly legitimate concerns about the political and ethical purposes that could possibly be served by breathing a second, virtual life into the hell that was Auschwitz. Most likely, these concerns do not represent any absolute limits of representation but reflect the limits of our presentday didactic-ludic imagination. We simply do not yet know what lines of historical interpretation and corresponding game rules a virtual Auschwitz should embody so that the gamers immersed in that truthfully recreated and therefore extremely violent world would emerge from the game with a self-reflexive democratic historical consciousness. How can the act of releasing into the world algorithms for a virtual Auschwitz support a human rights agenda of intercultural respect and non-violence? However, putting those legitimate concerns into writing immediately holds up a critical mirror to our familiar, comfortable cosmopolitan Holocaust experiences. How did we ever assume that a historical culture that incessantly and compulsively circles around the dark holes of torture, mass death, and extreme moral depravity serves those very same objectives? Does spelling out the dark holes in virtual detail really make all that much of an ethical difference? While we might not yet be able to design a good Auschwitz game, that problem does not apply to other didactically valuable, ludically viable, and historically realistic Nazi game ideas. What would be wrong with designing the virtual world of Nazi-occupied Poland, France, the Netherlands, or Denmark, having players assume the perspectives of Jews caught in the maelstrom, seeking out the few existing loopholes to safety, and learning in the process that the vast majority of Jews were increasingly faced with choiceless choices and no hope for rescue? Such a game should be at least as capable of inducing empathy with the victims as the Holocaust movies of past decades, which are probably becoming increasingly ineffective as a didactic tool for younger audiences steeped in digital culture. And why stop there? Why not work on a spin-off Aleppo 2016 game that follows the trial and tribulations of Syrian refugees on their way to Europe as they try to escape from Assad, rebel troops, ISIS, and Russian air strikes and try to overcome global indifference and prejudice in very much the same way as German Jewry in the summer of 1939. If scripted intelligently, such an Aleppo game would go a long way to expose the depravity of Europe’s political elites of 2016 as they tried to shed their Geneva Convention, UN Human Rights Charter, and EU Convention on Human Rights obligations. It is difficult to imagine any video game about the topic that would be in such poor taste as the ‘game’ that said politicians have been playing with the lives of millions of refugees whom they have denigrated and sought to contain in overcrowded camps outside the EU and the US. In fact, a successful and ethically valuable game that follows the suggested trajectory already exists. This war of mine, released

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by a Polish developer in 2014, lets players experience the struggle for survival of a group of civilians in a fictional besieged eastern European city. Loosely based on the 1992–96 siege of Sarajevo the game goes a long way in creating empathy with war victims (Clark 2014). Simulative interactive narrative worlds exploring past and present crimes against humanity could also offer new, decidedly self-critical perspectives on perpetrator and bystander biographies. Digital game formats seem to be very well suited to have players experience in their own virtual life the slippery slope of conformism, prejudice, and fanaticism that precedes genocide. In this fashion, genocide gaming could assume a radical self-reflexive quality and teach players, reflecting on their own virtual ethical failures and virtual crimes, how to recognize and counteract the early warning signs of radicalization and indifference. Since gaming with its extraordinary immersive potential offers the ambivalent (and for ‘analogers’ very troublesome) experience of being simultaneously inside and outside a given simulative world, a Holocaust game could help overcome a didactic impasse that cosmopolitan Holocaust culture has thus far never been able to solve: it could complicate and possibly undermine the troublesome structural parallels between the passive bystanders of the Holocaust of the 1940s and the relatively passive consumers of official Holocaust culture of the last four decades, a culture that taught consumers the virtues of remembering the victims (never again genocide w/h memory) but provided little meaningful guidance in preventing large-scale victimization in the first place (never again genocide). Given the high stakes involved, the first realistic, fully immersive, interactive, and simulative Holocaust game should be developed at the center of our Holocaust culture, for instance through a collaboration between the Shoah Foundation, USHMM, Yad Vashem, the Gedenkstättennetzwerk, the Museum of Tolerance, and other interested parties, including for-profit corporations. The task is too important and too expensive, and has too great a didactic potential, to be left exclusively to commercial enterprises or freelance outfits.

Notes 1 The professional screening segment of the censorship process at internet service industry giants like Google is outsourced to a low salaried digital proletariat located for instance in the Philippines. Here employees work ten hours a day on two-year contracts under conditions of extreme secrecy and mental stress to cleanse social networks from potentially offensive and illegal violent and sexually explicit content matter (Briegleb 2016). 2 The uprising has been subject to various retellings see the measured words in Chare and Williams 2016, 6–7 and compare for instance to Yahil 1990, 486. 3 In 2009 the ADL for instance, praised Inglourious Basterds as “an allegory about good and evil and the no-holds barred efforts to defeat the evil personified by Hitler, his henchmen and his Nazi regime. If only it were true” (Anti-Defamation League 2009); for a scholarly assessments of the movie’s transgressive accomplishments see Dassanowsky 2012.

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4 Holocaust memory institutions featuring dramatic emotionally manipulative lighting also exist on the other side of the Atlantic; consider, for instance, the documentation center in the basement of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe where visitors, as they advance from one room to another, are gradually deprived of light until they reach a space where they are invited to listen to the stories of select Holocaust victims in semi-darkness. 5 HMDT is currently developing a fully interactive digital teaching tool called HMDT Eteach but a presentation of the pilot at the BAHS Conference in July 2016 did not reveal a particularly dynamic or innovative platform: Andy Fearn 2016. 6 In October 2016, only the German version of the online game worked. Here the words of warning in the original German: “Die unbeaufsichtigte Beschäftigung mit dem Holocaust in einem jungen Alter kann zu einem Trauma bei Kindern führen, sowie zu Distanziertheit und in in manchen Fällen sogar zu einem Gefühl der Feindseligkeit im Zusammenhang mit dem Thema”: see Yad Vashem 2016c. 7 See for example Van Cleef 2016: “Yes, this is terrible, but I am curious if the USHMM has condemned the US bombings of civilians in Syria, Afghanistan and other places?”

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SECTION 2

Archaeology

6 TEMPOR(E)ALITIES AND ARCHIVE-TEXTURES OF MEDIACONNECTED MEMORY Wolfgang Ernst

Towards a media-specific theory of storage technologies While there is a vital academic field of studies in individual, collective, social and cultural memory with an emphasis on discourse analysis (Pogačar this volume), there are still just a few rigid analytic theories of storage technologies (Kirschenbaum 2008; Barker this volume). Such an inquiry demands sound technological knowledge on the one hand, and media philosophical curiosity on the other to create epistemological sparks out of such close reading and guiding theoretical hypotheses against which the evidence is tested. Let us emphasize a priori: Different from the epoque of analogue electronic communication media (culminating in radio and television broadcasting, which is essentially based on “live” signal transmission), with digital communication technologies, an irreducible momentum of intermediary micro-storage is involved—memory not in its culturally emphatic, but in its presence-processing sense. Admittedly, intermediary storage in forms of signal delay has been already constitutive in electronic systems like the PAL colour TV system (as indicated by its acronym for Phase Alternating Line). But this deferred temporality of signal processing is not of a logical, calculating nature like the intermediary storage of bit values in the registers of the central processing unit in the current von-Neumann architecture of store-programmable computers. In fact, every digital sampling of time-continuous signal events in the physically real world converts them in time- and value-discrete signals that technically is most generally being performed by the sample-and-hold mechanism involving a micromemory operation: a temporal interval, deferring the momentary time-value at the margin of becoming “infra-memory” as storage. Among the five elements of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication (Shannon / Weaver

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1949) ranges the transmitter (transducer) that processes the message via modulation (in the analogue channel case) or suitable coding (the digital mode) into a technical signal—”something which is quite impossible in the discrete case without intermediate data storage” (Kittler 1996). Even if the proper “medium” in Shannon’s diagram is a memoriless channel (with the output signal being a direct function of the input signal without processing inbetween), digital communication thus puts emphasis on the memory momentum.

On differences between technical storage, social memory and the archive The typographic expression “tempor(e)alities” aims to express a two-fold meaning. There are temporealities as inherent time properties within technological media, and otherwise there are temporalities raising the question: How does media time affect human perception? Once memory is coupled to media, this leads to almost traumatic irrations of the human sense of time (like the dog Nipper listening to “His Master’s Voice” from a phonograph) and to temporal dissonances and dislocations. When cybernetically short-circuited with technological processes, humans are subject to media time, which differs significantly from the traditional cultural time and social memory that relies on discursive and institutional tradition inbetween human generations—a decisive difference from technical storage and its resulting transmissibility (Halbwachs 1980). Recent time technologies not only induce a redefinition of archival storage but makes us question the classic ontology of social memory as well (Blom / Rossaak / Lundemo, forthcoming). Neither philological nor material hermeneutics of storage is about so-called social implications, since it rather deals with “technical individuations” of memory (Simondon 1980). Walter Benjamin defined the aura as a peculiar interlacing of time and space in an object (Benjamin 1989: 378). The archival aura in this sense does not simply emanate from its air of secrecy and power-relation; it stems from a specific temporality as well. The archival tempaurality that used to be based on the indexical writing trace from the past is being replaced by non-linear, time-critical, even bit-critical operations—just like the Charged Coupled Device as basis for digital image recording has replaced the Barthean punctum in analogue photography (Hagen 2002). Digital communication is a system that is permanently archiving presence. The cycles of 24-hour television news: have for some time refracted an external world segmented into composite fractions of clock time, shaping or conflicting with our internal sense of the passage of time. Compare this to the ‘non-punctual’ time of the Internet, providing a different experience of the continuity of time, even though it [. . .] remediates, other more punctual and cyclical media (radio, TV, press).

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One can say then that digital media have complicated the temporal dimensions against which we measure our sense of presence in-the-world, and increasingly blurred this with our sense of presence in-the-media, and also presence-in-memory (Hoskins 2011, 25 f.). Let us neither confuse the symbolical order of the institutional archive with human memory (or even recollection), nor neuronal memory with technological storage. The traditional archive is not semantic memory or storage as technology, but rather an organizational form inbetween, a well-defined system, a format of symbolic order by metadating, an external rule, non-invasive towards its records. Let us imagine experimental archives different from the well-organized institutional archive, driven by dynamic algorithms that replace what had been social dynamics in memory processes before. Digitized films, once transformed into a vast image bank, as data-set can be subjected to image-based search operations such as matching of similarities, object feature detection, statistical colour value comparison, even sorting pixels by colours. Similar (and even more delicate time-critical) operations can be performed by algorithmically sorting and matching rhythmic patterns in sound and music that consist of time-varying signals by definition. Whereas traditional archives and library catalogues operate upon metadata that is the symbolic level, electronic memories emulate signal processing within human perception itself, touching its “sense of time” on an existential level. On the level of storage media, a non-social memory is at work, displaying a rich memory poetics of its own, with inherent logic, specified for the needs of the so-called von-Neumann architecture of computers we still use after half a century. Let us name the modules of this techno-mathematical “memory”— which turns out to be a metaphorical transfer of terms well known from traditional archivology. The closer we look at this micro-memory architecture, the more its topology and organization turns out to be a mirror of traditional archival and administrative practice—merging both areas (which have been rather separated emphatically in cultural use) into one operational horizon, by including the storage elements immediately into the current action.

The media-archaeological approach In the midst of techno-logical approaches to digital media, recent critical code studies (CCS) is the application of critical theory and hermeneutics to the interpretation or rather exegesis of computer source code. In combination with platform studies, CCS uses the source code as a means of entering into discussion about the technological object on its second component, which is logics. CCS involves reading code closely “but is not limited to the sort of close reading that is detached from historical, biographical, and social conditions” (Montfort et al. 2013: 6 f.). Rigid media archaeology, in a kind of escalation, even aims at

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a momentary relief from the imaginary called “social history”, in favor of a direct micro-physical and temporal link between the real and symbolic technological regime. Media archaeology indeed aims at material philology, that is the close reading of technology, in order to derive and unfold epistemological surplus insight from there. Of course, such a micro-analysis itself necessarily leads to a neglect of critical distance (conventional “criticism”); one can rarely have both. A focus on the connection of computational code to historical, and cultural, factors is necessary but runs the risk of becoming so all-encompassing that it becomes undefined. Historiography (the gesture of “historical contextualization”) seduces imagination by narrative. Radical media archaeology—being “radical” in terms of the mathematical (square) root and of arché as primordial commandment— rather focuses on the primacy of technological autopoiesis in the temporal realm (“Eigenzeit”). Let us therefore not confuse technical storage with human, social and cultural memory. Media archaeology as a specific mode of media theory describes the nondiscursive practices specified in the elements of the techno-mathematical archive. Genuinely media-inherent memory has an epistemological dimension that deserves to be expressed beyond pure engineering language. Somewhat close to French apparatus theory, media archaeology identifies “social” forces within rather than as a mere bias of technological formations themselves, thus deconstructing the familiar (and easy) separation between brute technology on the one hand and social, cultural and economical “external” forces on the other.

Listening to the dynamics within memory devices Let us first have a look at, and then listen to, the once popular “Datasette” storage technology in early personal computing (notably the Commodore 64). There is indeed a crucial difference between the popular usage of the compact cassette format for music recording and its function in computational systems. If we take e.g. the Sinclair ZX81 Flight Simulation Datasette (16k RAM), the initial instruction indicates “Load time: 6 min. approx.” When such an ancient magnetic tape memory is being loaded into a Commodore 64 computer, acoustically stored signals are transduced into electric bit values again; via loudspeaker we can listen to such data music. What we are hearing is the interplay between technical memory and affective remembrance like an old percussionassisted song (Anderson 2004)—the implicit sonicity of computer memory itself, that is: a software program. That the dynamics within digital memory devices does not just take place on the time-biased alphanumeric level is drastically expressed by the media-artistic installation zgodlocator by Herwig Weiser. It consists of shredded computer hardware waste and ferrofluid liquids, which Weiser re-configured by electro-magnetic

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induction caused by sound input. The starting point of the installation is the archetypal storage unit for electronic computers as such: the hard disk. Unlike a musical vinyl record as mass-produced by the industry, a hard disk consists of magnetic input/output media and a magnetic liquid. Since it works at ultra-high speeds in the micro range only ferrofluids can make the mechanical components of the electromagnetic storage unit resistant to immediate erasure. ”zgodlocator presents the material of electronic storage media as a dynamic, deep surface, as a short-term memory. The computer with its storage media such as the hard disk is not ‘hard’ at all, but rather dynamic and fluid. In this way, zgodlocator gives media theory food for thought. We are in the process of saying goodbye to the computer as a storage medium, instead highlighting its nature as a dynamic process. Electronic media need not be described as the dead spaces of an archive, but are equally enactments of electronics themselves, being as they are an event of temporal, intensive experience.” (Roch 2001). Electronic memory thereby is closer to the dynamics of human remembrance on the neuro-biological level (McCulloch / Pitts 1943) than to the taxonomic regime named the archive or to the cultural semantics of social memory. The core of digital data processing is the single storage element: a flip-flop circuit or other binary units to store or change one bit of information, while more complex random access memory has been realized in various dynamic charge devices that constantly needed to be refreshed—be it the acoustic delay line or the cathode ray tube (both used here in a completely different sense than for sound or television). A truly media-archaeological hierarchy of technical memory levels unfolds between read-only storage (protected memory), the register (a term well known from traditional archival sciences, now being used to define the smallest intermediary storage element in computing), the accumulator as a special register for numeric calculations (thus in need of cells for the storage of intermediary results), and the buffer for explicitly transient data storage, when these data are being transferred from one functional unit to another. A state of latency, that is of deferred presence, aptly describes the nature of transitional, dynamic storage, with different modes of access to stored data: direct access storage; sequential access storage; indexsequential storage; pushup and down storage; word-organized storage, and associative storage with its special characteristic that its stored elements can be addressed by content. The cross-referencing of storage and transfer that is characteristic of computer memory becomes apparent with the close coupling of storage to timing, ranging from cycle time and latency (which is the time it takes in a functional unit for data to be shifted and re-located) up to access time (the sum of latency and transfer time).

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On this micro-temporal level, in terms of systems theory and cybernetics, memory is literally permanently in transition. While the traditional function of the archive is to document an event that took place at one time and one place, the emphasis in the digital archive shifts to re-generation, (co-)produced by the online users for their own needs. There is still an archive, in Immanuel Kant´s and Michel Foucault’s sense: the condition for the possibility of the memory performance to take place at all. The real multi-media archive is the arché of its source codes, but in a different form of existence: algorithmic dynamics instead of documentary stills. “The abstract-state-machine represents an [. . .] attempt at introducing dynamism into logic” (Fuller and Goffey 2012, 80). Traditional archival tectonics is topologically fixed, whereas when biased by the current of electrified algorithms, it becomes an operative diagram. The trans-archival notion of “organizational”, cybernetic, that is: feedback-based, instant memory, describes the logic of electronic and hypertextual memory well.

The present as a function of memory Standardized electronic immediacy has no appeal of aural remoteness at all any more; digital memory loses its distance. Within the temporal window of what humans perceive as “present”, real-time signal-to-data processing happens subliminally. Different from metaphorical assumptions in the past, there is no static archive here, but micro-moments of memorization take place in the neuronal net, representing a kind of dynamic micro-archive for moments. Both neurological perception and so-called digital culture turn out to be radically memory-based, even if this memory shrinks to momentary inbetween-storage. In Matière et Mémoire (1896) Henri Bergson expresses that memory does not go back from present to past, but in reverse, a re-call of images takes place in the short-cut between immediate sensation and virtually stored perception from the past. Digital devices—different from live transmission in electronic media like analogue radio and television—are based on micro-memories indeed (be it registers, flags, cache, et al.). Not only that, memory becomes part of presence (which it has been always already), but the present dissolves itself into microarchival and micro-mnemotechnical moments. Digital video compression is such a delicate operation in image transfer based on micro-archival events; only parts and sections of the image are updated at a temporal moment. MPEG technologies for video compression transform the plenitude of movement into partial sampling of stills and below. On the basis of key frames, predictive pictures are established in between to predict the location of each block of pixels. Movement only takes place through updates of certain sections of the image, while the rest of the frame is replayed as before (Lundemo 2008: 316 f.). Wolfgang Hagen designed a three-step model of the evolution of memory in occidental society: first the mnemotopic, that is real and imaginary space-based

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memory (the rhetorical ars memoriae); second the mass-media based communication that is rather based on actuality than on memory recall; third the contemporary and future online communication where both archival memory and “live” actuality are being replaced by the aesthetics of powerful search engines; algorithmic memory is a coupling of human queries with machine remembrance—an active digestion rather than passive memory container, recalling G. W. F. Hegel’s distinction between mechanic Gedächtnis and interiorized, now mathematicalprocedurally appropriated, Erinnerung. Generic memory replaces the fixed record, like in digital image compression an image is not transferred in its entirety but algorithmically being compressed and condensed to be re-generated. The capacity for memory ranges from physical matter (material memory) up to almost immaterial cultural heritage. But with programmable media, for the first time remembrance is not exclusively human any more, but becomes a nonhuman agency (in Bruno Latour’s terms)—algorithmic memory (Sluis 2010). Let us define the “virtual” as any object that exists not by indexical reference to an origin in the physical world like photochemical photography, but is generated genuinely by calculation. The virtual archival record is thus not being preserved in its materiality on which its traditional authority has been based, but re-generated on demand—just like Leon Battista Alberti in the early Italian Renaissance invented a numerical procedure for reproducing the map of Rome without loss in the act of copying (Carpo 2005). The rules (i.e. algorithms) of such re-generation are the new archive in Foucault’s neologistic sense, the conditions of a possible actualization at any time. This actualization is a form of temporal existence that dramatically differs from the physical re-call of a material record. A frequent editorial remark about the URLs referred to in printed texts expresses that the author and / or publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Knowledge in the Gutenberg era, once trusted to an official publication (“Imprimatur!”), claimed to be (in principle) enduring and time-invariant. With the liquidation (fluidity) of electronic publishing, though, knowledge itself becomes a kind of flow, to be nonlinearly and dynamically updated at any temporal instant. The nature of digital memory on the level of storage is different from analogue storage media that entropically “fade” with time (as iconographically expressed by the baroque allegories of transient time—tempus fugit). Digital memory—due to its address structure—has a binary character not only in its elementary units but overall; it is either available or gone, beyond the simple dichotomy between the present and the past. In most cases, “digitally saved information can either be read without loss of quality, or it is illegible and hence ‘completely lost’” (Gschwind 2006, 184). In Shannon’s communication engineering diagram, the channel of transmission ranges centrally. Once the coded message is trusted to a storage medium,

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it becomes a temporal channel. Symbolically coded memory has a good chance to be transmitted with high fidelity against noise, since alphabetic letters are to a high degree sublated from physical entropy. The physical quality of the medium is of secondary importance, as long as its symbolic inscription can still be decoded. From that results a rather ahistoric form of tradition, different from the scratchy audio signal as phonographic record or the “stealthy disintegration due to the relatively low stability of photographic material” (Gschwind 2006, 183).

From archival storage space to dynamic storage time “Archives have long been seen as the external and institutional basis for the remembering and forgetting of societies at different stages of development across history, and as an ultimate storage metaphor of memory” (Hoskins 2011, 25). But the archival dispositive itself has become part of the current crisis of memory terms; at least it fails adequately to represent the capacities of media memory. The current shift from archival space to archival time itself is a function of the dynamics of permanent data transfer. In the somewhat misappropriately so-called cyber“space” the notion of the archive has become an anachronistic, hindering metaphor; it should rather be described in topological, mathematical or geometrical terms, replacing emphatic memory by transfer (data migration) in permanence (Chun 2011). Even the old rule that only what has been supplied with archival metadata can be retrieved from memory is no longer applicable in times of fuzzy search (engines) and similarity-based character recognition or image and sound matching. Within the context of the current shift from archival space to the dynamics of post-archival time, processual connectivity indeed is a precise term for the underlying chronotopology, respecting the “real time net”. Discrete time is embodied in the para-archival mechanism built into the transfer process of data in the Internet as such. Once messages have been fragmented into data packets, they are disseminated to find the most effective routes in the net composed by a grid of servers world-wide. This flood would block the Internet very soon unless there was a deadly stamp: the Time To Live (TTL). The existence of data packets has the termination value of 255 according to 8-bit logic; with each passage across a server relay (a “hop”) the value decreased at one. If this amounts to zero without the data packet having arrived as its destined address, it is being deleted. What Martin Heidegger has defined as the essential ontological human experience (Sein-zum-Tode: being-to-death) has its computable equivalent.

Volatile electric media memories A radical metamorphosis of the aesthetics of storage takes place in the electrotechnical field, demanding new models for dealing with dynamic memories. Video recorders have once been designed for the temporally delayed replay

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of TV programs and for short-term storage, not for permanent archival memory. In German public broadcast services, the archives are called “Production archives” (Produktionsarchive), with the emphasis being on immediate re-production and re-cycling rather than emphatic cultural long-time memory. This corresponds with a technical discontinuity: The physics of printed or mechanical storage media against fluid, that is volatile electro-magnetic memories. Whereas the traditional symbolic order of memory relied on fixed symbolical inscriptions such as archives and libraries, writing or printing is currently being replaced by electric charges as carriers of signals. The physically real is being registered by electrons, literally flashed into digital memories. In May 2011 two black boxes could finally be rescued from the floor of the Atlantic sea two years after an Air France airplane crash: the data recorder and the voice recorder keeping the last words of the pilots in the cockpit as well as the background noises that retrospectively signal the unfolding disaster. The recordings proved to be miraculously intact. Both data recorders consist of memory chips that keep their magnetic charge. Whereas mechanical records still represent the culturally familiar form of physical impression (therefore the writing metaphor in the very term “phonography”), electro-magnetic latency is a different, sublime, uncanny form of invisible, non-haptic memory. The voices and sounds emanating from electronic storage media are radically bodyless, undead, different from the familiar historiographical, textually readable time. Sound recording does not simply unfold as evolutionary course of technologies in history, but the phonographic record on the one hand, the magnetic tape on the other, and finally the digital recording represent fundamentally different materialities and logics (literally “techo/logies”) in terms of their ways of registering time-variant signals, time-based forms of reproduction and their “archival” being in time. Electronics once liberated sound carriers from mechanical constraints, thus: from erasure over time (even if the thermionic tube or transistor are finally subject to decay themselves). Negentropic digital persistence against decay time allows its ahistoricity to its different form of registering: not by recording the physically real signal event, but by symbolically keeping their information. This information is suspended from physical time, leading to literally “spectral” memory latency, haunted by media ghosts.

Micro-media memories: From storage to transfer Let us finally clarify the relation between this micro-level of storage practices and so-called social memory. Any talk about maximized computer “memory” capacities still continues an old occidental obsession that culture depends on material storage (historic architectures, libraries, museums). But media analysis indicates that the future cultural emphasis will be rather on permanent transfer. There is already an implosion of storage into processual data flows, a different economy of the archive as dynamic agency online. The notion of immediate

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data feedback replaces the separation that traditionally made all the archival difference. With electro-digital archives, there is—in principle—no more delay between memory and the present, but the technical option of immediate feedback, turning every present data into archival entries and vice versa. The economy of timing thus happens in short-circuits. Streaming media and storage become increasingly intertwined. This new type of volatile memory consists of selflearning, adaptive archives, transitive to their respective media formats. In comparison, cognition studies rather abandon with the storage metaphor as well, replacing it by the equation of memory within the system itself (Ackerman and Halverson 2000, 63). With the supremacy of selection and addressability over storage there is no memory in the emphatic sense any more; archival terminology—or rather the archive itself—becomes literally metaphorical—a function of transfer processes.

Archive textures: Suspended memory versus immediate recall While archival memory by rapid digitization of its records (or at least their inventories) has become open for online access, there is a new kind of archival secrecy that is hidden within technology itself. The real archive nowadays recedes into coding that is the essential media-archivological layer of the current symbolic order. Data processing and transmission in online communication needs a protocol that is the command (ancient Greek arché) at work in transfer. The law of technical memory nowadays equals code. Literally “current” memory (in terms of electricity) is not, like traditional archives, clearly separated from present administration as symbolic form of bureaucracy any more, but cybernetically becomes a feedback-ingredient of present operations itself. The basic condition of current data processing consists of an almost indivisible system of short-time memories such as the cache storage in computing, resulting in a memory aesthetics of repeated re-loading and in media diagrams of memory. A look at a magnetic core matrix in early computers, which is a mediaarchaeological dinosaur of early digital memory, reminds of that oscillation between immediacy and permanence. Whereas in the human brain there is no such thing comparable to an “archive”, memory is rather an enactment of immediate synchronization of distributed electro-magnetic charges in the neuronal net. On December 6, 1896, Freud wrote to W. Fließ about his assumption of a psychic mechanism that does not diachronically consist of layer above layer, but from time to time re-configures the order of memories—which corresponds to media memory in synchronous layers. The neuronal dynamics of addressing and assembling signals as data into “memory” corresponds to the way a magnetic core matrix is addressed and configured by a mesh of copper “nerves“ (resonant with digitally switched electricity).

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Magnetic-core memory device (Media Archaeological Fund, Institute of Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin); Photo: Benjamin Renter)

FIGURE 6.1

The analogy even extends to the role of chemical processes within the transmission lines (nerves) that is comparable to inductance in electric cables. Dynamic storage turns out to be closer to human neuronal memory than to cultural memory agencies that long for endurance. Finally the question arises: Is the term “memory” still informative when it comes to analyze techno-mathematical data storage and transfer mechanisms, or has it become a misleading metaphor, leading to a confusion between social and algorithmical remembrance? When applied to data storage within the computer, “memory” is misleading because of its cultural associations, which make all other forms of social or institutional memory agencies like libraries and museums a forerunner of the computer itself. Every archive creates a space of indeterminacy, which is the relation between the read and the un-read. Symbolically coded storage first of all is preservation for an undetermined time span and not meant for immediate access and recall but rather a literal exception from the economics of knowledge circulation, opening a spatio-temporal field of deferral (the katechon). According to the definition of information in terms of communication engineering (and its sociological application by Niklas Luhmann), systems theory defines information as the

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unexpected. In order to preserve this option, data have to be sheltered from immediate consumption—which unexpectedly provides sound arguments to defend archival secrecy. The philosophy of “open access” has connected the previously separate and remote archival records to the immediacy of the World Wide Web. With its becoming electronically online the archive has been deprived of its traditional “privacy” in the literal sense (Latin privare), its secrecy from public discourse. The former archivum secretum (like in the Roman Vatican) is not just an old-aged power instrument to be overcome in favor of open access, but an exception from immediate memory circulation, a critique of real-time media economy.

References Anderson, Ben. 2004. “Recorded music and practices of remembering.” In: Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 5, No. 1, March, 3–19. Ackerman, Mark S. and Christine A. Halverson. 2000. “Reexamining Organizational Memory.” In: Communications of the ACM 43, no. 1: 59–64. Barker, Timothy. 2017. “Television In and Out of Time.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 173–189. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1989. “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”. In: same author, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann / Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 2nd ed.: 368–385. Blom, Ina, Eivind Rossaak and Trond Lundemo (eds.). Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Forthcoming. Carpo, Mario. “Le Media Lab d’Alberti”. In: Perspective, projections, projet. Technologies de la representation architecturale, edited by Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle-Pauwels, Paris: Centre des Monuments Nationaux et Éditions du Patrimoine. Chun, Wendy. 2011. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory”. In: Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 184–203. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press. Fuller, Matthew and Andrew Goffey. 2012. Evil Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gschwind, Rudolf. 2006. “Digitisation and Long Term Archival of Digital Data.” In: Gegenwart dokumentieren / Archiving the Present, edited by Lioba Reddeker, 183–195. Vienna: Eigenverlag basis wien. Hagen, Wolfgang. 2002. “Die Entropie der Fotografie. Skizzen zur einer Genealogie der digital-elektronischen Bildaufzeichnung”. In: Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters. Vol. 1, edited by Herta Wolf. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The collective memory. New York: Harper & Row. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn”. Parallax 17:4: 19–31. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2008. Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1996. “The History of Communication Media”. Online www.ctheory. net/articles.aspx?id=45. Lundemo, Trond. 2008. “In the Kingdom of Shadows. Cinematic Movement and Its Digital Ghost”. In: The YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 314–329. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.

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McCulloch, Warren and Walter Pitts. 1943. “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. 5, 115–133. Montfort, Nick, et al. 2013. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pogačar, Martin. 2017. “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 27–47. New York: Routledge. Roch, Axel. 2001. “Heavy Metal. zgodlocator as a techno-visionary phenomenology of matter”. In: Camera Austria, no. 75, 50–56; online http://interface.khm.de/wp-content/ uploads/2008/10/roch_heavy_metal_2001.pdf. Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: University. of Illinois Press. Simondon, Gilbert. 1980. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. London: University of Western Ontario), online, http://accursedshare.blogspot.com/2007/11/gilbertsimondon-on-mode-of-existence.html. Sluis, Katrina. 2010. “Algorithmic Memory? Machinic Vision and Database Culture”. In: New Media and the Politics of Online Communities, edited by Aris Mousoutzanis and Daneil Riha, 227–236. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

7 THE UNDERPINNING TIME From digital memory to network microtemporality Jussi Parikka

I Microtemporal A June day of internet boredom and link hopping, following Software Studies scholar David Berry’s tweet, something caught my attention and led me to the clothes retailer H&M’s website. A strange feeling about a seemingly unfitting heads up about the physicality of internet culture was evident when you did not get your requested web page to load but were bluntly notified with the apology message: “You are placed in a queue”, reminding that you are definitely not the only customer keen to see their most recent collections. Thank you for waiting. Indeed, hm.com seemed to just point towards that very typical experience as well as a defining feature of modern urbanized societies of handling big masses of people through bottlenecks, whether such are doors or, as in this case it seems, servers: standing in line and waiting. The mundane nature of this example, of slowness in the supposedly instantaneous sphere of digital network life, resonates with some recent years’ work about network temporality. It is well summarized by Robert Hassan: What kind of time do we experience online, when we get lost amid dead links, get blocked at restricted access sites, search queries that lead to who knows where? It’s not clock time, and it’s not Swatch time, it’s a time of lags and latencies, of waiting and clicking through, of fast and slow. It is the experience of differing speeds and asynchronicity (Hassan quoted in Lovink 2008, 128). This asynchronicity is what sustains the conflicting experience of online time and connects to issues of the post-digital (Cox 2015) as well as to a wider question about temporalities of the network that is disjointed from human

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Screen grab from June 12, 2012. HM.com

perception. Funnily enough, another quirky example of an augmented reality headset (by Oculus Rift) that shows “real life through internet lag” demonstrates a further point.1 Imagine if the technical lag in streaming network content would be a glitch in the real world, displacing you constantly so as to be out of sync with others. This might not be news to players of First Person Shooters who know the importance of network connections and pings, but as a broader feature it is something that characterizes questions of sync—and out of sync. Such experiences of speeds, lags, ethological relations of speeds and slownesses, can be tracked down to the somatic worlds of the body as well as down to a level of network microtemporality as well. This chapter is about temporality, but the argument that follows is however less about shopping experiences and more interested in the architectures of temporality in network culture. As such, the text also concerns the constitution of the experienced time and memory that is conditioned by the network. This refers to a level of network that remains partly imperceptible: a modulation of our human time on a level of the network architectures and their temporality, which is a sort of a non-human time of technical media. The chapter offers a way to understand digital memory (studies) from an alternative perspective while resonating with themes articulated in many of the chapters in this book such as Timothy Barker’s “Television In and Out of Time” and Martin Pogačar in “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity, Co-historicity and Dispotentiated Futures” that articulates some of the political horizons of temporal coordinates. But in the context of network temporalities and digital culture, the increasing amount of storage available and ready to be mobilized as memory exceeds any earlier possibilities for cultural preservation leading into the question, asked by Peter Weibel (2013, 188): do we even have time to produce so much so as to fill that possible memory space? In other words, “the storage space is the black hole into which storage time disappears”. But instead of seeing this only from the perspective of anxiety of lack of time it also flags

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a more specific question that is fundamental to theories and practices of memory in technical media culture: what sort of time is this time of storage and, indeed, as we saw above in our lighter starting example, the time of transmission? The two often seem to come together in terms of network structures, as well as have over the past decades of computerization seen a transfer in terms of meanings: computer memory. This memory is not experiential but technical and functions by counting, not by way of a phenomenological memory; it is not directly perceived but is completely real; it is material but embedded in wider imaginaries, metaphoric and metonymic shifts across material and semiotic scales. It is in this register that the technicality of memory is immersed in the rhetoric of cyberculture, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2011, 184) aptly notes: key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media’s archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines. As one mobilization of the notion of time-criticality, my argument relates to the theoretical ideas by Wolfgang Ernst as well as a range of other scholars (see especially Ernst 2013a, Ernst 2013b, Ernst 2016 and Volmar 2009). They have articulated the need to focus on the other temporalities than the narrativizing and writing-based historical discourse as one particular solution to management of temporal sequences. This “other” time is also a time of non-human memory as a computational assemblage: constituted not by what homes in on the perceptual, cognitive and human scales but what escapes it as partly automated regime of counting—in this case because of its quickness, speed and pace. In other contexts concerning the posthuman, scholars speak of the Anthropocene as the non-human durations offering an ecological context in which humans entangle with Earth durations. But in this chapter, I want to focus on the other end. Ernst’s call for microtemporalities and a time-critical perspective argues to look at the alternative historical conditions of existence for modulation of time. For Ernst (2013b, 135), this sort of analysis demands to position “media theories within concrete spaces of cultural practices”.2 Besides the media archaeological task, time-criticality extends the vocabulary of temporalities available for a cultural theoretical analysis.3 Indeed, there is no lack of time-focused critique of technological culture. Such authors as Paul Virilio (2007) have provided us with extensive analyses concerning the shifting temporal regimes that define our perceptual worlds. Logistics of space is complemented with management of temporalities as a defining feature of how the social, and hence politics, is organized. Siegfried Zielinski has argued for the centrality of time as well. Besides

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his term of “deep time media” as a research agenda, he points towards temporality: “All techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones are, in a specific sense, time media” (Zielinski 2006, 31).4 Despite a shared interest in temporality, Zielinski’s argument takes us in another direction as Ernst does; for Zielinski, his critique of internet times as monomedium are revealed as slightly missing the point of technical multitemporalities, as for instance a closer look at the engineered temporalities of networks makes clear. Temporalities of flows, bursts, and various techniques and technologies of time management even on the level of packets is what characterizes the specificity of reproducing existing worlds in network culture. This work of reproduction is approached in this perspective as one of management of time. In this sense, Ernst provides a take that can elaborate the modulations of memory, time and politics from a technological perspective. The way in which critical theorists such as Virilio lamented the loss of temporality in network cultures, Zielinski’s notes on monotemporality, Castells (2000) defining network culture temporality as “timeless time” and critics like Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009) have pointed towards the incommensurable relation between human times and accelerated machine times of information culture expresses easily a too narrow understanding of temporality in network culture. This is not to dismiss such accounts, as they provide important clues how to think about the political implications having to do with the experience of time—for example in perception, identity or for example in relation to post-Fordist labour. But a consideration of how interfacing such ideas with some microtemporal aspects might open a broader focus on what the time-critical means for a politics of digital culture and its memory. The clock time of labour that characterizes human labour in factories, dividing it down to quantified units, does not disappear in network culture. Instead, the clocks become internalized in machines and contemporary labour practices in digital culture as well as concretely in computer clock times and network temporalities (see Franklin 2015). Hence we need to complement the arguments of the cultural critics lamenting the implosion of space and time in cyberspace. Despite it having escaped human perception, time has not disappeared at all; there is lots of it, and it is very quick, managed in milliseconds and quicker, as short bursts and time-critical processes of networks—temporalities which produces senses of the public, of experience, as well as themselves embody the social as packets that negotiate who goes first, who has to wait. Questions of networks, memory and what constitutes the public are embedded in speeds and pacing. Hence our politics of things should also include a view to management of temporality (see also Pogačar in this collection). But this issue is thick with things such as switches and packets, protocols and signals and signal processing; it includes pulse code modulation and modems, multiplexing and procedures of timing (see also Hands (2011, 93–96) on the delegation of communicative action and morality to distributed networks.). My historically

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tuned approach draws from 1960s and early 1970s sources concerning how to deal with the emergence and planning of public data networks. But it is also political in the micropolitical sense; how to articulate publicness, and multiple shared channels through the measures dealing with management of time? How to switch and share, time and route, as issues of later network capitalism and constitution of memory? Problems of sharing, queuing, and routing become network problems and public politics as a matter of temporality even touching the current post-Snowden landscape of internet politics. Any discussion of surveillance is related to the techniques of interruption of internet traffic and the wider archaeologies of that architecture, as Florian Sprenger (2015) fluently articulates. In political economy and experience of the digital content unfolding, this is also experienced in the debate about net neutrality. The decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in April 2014 allows speed discrimination over internet traffic. The controversial change in net neutrality in the U.S. is not only demonstration of a shift in priorities of network architecture, granting internet providers new sorts of advantages for their business models (charging more for quicker access to popular addresses) but also on a philosophical level a measure of how experience is being modulated through temporalities. Political imperceptibility and obfuscation at an institutional level is matched by some technical aspects, which make the spatio-temporal sense of human experience insufficient to account for what happens in the techno-political regime of contemporary network society that is automating decision making on the very level of architecture of communication and memory (Sprenger 2015, 27–31).

II The Switch The emergence of the internet (and its various network predecessors) and the key new media developments that we attach to our current terms like “network culture” have been relatively well documented (Abbate 1999; Hafner and Lyon 1998; Ryan 2011), but we should also revisit some of the more grey aspects of such technologies. I argue that in order to excavate the aforementioned themes of memory and network time, we can benefit from a closer unscrewing of realtime systems and, more generally, the temporal layers of networks. In other words, we must specify this political questioning by opening up “time” in a more detailed manner and continuing to pursue even deeper with the relation of the public with network times. We should specify our use of notions of time when it comes to network theory and politics. Real-time information systems included the aforementioned social situations of negotiating temporal ordering of signals, as well as switches between peripheral devices, and the environment (including users) via for instance Interrupt. Hence such an engineering of information systems and network traffic can also be seen as an engineering of the social through notions of memory, the public and the time-critical systems underpinning them.

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Concerning “the public” as one key term in the political vocabulary in the modern political order, an infrastructural shift was starting to take place gradually since the 1960s and 1970s. Public switched telephone networks were still used for data connections, even if increasingly debated as to their suitability for this new function that transported communication in a different way. In terms of public data networks, purpose built for the new real-time communication systems, other sorts of issues were addressed. Time was one. The human social events familiar to any urban dweller as queuing and congestion had become important for network design and management as well. But instead of human objects, we encounter data packets in situations that extend the constitution of the political space into technical sociability. Debates about data packets occupied the early packet switching discourse, which tried to find out best practices for temporary storage of messages (Kleinrock 1961). Urban situations of congestion frustration and social codes, like with queuing, turned into questions of network standards. Such standards were of even increasing importance as it was through standardization that the connection of several private or isolated computers and technologies could be made to happen. In other words, the notion of real time did not pertain to humans only and was more of a pragmatic question “real-enough-time”: what we perceive as smooth enough response time, and not just an irritating delay, but what computer systems themselves might qualify as such. This put the emphasis on even much quicker temporal events and shorter durations. Indeed, computer systems were divided into different categories based on their relation to time: real-time systems where there is a strict upper limit on the time within which the computer must deal with the signals from a number of input channels, quasi real-time systems where the failure of the computer to response causes annoyance rather than damage and batch-processing systems where the response is not at all critical and jobs may be scheduled to use the resources of the computer to best advantage (Davies and Barber 1973, 5). Hence, what occupied early computer scientists and, for instance, such pioneers of packet switching as Donald Davies from the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK, were issues concerning time, as well as the new epistemology of data networks. For them, telephone networks did not represent only old technology that was now to be purposed for new ends, but also an epistemology, a framework for thought. With telephones, you still had the call and its length as the “unit of traffic” (ibid., 16), bear ing some kind of a more direct relation to the social events and habits enabled by the circuit switch-based network technology. Your talkative mood measured as part of the network’s traffic directly. More words, more things to say and share, longer calls, more traffic.5 With data, things get colder in the sense of less semantic. From Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication to the engineering considerations

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concerning pulse code modulation, signal transmission and observation of noise and disruption levels: the temporality is not anymore measured by how long you chat on the line, but the microsecond intervals of samples taken from the analogue waveform of sound, at the rate of 8,000 of those per second (Davies and Barber 1973, 29). This indeed is one context of microtemporality that opens up primarily to the machine time and not to the lived human time (see Ernst 2013a, Ernst 2016). It complexifies the notion of experienced network time, and points towards the non-human experienced network temporalities that we would need to account for as well. The switch concerning which switch became one way to think about networks both as technologies and as forms of knowledge. One approach was early on expressed by Davies and Barber in Communication Networks for Computers. Indeed, it becomes clear that one of the focuses was on the negotiation of private and public in terms of switching (creating private lines in public networks), network topologies, and private circuits. The existence of private data networks had already to do with the range of microtemporal events, techniques of nonhuman networking such as rapid polling of terminals in businesses such as banks and airline systems (Davies and Barber 1973, 132). These institutions represented the overlapping areas of globalizing finance capital and information networks as support for computer-based banking and global travel. In other words, we need to be meticulous when considering network archaeologies as an aid to current discussions of public and private spheres, of neoliberal capitalism and its practices, as well as try to look at in more detail, how such ideas of the public were negotiated across a messy field of arrangements and management of time. Packet switching is one example of such. The work on packet switching networks began in the first half of 1960s, with Paul Baran’s important writing coming out in 1964, and in the UK the National Physical Laboratory design plans for “public data networks” in 1966. This specific cultural technique of networking remained for a long time much debated (Abbate 1999, 7–8. See also Giessman 2014). The need for standards to establish a wider scale for such infrastructural projects was one step from private to public function of networking, but also a step of understanding communication on a different level than usually; now as about packets and packet-based networking. Of course, the whole idea of “common” infrastructures for communication was underlying some of the thinking behind earlier projects too—just for economic reasons, of sharing telegraph and telephone lines with the help of multiplexing, and gradually through packets referring to the packet switching plans since the early 1960s (Baran 1964, 22). Also packet-based networking responded to the design question of “deciding who speaks when” (Davies and Barber 1973, 13). Packet switching networks demonstrated one way of responding to the situation of asynchronous and multitemporal connections (Bright and Smith 1975). With this in mind, to be more precise, in the age of packets it becomes more of a question of what speaks when,

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and the questions of delay, waiting and queuing become integrated as network and software events. Such time-critical events, and temporalities like storage, become functionalized as part of traffic flow. Sorting, routing and managing packets between computers becomes a necessity of increasing importance, as well as where to store temporarily a packet on queue—in a time-shared system, on an individual computer but now in networks in a more distributed form (Davies and Barber 1973, 342–343). Storage becomes integrated as part of transmission, like it was already in the telegraph system: message stored in paper tapes at relay stations, with humans doing much of the work of storing and (re)routing (Abbate 1999, 13). With packet switching, the nodes had to be equipped with suitable computer memory to account for the work of paper tapes. This is the fascinating step when seen from the point of view of archaeology of networks and politics of what becomes addressable as a public part of communication technologies and infrastructures. The relationship of data and humans is framed as central but this implicitly expands to a rather odd-sounding idea of politics of microtemporality of networks too that is mobilized in the seemingly apolitical fields of computer science and network engineering. The work of networks becomes more than about communicating as a technical process, and so much emphasis is here focused on exactly the medium: what stands between and affords the communicative event as the fantasy of unmediated and uninterrupted communication in and for the public. As also Sprenger (2015, 87) observes, it takes media to establish the phantasm of immediacy. Even in the words of Davies and Barber this could be interpreted as a posthuman scenario of sorts, geared towards making human publics happen through the information events of computers and networks: whereas message switching systems are intended to meet the needs of human users, the packet switching network is design primarily for computer to computer communications. It has a much more rapid response which matches the internal behaviour of computers, and handles more information in much the same way as does a computer. At the same time it can readily match the speed of attached computers to that of the terminal users, by virtue of its internal storage. (Davies and Barber 1973, 342) Speaking of the non-human element is not a cultural theoretical exaggeration of past years of academic enthusiasm. Indeed, if we look at the self-descriptions, diagrams and plans in such earlier computer science and engineering texts, we find a constant emphasis on how to negotiate this difference that is primarily temporal. The asynchonicity is not only established between terminals with different connection speeds, but functions in the interface toward humans as well. The difficulty of matching the speeds and habits of computers with humans was encountered on the interface level (Licklider 1968/1990) as well when computers started to have to deal with peripheral devices. For example,

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FIGURE 7.2

Message-space of humans and machines (Davies and Barber 1973, 8).

the real-time Whirlwind system had to do with various levels of “environments”: the radar system observing approaching planes, the cathode tube displays, and the user as well. Hence, “[i]nput and processing also had to be scheduled discretely”, which demanded processes of polling—“temporally regular gathering of data [. . .] conducted through a switch called Interrupt, a hardware line that at regular time intervals interrupted processing and could cause a jump to a subroutine, which was then capable of perceiving, for example, the ‘environment’” (Pias 2011, 168). Mediation happens as much between people as it does inside computer milieu too. Different computers have to learn to manage information signals in concert: a computer might be happy to use the whole bandwidth in very intensive short bursts, whereas we humans are more likely to let our expressions unfold in time with a slower bit/s rate. In other words, for the network design problems, one

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was not able to assume that information flows steadily, but in bursts (Kleinrock 1961, 8). Managing that bursting nature of signals/messages was a question that reveals the management of temporality in networks as part and parcel of what then becomes perceived as the real-time nature of communications6 (see Sprenger 2015, 86–93). In some ways, such situations of communication and time management can be seen emblematic of a wider shift in understanding management of dynamic things and their movement. Indeed, what is introduced is a world of managing commodities and people in a manner that demands more responsiveness to the dynamics of the situation as well as cooperation (Marill and Roberts 1966) as the engineering dilemma that provides an insight into the later talk of communicative capitalism and collective modes of production at the core of cognitive capitalism.7 This refers to real time as one of constant responsiveness, on call, just in time. Furthermore, we also should not fail to notice the references to commodities, as well as customer situations, where simulations are often dealing with how to serve the arriving customers in efficient manner. In network design, considering different solutions to routing and switching were early on proposed in terms of the networks self-managing routines. Selflearning became a way to reach unmanned switching, where the system teaches itself, dynamically, the best routes for packets, and manages that the messages end up where they should, without errors (Baran 1964, 24). For computers, this was to be envisioned as the phenomenological equivalent of hot potatoes, where it was better to pass on the potato (message) than let it burn at your fingertips; the neighbouring node might always be in a better position to find a suitable route for the little hot packet. It was also discussed through an analogy to the postal system. Paul Baran’s way of explaining the idea related to an imaginary American postman who has to deal with asynchronous reception of mail from San Francisco. Any mail including metadata in the form of postage stamps included also information about the most efficient route for determining how to use the system of nodes best. As Sprenger (2015, 95) explains: “What is decisive in this is that the postman can extract information about the best route by simply looking at the stamped date of dispatch, which accompanies each piece of mail just as a handover number tag is meant to accompany every data packet. The message carries information about its own transmission, whether on its stamp or in its header.” Such work as Baran’s made analogies to the postal system that can arguably be seen as the obsolete “space-bridging transmission” (Ernst 2016, 177) system that was on its way out. As Ernst (ibid.) argues, the postal principle was challenged by a time-critical network of mathematical theory of network traffic. Instead of bridging distances, packets are managed by way of counting and time-critical operations in virtual networks, argues Ernst (2016, 178). There is of course a lot of insight to such a claim about an epistemic break and one can see how the postal principle became nested into the early discussions concerning

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networks as a remediated metaphor. In the UK, in the National Physical Laboratory’s work on similar matters of networking this articulated the national public at the era of gradual shift from the regimes created by the (Royal) mail and the telephone circuits to computers. The analogies to postmen sorting out your mail at switching stations and forwarding it along the quickest channel (Baran 1964, 25–26) was used to emphasize the difference to the new sorts of services of networks—packets and local routing policies where you did not even have to look at the big picture of the whole post network, and your mail coming from San Francisco was not really relevant information for the machines sense of West Coast. Instead, the half-blind machine, suffering from near-sightedness, was seen as more efficient in its ability to retain local control and knowledge only of its neighbours. No central control, just enough local routing knowledge to be able to pass on the message (Baran 1964, 31). Furthermore, packet switching was itself seen as a switch in the sense of the emergence of smooth translatability across private networks, and hence creations of new regimes of communication. In the words of Larry Roberts in 1978 echoing the vocabulary of Turing’s Universal Machines, now in terms of packet networks: “packet networks are rapidly becoming universal translators, connecting everything to everything else and supplying the speed, code, and protocol conversions wherever necessary” (Roberts 1978/2001). Since the middle of the 1970s, packets as an articulation of the national public data network can be seen as an illustration of network politics on a material level: politics happens on the level of packets, routes, network topologies and the other grey elements of networks. Indeed, instead of dismissing the postal principle as mere obsolete past, one has to remember the importance of building infrastructures that allowed the virtual networks to exist across rural and urban situations and how the time-critical operations were still tied to very concretely spatial vectors—as they are still (see Starosielski 2015). The function of packets was there to negotiate the spatially laid infrastructures in relation to the timecritical operations and in relation then to the human readability of some of the messages. Hence, an archaeology of time-critical operations and “microdecisions” can then also be “an archaeology of present day technical infrastructures” as Sprenger (2015, 76) argues pointing to such a level of network politics. The articulation of packets themselves, consisting of the encapsulated message but also a header with address information, created an idea of an individualized but shared publicness. While the politics of packet switching is in principle one of democratic equality—no discrimination among packets or in relation to what they contain (Cubitt 2013)—they still involve the complexities of social situations in terms of negotiation of turns, routes and what to do about blockages. In other words, any system that functions according to address structures is itself part of a logic of control that maps the space of possibilities. Address spaces are genealogically related to archaeologies of city space, or to “make the numbers on all houses legible and visible”, as the order by Maria

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Theresa of the Habsburg dynasty was phrased (quoted in Krajewski 2011, 28). It gets carried over then to the postal system as one particular way of matching space and management of communication or, in other words, a special measure to govern spatial arrangements of people (see Siegert 1999). This is a constitution of a public in terms of standardized addressability, and hence deliverability as a communication system. Only that which can be posted exists, to paraphrase Siegert (1999). What the postal system establishes is the early attempt at universalization of space through standardized elements that manage not only distances, but time as well. Standardized costs for letters delivered a sense of reduction of distance. With the penny post, the city plan extended to cover the whole of Great Britain (Siegert 1999). Could we in this sense speak of the attempted universalization of time in internet traffic—something that works through processes of managing asynchronous temporalities of the traffic and that stretches across the spatial distances and territories as a temporal information management? Interestingly enough, on a technical level, packet switching re-inserted itself to the lineage of earlier, pre-telephone based communications: a media archaeology of packets, which included that of mail, the telegraph and the nowadays less well-known “torn paper switching systems”, all of which allocate “bandwidth when a block of data is ready to be sent, and only enough for that one block to travel over one network link at a time” (Roberts 1978/2001). For sure, also delay can be seen as an integral part of print-based media technological memory regimes—a point that Jack Goody makes; delayed transfer is tradition (Ernst 2013a, 119). With computers and networks, such regime of delay becomes automatized in differing ways. Various ideas concerning time management and implosion of distances is carried over to packet switching too: it becomes one way to encapsulate messaging into a public network “space” not so much an architectural space for human dwelling than it is an assemblage of protocols for signal transmission. The arrangement is, however, more than a collection of software and hardware. It fuses with the mentioned somatic aspects of experience of temporality and memory. Furthermore, matters of signal processing take a special position in terms of things public, things secret. Sprenger (2015) speaks of the relation to current versions of network politics that engage with deep packet inspection. Siegert’s example here is the introduction of pulse code modulation since the mid 20th century as a form of conversion of analogue waves like speech into discrete signals—the telegraphization and subsequent digitalization of constituents of communication. The implication is that networks now share all things secret or mundane. The origins of modern information theory in cryptography becomes a generalized state of things, where in the words of Siegert “[t]he most highly classified information of the NSA (National Security Agency) thus would be transmitted over the same network as the afternoon mystery series or the everyday blahblah of people on the telephone.” (Siegert 1999, 260). In other words, what

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such engineering approaches afford is not only a talk of technology, but an engineering of time, which also includes an interest in how space is being shared, negotiated, used. The social and the public/private/secret is not constituted by a shared memory but a time that shares, a time that allocates.

IV Conclusions Concepts and techniques of communication, community, the public and politics are sustained by specific technological arrangements that work in non-human media times. As Siegert (1999, 245) argues, this came evident in its own way already in relation to the a priori of the postal network and it is carried over to the ways in which the postal is nested as part of contemporary communications at least as an analogy. But already the postal principle challenged some anthropocentric ideas. Letters being sent, and arriving, secret notes and official commands, all were sustained by material techniques such as postage stamps, postcards, and institutions such as the World Postal Union, which “itself deconstructed the humanistic ‘idea that people can communicate with one another by letter’” (ibid.) This chapter focused on the microtemporal unpicking of another sort, specific to the age of advanced computer-based networking. In such a case, we can argue that the a priori’s for communication and for instance the public and politics include pulse code modulation, packet switching and a variety of other techniques of sharing, switching and time management of various sorts. These are measures that are linked to discussions of the shift from the time management particular to disciplinary regimes of power to those of control; a modulation of variation, asynchronous events, bursts, and so forth. The chapter argued for a shift towards the management of non-human temporalities as a way to account for the network political event. It addresses the notion of the public, which is managed and reproduced also on this infrastructural, temporal and technical level of microtemporalities, which escape our direct perception but are completely real. The step from flows to bursts is one sort of recognition of the multiple temporal regimes that are put in place as infrastructures of network memory. But they are also more fundamentally producing a network nomos of sorts that brings into play a complex political vocabulary that attempts to deal with such alternating scales and levels. Benjamin Bratton (2015) elaborates this aspect of the planetary condition of multiple stacked constituencies and temporalities, which overflow but also co-condition each other. Such stacked regimes also produce divisions that are fundamental to the sense of togetherness in network communications: a processing of time in order to have a sense of temporality as an experience. And yet this experience returns to a massive infrastructural layering that is far from anthropocentric and becomes a whole different scaled design question. It also asks what does time and memory mean

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FIGURE 7.3 “Data on tap”: the marketing discourse of the constant flow of data. O2 advertisement from London tube, summer 2012. Photo by JP.

in this sort of a stacked communication system. Questions of memory are nested in productions of time that is both political and technological and, as Bratton’s account implies, functions on a planetary scale. This is going further than the satellite-age inspired talk of “real time” and delves into the microtemporalities in which time in real terms takes place. This is why, as a way to unfold the conflation of storage and memory that Chun (2011) analyzes, we can turn to Ernst’s (2013b; 2016) account of microtemporal analysis: the specific time of machines8 that is essential as an infrastructural, non-human and even politically significant realm of modulation of reality. Ernst talks not only of temporality but also of temporeality to underline this point of the underpinning technical modulation of what is catered as experience. Indeed, this opens up as a significant thematic and even methodological way to discuss memory and time in digital culture.

Notes 1 “Living With Lag”. The example is from a rather tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign by a broadband provider and found online at http://9gag.tv/p/a9mjBn/living-withlag-an-experiment-lets-you-experience-lag-in-real-life-oculus-rift (accessed June 9, 2016).

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2 However, Ernst (2013b, 135) insists that “media archaeology is not to be confused with Kulturwissenschaft. Writing, reading, counting, networking and representing are symbolic techniques which generate culture as a recurring and normative formation. They transform a priori concepts of space and time into an analysis of concrete spatial and temporal systems. Media archaeology does not conduct this analysis on the level of macrocultural production, but rather on the level of micro-technical operativity. In contrast to Kulturwissenschaft, which starts from grand narratives (histories of culture, science or even knowledge) to arrive at concrete particulars, media archaeology operates on the assumption that technological media systems can be understood primarily and conclusively on the basis of their elementary, subsemantic procedures. This type of analysis, which understands material, symbolic and signal-based operators as escalations of classical cultural techniques, requires a theory of genuine media-temporal processes.” 3 Mark Hansen’s (2014) Feed-Forward elaborates a microtemporal analysis of contemporary 21st century media culture that resonates in parts strongly with my analysis here. 4 See also Lazzarato’s arguments concerning temporality of the video and its entanglement with capitalism. He elaborates on Bergson’s important point about time as delay, and reads that as an antidote to Virilio’s thesis that talks of real-time as disappearance of delay. Instead, following Bergson and to an extent also Lazzarato, I argue that real time is delay management. To quote Bergson: “I noticed, one fine day, that in all theory time serves no purpose, it does nothing. Yet, I said to myself, time is something. Therefore it acts. What can it do? Simple good sense responds: time is what prevents that everything be given at once. It delays, or rather it is delay. It must therefore be a kind of elaboration. Is it not then the vehicle of creation and choice? Does the existence of time not prove that there is indeterminacy in things? Isn’t time itself this indeterminacy?” (quoted in Lazzarato 2007, 94). 5 Even if, as Avital Ronell (1989) reminds us, telephone has never been simply about connecting people and the human contact; instead, it is embedded in a complex metaphysics of speaking and listening, of circuited schizophrenia. 6 Interestingly, Kleinrock (1961: 8) does not talk only of information but of commodities—such as water, people and indeed information—which demand a new sort of management, as they do not “flow steadily” in the network situations he is trying to address. Kleinrock’s PhD from 1961 was a pioneering work in terms of the queuing problems of data networks, and could be seen as one of the early works to deal with such data network problems that both transpose urban problems into computer systems (commodity flow, congestion, traffic management) and articulate the specific nature of the emerging, packet based communication that uses data channels more effectively. 7 This dynamics followed from dynamic allocation of bandwidth in contrast to pre-allocation, as Roberts outlined: whereas circuit switching was based on fixing a pre-allocated circuit for the duration of the communication, the dynamic mode of allocation sorts such mail packets at “immensely high speeds”. Roberts 1978/2001. 8 Ernst uses the term Eigenzeit of the machine, which broadly speaking refers to the “intrinsic temporality” that technological machines produce. To quote Ernst: “ Humanity perceives its own products as reality [. . .]. This other reality is the object of a mediaarchaeological aesthetics. The intrinsic perspective [Eigenblick] and the intrinsic temporality [Eigenzeit] of media technology succeed, in their difference from human perception, in telling humanity something about itself. Since the advent of the mechanical clock, the temporal specificities of western society in particular must be analysed as a function of such techniques” (Ernst, 2013b, 141).

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References Abbate, Janet. 1999. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Baran, Paul. 1964. On Distributed Communications. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks. RAND Memorandum 3420, August 1964. Barker, Timothy. 2017. “Television In and Out of Time.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 173–189. New York: Routledge. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. 2009. The Soul at Work. From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Bratton, Benjamin. 2015. The Stack. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bright, Roy D. and Michael A. Smith. 1975. “Experimental Packet Switching Project of the UK Post Office” NATO Advanced Study Institute on Computer Communication Networks, University of Sussex (1973), Proceedings (Leyden: Noordhoff, 1975) 435–444, online at http://rogerdmoore.ca/PS/EPSSB.html (accessed June 10, 2016). Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1). 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or, the Future is a Memory.” In Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 184–203. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cox, Geoff. 2015. “The Post-digital and the Problem of Temporality.” In Postdigital Aesthetics. Art Computation, and Design, eds. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 151–162. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Cubitt, Sean. 2013. “Global Media and Archaeologies of Network Technologies.” In Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, edited by Paul Graves-Brown and Rodney Harrison, 135–148. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Donald W. and Derek L.A. Barber. 1973. Communication Networks for Computers Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013a. Digital Memory and the Archive, edited by with an introduction Jussi Parikka Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013b. “From Media History to Zeitkritik.” Trans. Guido Schenkel. Theory, Culture & Society 30 (6), 132–146. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2016. Chronopoetics. The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technical Media. Trans. Anthony Enns. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Franklin, Seb. 2015. Control. Digitality as Cultural Logic. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Giessman, Sebastian. 2014. Die Verbundenheit der Dinge. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Netze und Netzwerke. Berlin: Kadmos. Hafner Katien and Matthew Lyon. 1998. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hands, Joss. 2011. @ is for Activism. Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in Digital Culture. London: Pluto. Hansen, Mark. 2014. Feed-Forward. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kleinrock, Leonard. 1961. Information Flow in Large Communication Nets. PhD thesis, 31 May 1961, MIT, Research Lab of Electronics, Cambridge MA. Krajewski, Markus. 2011. Paper Machines. About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929. Trans. Peter Krapp. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2007. “Machines to Crystallize Time: Bergson.” Theory, Culture & Society, 2007, Vol. 24(6), 93–122. Licklider, J.C.R. 1968/1990. “The Computer as a Communication Device” [1968], reprinted in In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider, 1915–1990. Palo Alto, CA: Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research.

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8 TELEVISION IN AND OUT OF TIME Timothy Barker

As the first step in such a transmission, the space variations in brightness from point to point in the view must be translated into time variations in an electrical current that can be sent over the channel of communication. (Frank Gray, J.W. Horton and R.C. Mathes, “The Production and Utilization of Television Signals”, 560) Media mediate change and are therefore the material form of time. (Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light, 257) The time of television (both on micro and macro scales) seems to be continually coming to an end. Throughout its history, television seems to have been constantly under attack and constantly at the end of its life, only to remerge in new forms. People have always thrown insults its way. Television was once famously referred to by Frank Lloyd Wright as chewing gum for the eyes. In my family, when I was an eager young viewer, it was referred to by my father as the ‘idiot box’. I would then later learn from theorists like Vilém Flusser, Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio that it was a medium that signalled nothing less than the end of history. After that, everyone was sure that the internet was, for better or worse, meant to finally eradicate what we once knew as the television, along with other forms of older media. The medium, however, in complete accord with the discontinuities of technical media histories, keeps changing and keeps returning. It seems a rather good example of what process philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead refer to as the folding into one another of a perpetual perishing and a perpetual becoming. The phenomenon of television’s seemingly eternal return is mirrored on very small scales inside the television. On the scale of electronics, like the ones that occupy both Wolfgang Ernst and Jussi Parikka in the preceding chapters, the

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television segments images in ways that are translatable as electronic values, calculated by the movement of electrons, and then reassembles these on screens. The time of these ‘micro-events’ is also continually coming to an end, as the image appears through the perpetual perishing of colour on pixels, which are replaced by new colours instantaneously. It is in this sense that Friedrich Kittler (2010) once said that television began as ‘radical cutting’ (209). It not only cut up movements in time, like film, but also, as set out above by Gray, Horton and Mathes, disintegrated planes into individual points in space. Perhaps Whitehead was right. How then does the television, as a medium predicated on notions of transmission rather than storage, fit into the discussions of memory and the audiovisual discourse? Most would say that it doesn’t: the medium transmits events, it does not store them and hence has nothing to do with the discourse on the concept of a so-called collective memory archived by external media devices. This position, however, as Amy Holdsworth has argued, this situating of television as a ‘bad memory object’ (Holdsworth 2011, 1), would be short sighted and would miss the fact that television in its contemporary forms continually repeats and in effect provides the dramatisation of the archive, making memory available and transmittable. This takes place symbolically, as Holdsworth has argued, but the memories that it represents are also given their character technically, and it is this function that needs to be explored further. YouTube, one of the forerunners of digital television, is in effect an archive of video material that is constantly reanimated by new links, new comments and new relationships between clips. It is the conditions for the transmission of YouTube content, those things that make the archive visible, that count when conducting a discourse analysis of the medium as much as the mnemotechnics of the database architecture or search function. ‘Although the traditional function of the archive is to document an event that took place at one time and in one place, the emphasis in the digital archive shifts to regeneration, (co-)produced by online users for their own needs’ (Ernst 2013, 95). The transmission of memory is often studied in terms of the way traditions and stories are passed on through generations, through monuments, collective rituals, textbooks and other pedagogical practices (Dessi 2008, 534). But there are also transmission events that occur on a technical level that give the archived data new characteristics. Our situation is one of living amongst overwhelming storehouses of information, which leads to what Ernst (2013) describes as an overwhelmingly archival culture. It is indeed important to analyse the architecture of these warehouses of data, but it is also important to undertake an exploration of the apparatuses that select and transmit artefacts from these databanks, that regenerate digital memories for user’s own needs. As such, in this chapter the television is analysed as a medium for transmission events, much like older oral stories, rituals and traditions, which mobilise the archive and make it that way discoverable. I try and explore in what follows the way that the conditions of transmission, not

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just the conditions of storage, are related to the transition of and conditions for memory. In this contribution to Digital Memory Studies, following the archaeological approach already set out by Ernst and Parikka, I begin with an exploration of the temporality produced at some of the very early moments of television, before it stabilised as a medium, and then show how the ‘radical cutting’ that defines television continues in the medium’s contemporary and multiple digital forms, with a focus particularly on distributed searchable video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. Somewhat inspired by one of Marshall McLuhan’s now famous four laws of media, the chapter emphasises the way that television’s new ‘channels’ (both in the non-technical sense of a digital TV channel and the technical sense of a channel for information) retrieves many of its experimental beginnings, particularly concerning its analytical organisation of events. This task is fundamentally media archaeological because it not only looks to the fossils of media technologies but also attempts what Ernst (2013) refers to as epistemological reverse engineering (55)—a taking apart of contemporary technologies to see in them traces of the past and then to see how their hardware conditions, as assemblages of polychronic technical solutions, have real effects on contemporary culture. This investigation of mediated time and the conditions of contemporaneity relates to the book’s focus on digital memory as it explores the way technology itself exposes its history of development at often unexpected moments, as though knots or folds in the timeline of technical developments. In the same vein, I also take on the media archaeological task of examining the way that television, as a system for forming the supportive infrastructure for the transmission of stored data (memory), organises, via technical means, nothing less than the temporality of History that is able to be actualised from these memories. The television, as one of the major elements in the audio-visual discourse networks, was once thought of as an inherently amnesiac medium (unlike film) because of the way images would vanish once they were transmitted. Film was able to be conceptualised as a photographic storage medium because its images were fixed on the carrier medium and able to be seen at any point in the communication channel, whether or not they were passed through the projector. Television images, on the other hand, disappeared into a black hole of circuits and wires once they were transmitted, only able to be seen once they arrived at the reception end of the chain (Kittler 2010, 316). After they were watched the television image would again disappear, unless they were recorded on video. The television did not itself act as an archive, as the cinema did, but instead provided the conditions for the archive (it reported the events that were to be archived and also provided the playback mechanism for the archive). It became the interface to the ‘fluid electromagnetic memories’ (Ernst 2013, 95), the volatile storage medium that now characterises twenty-first century media.

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Con-temporary media Television becomes the vehicle for the screening and repetition of the archive. And it is in this sense that it could be said to produce a temporality, a rhythm, to stored collective memory. Like Parikka and Martin Pogačar in both of their contributions to this volume, I am interested in exploring the relationship of memory to the conditions of contemporaneity, the present moment folded and knotted by media temporalities (what Parikka calls ‘the existence of the present’, what Pogačar conceptualises as the blockages of time), by looking into this function of the televison as the front-end to the archive. Etymologically speaking, the term con-temporary refers to a togetherness (con) with time (tempus). Now, however, as it becomes possible to define the present moment as the production site of multiple temporalities, what is the condition from which the experiences of con-temporariness takes form? How can one be with time in all its multi-timed rhythms? What are the types of memory, as past events folded into the present via the recursive micro-processes of computers, that are possible within this condition? Questions of time and temporality have been a major part of the discipline of television studies. Raymond Williams’ (1974) work most famously brought this into focus, where he told us to focus on the programming of diverse genres into a televisual ‘flow’. Major scholars such as Paddy Scannell, John Fiske, Mary Anne Doane, Stephen Heath, and Mimi White, focussing on the programming, production and delivery of television content, have also added field defining concepts to this discussion. Topics such as flow, liveness, the glance and more recently time shifting and mobile viewing, seem to characterise the television as a medium that gives viewers unique access to technically produced forms of temporality. For some cultural theorists as already mentioned, such as Stiegler, Flusser and Virilio, the television not only generates temporality but represents nothing less than a post-historical medium, which brings with it what might be seen as a cultural loss of history (McQuire 1998; Davis 2007), mainly due to the way its images disappear in the transmission channel and the screen image’s volatile, ephemeral nature. For these thinkers it is not so much the flow of television that is to be brought into focus but instead the mechanisms associated with programming time into repeated segments, which, according to these thinkers, amounted to an a-historical mediation of social reality. As Zielinski (1999) argues in his groundbreaking book Audiovisions, “television is nothing more than the reification of time as a service or a commodity” (235). Viewers did not engage with homogenous historical time-slots, as far as the television was concerned. Instead they dipped in and dipped out, helping themselves to the material provided by the industry for their consumption in frequent, small, portions, that broke up the other temporalities associated with home, school, college, and job (Zielinski 1999, 235). Instead of a flow, this bitty engagement with the medium represents, for Zielinski, a segmentation of time, or what

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McLuhan (1964) might call a mosaic (313), that acts as a further support structure for the mechanical compartmentalisation of time introduced around the beginning of the twentieth century, with Taylorism being the most acutely felt effect. The technical engineering of temporality has so far, with the obvious exception of Zielinski and Flusser, received relatively short shrift in the discussions of television and time, at least in English-speaking media studies. But a focus on the engineering developments that were to solve the problem of television is more in tune with what Sean Cubitt sets out as the topic for media philosophers of time—examining the material forms of time that are emergent in technical media culture. Television itself was not born from the desire to entertain, but television, and the mass media culture that was to follow, was founded on focussed research into theories of information and communication and the drive to solve engineering problems. Paul Nipkow, John Logie Baird, Harold Ives, Boris Zworykin, Alexander Bain and the other major names in television’s early development were not interested in new forms of mass entertainment. They were interested in solving engineering problems based on information transmission. It was the medium that interested them, not necessarily the content. For the Americans the television was to fulfil a role in telecommunication, offering an addition of the visual to telephonic communication. In the UK, Baird quite willingly relinquished control of programming to the BBC, a task that was otherwise causing him to lose both money and time that could otherwise be spent better developing the technical medium. In Germany, Nipkow, inventing the disk so fundamental to mechanical television, and in the Soviet Union, Léon Theramin, who was to revolutionise the Nipkow disk, were interested in questions of physics and optics rather than entertainment. Likewise in Japan, Kenjiro Takayanagi was intent on converting Baird’s developments into an all-electronic form in order to improve the negentropy of information, not by any artistic desire. Simply put, the television, its temporality, was built as a machine by inventors who solved long-running engineering problems not by producers of content per se. The inventors of the soon-to-be mass entertainment medium of the twentieth century had highly technical ambitions that had more to do with a mathematical theory of information transmission than dramatic performances. This ambition would feed into the ‘technical code’ (Feenberg 2002, 15–21) of the television, as a set of conditions under which technological processes run, and have real (though invisible) effects on the way content was produced. For actors to perform in front of drum cameras to be broadcast via experimental mechanical television, in ways that were quite different to the popular radio plays or theatre performances, they had to conform to the conditions of the medium and restrict their movements. The medium conditions produced the rhythms of the broadcast performances. As television again begins to destabalise as a medium, the old ways of doing things resurface and the television’s organisation of temporality begins again to become more obvious.

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The memory of a technology Time and indeed the brand of collective memory produced by television is very different from the time and collective memories presented in the cinema. This difference is not only experienced through the formal differences of the medium of cinema (fixed photographic inscription) and television (volatile electric signal), but also the cultural techniques of viewing. As Zielinski (1999) argues, in the cinema people pay a small amount to ostensibly ‘rent’ ‘film time’ or ‘temporal cine-space’ (187). However, with the coming of the television, viewers were able to, on a large scale, own, rather than rent, the mechanism for producing media events and regulating time. In this way, viewers began at these moments in media history to participate in what Zielinski calls the ‘audiovisual discourse’, which now takes on new significance, particularly with the advent of digital television. Most of my own memories of television are of a large wooden box that was the focus of what my family called the ‘TV room’ (what in the UK people refer to as a ‘front room’). My brother and I would sit for hours on the floor and watch, in low definition, short segments of usually cartoons, sometimes news, sometimes sport, depending on what were programmed on the limited channels that were offered to Sydney viewers in the 1970s and 1980s. More often than not there were problems with the aerial and problems with interference from other electronic devices in the house. We may have owned the mechanism for producing media events, as Zielinski argued, but our interaction with an audiovisual discourse was effected by a great deal of noise beyond our control. Sometimes, and this is what I remember most, there were problems with the picture scrolling up and down the screen. When I was young I used to love dialing in the v-hold (what I later found out meant vertical hold and related to the vertical synchronisation of the image) and seeing the picture slowly right itself. What I did not know then, was that at these moments I was essentially beginning to experiment with the temporality of television and the broadcasting of synchronisation. As was known at least since Baird’s work on experimental television, and probably earlier with Charles Redmond’s and Constantin Senelcq’s early inquires into the problem of television, if the transmitter and receiver were not in synch, the picture would be fractured horizontally into scan lines or appear to scroll over the screen. This moment of very limited interactivity with television was in effect a moment when the technology itself displayed its lack of precise temporality and returned to its experimental state, where users have to dial the apparatus in to synchronisation pulses broadcast along with the image, much in the same way Baird first experimentally solved the problem. As Ernst (2013) has argued previously, the moment of experimentation, of testing out a technology to see what it can do, ‘dialled in’ the much older inventions of Baird, Ives and others at the beginnings of television. We owned the box and had some ownership over the way it received signal, but this mechanism only operated by

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keeping in step with the rhythms transmitted from elsewhere, from something we did not own and based on inventions and solutions from multiple points in time. Folded in to the event of a small boy dialing in the v-hold was the much older engineering developments made by Baird, among others, but also a much older cultural technique of using mechanisms (such as clocks and bells) to synchronise routines (in monasteries, for instance) that McLuhan (1964, 157–168) draws our attention to in Understanding Media. A great deal of solutions to the problems of television are revealed in contemporary televisual moments, particularly relating to the foundations upon which the medium is based, namely, the segmentation of light into measurable signal, which was once transduced into modulations, now coded into digital signal. The idea of scanning an object in order to transduce it into signal and transmit it as electricity was first published in 1880 by Maurice LeBlanc published in La Lumière Electrique (Abramson 1987, 11). The first person to move this idea from a suggestion to an achievable task was Nipkow, who in 1884 patented a disk that had 24 holes in a spiral pattern spaced at regular intervals around the disk. Light from the scene to be scanned passed through the perforations in the disk onto a selenium cell. At the receiving end, another disk would rotate in synchronisation with the transmitting disk, which was illuminated by a light source. Although this device was never built by Nipkow, he showed effectively how using his disk mechanism an image could be systematically scanned and separated into its ‘elemental point’ (Abramson 1987, 13–15). But why mention all this technical detail in a chapter about memory and digital television? Simply put, one of the defining characteristics of digital media is its function as an analytical instrument, which segments signal into computer readable code. Digital memory then, on the micro-scales that Ernst describes, amounts to the archiving and transmission of these bits. Digital memory, on a more messo scale, shares a similar analytical character: Platforms such as YouTube archive segments of events and then perform analysis by uncovering patterns and connections between archived data based on its relational data management systems. When the problems of television were first solved, when the medium in effect produced the first all-electronic realisation of Claude Shannon’s mathematical model of information, an electronic medium was first produced that did something similar to what we now think of as digital media. Television acts as an analytical medium by segmenting the world in front of the transmitter into points of light that are strung together to make bands. As was written in the first edition of the first journal that was dedicated to the experimental medium, the essence of television is “that each spot is examined” (Anonymous 1928, 23). The television was a highly technical object in that it provided the first realisation of a fully electronic converter of images into electronic signal and electronic signal into images, which are mediated by a fully electronic transmission circuit. To achieve this, images would become “discrete quantities of

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data” (Kittler 2010, 208). “The symbolic thus now triumphed where once the imaginary had ruled over perception” (Kittler 2010, 209). Where Pogačar argues that it is the audiovisuals that define contemporary memory culture, I would argue that it is instead to the actual structures underneath the audiovisuals, the technical conditions for transmission, that we should look. Television acted as a pre-condition for digital culture because it gave to the mass public continual moments when they acted as receivers of discrete quantities of data that they would then reassemble, obliviously and technically, via an apparatus in their home. The digital, multi-temporal present has folded within it these moments of television history and the solutions to time-based engineering problems. The way that the ‘acoustic’ space of the digital (to use one of McLuhan’s favourite metaphors) organises memory, both technically and culturally, owes a great deal to the synchronisation and transduction of events first given electronic form by the television. Two of the major challenges for television engineers were the time-based problems of delay and synchronisation. Important work such as Max Diekman’s contribution to the Bild Telegraph along with Caselli’s pantelegraph demonstrated how images could be picked up and transmitted over distances, with the analytical logic of the telegraph system used to transmit images. But without a solution to the problem of the delay caused by the photosensitive cells, the devices were unable to capture movement and amounted to early variations of fax maxchines. Without an automatic synchronisation system, the devices had to be tuned by hand, which introduced imprecision. Baird’s now famous work with mechanical television would solve both of the time-based problems that stood in the way of television proper. Baird, by developing his light sensitive cell and including a signal sharpening circuit, which measured rate of change as well as intensity of light, was able to first solve the problem of delay that had plagued most other inventors and by including with the transmission of pictures an impulse of electricity that could be used to regulate the televisor’s Nipkow disk was able to solve the problem of synchronisation. What we have in these developments is the segmentation of the world as an image in order to measure light, assign values, transmit these and then reassemble the image at the other end of transmission. To do this, time was engineered in a way that ensured the apparatus in people’s home kept the same time and that, as much as possible, delay was overcome. These elements all return with the digital, which, now at very small scales, as both Ernst (2013) and Mark Hansen (2015) have very convincingly shown, produces temporality via the segmentation of signal. The reconstruction of an image at the receiving end of a television system is dependent on the reconstructed elements falling in exactly the right place at precisely the right time. A 1927 paper in the Bell Technical Journal by H.M. Stoller and E.R. Morton outlined the research conducted to find engineering solutions to the time-based problems associated with transmission. In order to

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get televisions around the country to operate at the same speed it was “necessary to employ unusual features of motor design and control circuits to secure the required results” (Stoller and Morton 1927, 604). Control was to be found in electronics, which were used to drive mechanical processes. A way needed to be found for the whirring motor to be held in precisely the right tempo for the image to appear correctly in the viewing window. After Baird’s use of signal-sharpening circuits and his transition from selenium to the thallium sulphide photoelectric cell as the light sensitive substance placed behind the spinning Nipkow disk, images could be transmitted in their liveness. But the problem of synchronisation persisted. How could you make sure that the Nipkow disk was spinning at the same speed at each end and that corresponding lights were illuminated at the correct time? If things went wrong, the image would be cut up or framed incorrectly. The solution came as the analytical medium was used to, as well as measuring light, measure time and regulate the speed of mechanical wheels. Short pulses were sent to the television to trigger a small toothed wheel that regulates the speed of motor that drives the Nipkow disk. Baird explains this in an article in Popular Science in 1932. After describing the black unilluminated strip at the top of the receiving image on his television system, Baird states, “it is this strip which forms three hundred and seventy five definite impulses a second, and it is these impulses which we impress upon the synchronizing device” (Baird in Waltz Jr. 1932, 85). The apparatus begins to produce the temporality for the playing out of content. The solution to the problems of synchronisation and delay that Baird offered were to become one of his greatest contributions to the measurement and production of time, first in experimental setting and later in contexts so everyday that the conditions of so-called real time and the synchronisation of networked machines are no longer seen as spectacular. Baird’s breakthrough, as with Dieckman’s, Ruhmer’s and LeBlanc’s work, among many others, was foundational to the medium and all of these engineering solutions had one thing in common: they were based on the analytical measurement of light, ‘analytical’ because it broke light into component parts in order that it could be measured and transmitted. As well as this, they were all based on the synchronisation of the transmitting and receiving present. At this point, in Flusser’s (2011, 31) words, the world in which they (the users of apparatuses) find themselves can no longer be counted and explained: it has disintegrated into particles—photons, quanta, electromagnetic particles. It has become intangible, inconceivable, incomprehensible, a mass that can be calculated. This mass must be computed to make the world tangible, conceivable, comprehensible again, and to make consciousness aware of itself once more. That is to say, the whirring particles around us and in us must be gathered onto surfaces; they must be envisioned.

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In this passage Flusser refers to the technical image in general, which he sees as coming into existence with the advent of photography. But the technical image achieves its full realisation only with the television, which breaks the image into mathematically organised segments (scan lines), rather than randomly scattered grains.1 At this point, the time media of television brought a radical fragmentation to the world that resulted in new rhythms and new modes of con-temporariness, as the image of an event in time reveals itself as not only able to be reduced to temporary moments but also temporary particles within moments. As Zielinski (1999, 30) states, all techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones are, in a specific sense, time media. Photography froze the time that passed by the camera into a two-dimensional still. Telegraphy shrank the time that was needed for information to bridge great distances to little more than an instant. Telephony complemented telegraphy with vocal exchanges in real-time. The phonograph and records rendered time permanently available in the form of sound recordings. The motion picturecamera presented the illusion of being able to see the bodies in motion that photography had captured as stills [. . .]. Electromechanical television combined all these concepts in a new medium, and electronic television went one step further. In both Flusser’s and Zielinski’s argument the technical operation of the analytical medium, breaking images into particles that can then be rearranged, plays out not only on very small scales but is echoed as it is scaled up. The pixel, the particle, the bit have emerged as a cultural artefact of our time, with which digital memories are written. They are like the rituals and monuments that once transmitted memory over time, throughout culture, just as the television strings points of light into bands. To paraphrase Flusser, all events are nowadays not only aimed at television screens but also computer screens, tablets and mobile phones, in order to be translated into a state of things. “In this way, however, every action simultaneously loses its historical character and turns itself into a magical ritual and an endlessly repeatable movement” (Flusser 2000, 19–20). The television image, following Flusser, exists both in and out of time. On a technical level, the event, once transduced into a value, is able to be represented as a string of time-discrete bits of information. The time of national and international disasters documented, circulated and repeated like 9/11, the tragedies in Paris, the London bombings or the Japanese Tsunami are uncanny and upsetting. In all these cases, technical images place events in time as either citizen journalists film with their phones or reporters leave the studio to go out ‘on location’ in ‘real time’ to document and archive signal from the world. Fulfilling the function once reserved for stories, rituals and monuments, events are translated into scenes, into a state of

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things. But these technical images ultimately produce a cultural experience of being out of time, as the signal originally recorded is continuously disoriented from ‘real time’, repeated, remixed and rearranged. As will be discussed in what follows, a time of the aftermath is created by these technical images, which, via a framing of the world based on their analytical function, give form to what Martin Heidegger once referred to as a ‘world picture’, evoking the experience of being in the present in multiple types of history, in a place of multiple conflicting memories. The world, according to Heidegger, becomes picture, becomes enframed, through its technical measurement and dissolution. Heidegger’s original formulation of being-in-the-world is replaced by an attempt at being with multiple presents simultaneously.

Fractures: Digital Television There are many examples that could be used to demonstrate the memory culture facilitated by digital television when it fulfils the role of analytical media. One that seems particularly appropriate is the YouTube footage that circulated in 2011 of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi. This is due to its historical significance, but also because of the way it—the video, its exhibition online and its broadcast as citizen journalism on almost all news stations that reported the events—represents an outside of history via a particular measuring and analytics of the event. The bloodied body, stripped and dragged through the streets, was symbolic for the cohesion of rebel fighters. The act of photographing the events, uploading them and circulating them over the internet was an act of symbolic violence but also an act that highlighted the temporalities with which real-world events are mediated via citizen journalism and non-centralised distribution platforms. The images of Gaddafi, not simply footage of retribution, are, as pointed out by Johanna Sumiala ostensibly an image of sacrifice (Sumiala 2013, 34), offering the same level of symbolic value as the ritualistic human sacrifice to gods. Unlike previous versions of sacrificial rituals, however, these symbolic practices take place in a distributed multi-temporal space, synchronised by digital media. Much older stories of the ancient custom of sacrifice detail rituals at specific places: the Aztecs assembled sacrifices at the Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, Canaanites sacrificed children at Tophet, the Incas sacrificed humans en masse at great festivals. To come together as a community, citizens assembled to collectively participate in witnessing a sacrifice as an offering to a god that will sustain their way of life. These events are folded into the footage of the killing, the time line of events knotted, folded back on itself, now available to view on YouTube. A new temporality is given to an old practice: sacrifices are now looped in time. A con-temporary global community comes at different times and for varying lengths of time and witnesses these events, often compartmentalised from their Historical pre-conditions. Like the early television experiments, the events synchronise viewers in to a particular moment in time. Once I used the v-hold

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on my old television to make sure I was synchronised with the temporality of pulses broadcast along with images. Now, the act of accessing online content, reading the comments and following links, assures me that I am in step with the temporality of contemporary reality, which has taken on the acoustic character of depth, rather than the optical character of a line. The images, like the pulses of electricity first devised by Baird, occupy a digital temporality—both in the sense of being presented online and also in the more metaphoric sense of representing a compartmentalised digit in time—which repeats their significance across the globe temporarily. Once stories, rites and rituals synchronised individuals into the temporality of a culture. Now as McLuhan (1964, 164) argues, “synchronization is no longer sequential. By electric tapes, synchronisation of any number of different acts can be simultaneous. Thus the mechanical principle of analysis in series has come to an end.” Events are now analytical in relational, rather than sequential, systems. In the Gaddafi example, viewers are synchronised with neither a specific time nor a specific space, but rather a multi-temporal collective of viewers, coming from different times and places. This is how the events of history and their aftermath are measured. As with all ‘space-biased media’, following their formulation by Harold Adam Innis, the public’s attention toward such events is limited. The events cover space via computer networks, but fail to persist in time. It is true that the events are stored in what we might term a digital memory, archived on servers. However, the footage at some point loses its place in the public imaginary as it is replaced by a new meme. The sheer volume of data stored on the server and its architecture ensures that only users aware of the search terms or those that search for similar material are able to excavate this media event. More importantly, the media event of the sacrifice of Gaddafi is isolated from a historical narrative of events. Via its measurement and storage, it has become a new, recontextualised media event, whose significance is built via the links it forms with other footage, such as the footage of Barack Obama supporting the revolutionary activities of the Libyan people (Sumiala 2013, 35). The process of tagging videos and the software system that forms links between the tags makes the experience of watching the killing of Gaddafi distinct from older forms of journalism. Depending on the platform, it is surrounded by other—and for the computer, related— suggestions for future viewing such as a video documenting the Life and Death of CIA asset Sadam Hussein, an interview with Gaddafi, a video titled The Women of Gaddafi, articulating these events in a multi-temporal, and sometimes bizarre, measured present of the aftermath. These relationships give character to the ritualistic images of torture, killing and sacrifice. The complexity of the local event is replaced by the multi-temporality of the supposedly global. The footage of the murder of Gaddafi is a particularly clear example of digital temporality for a number of reasons, largely due to the way the computer and the mobile phone footage define the event and its relationships to other events. The footage captured by a single mobile phone camera has its own rhythms.

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Gaddafi’s face is only on screen for short moments in time, the majority of the footage consists of flashing colours, blurred images and sounds of gunfire, as the camera operator jostles in the crowd. Because of this, the footage has a distinct tempo, cutting between shots of Gaddafi bleeding, being taken around the town, and rapid movement as the camera operator circles the subject, bumping through the crowd to find the best view. In the footage that I accessed on YouTube there is also a looping element, as the footage shows a repeated section of the cameraman moving past a truck to locate Gaddafi held by several men on the ground. And then there are the comments under the video posting, which reveal the ideologies and histories that the various posters operate within; some oppose the killing with vitriol, whilst others argue for its justification. When watching the video, all these temporalities are drawn together, temporarily combined, in the present. This example of con-temporary media, using tags and assembling conversation strands, segments information so that it can be stringed together, explored and re-arranged. In this instance YouTube provides a way to analyse an event by presenting it within a context built via software programming and hardware design, from the way the camera as a hand-held mobile apparatus records the event to the way it links with other videos and comments that are assembled to suggest further viewing and public opinion. The footage of Gaddafi retrieves television’s experimental beginnings mostly through its production of the conditions of contemporaneity as distinctly segmented, synchronised and repeating. In addition to the programming of daily and weekly broadcast represented by analogue TV, like the ones I remember watching, there is also a structuring of television time, as also mentioned above, that occurs on much smaller scales and is more embedded in the medium as a technology. The process of transduction and the drive to solve the problems with synchronisation and delays were at the centre of the engineering developments that have come to define contemporary television and the temporality that it produces. The engineering developments aimed at solving this problem, which underpin television’s mediation of time, begin to illustrate the accounts given to us by important cultural theorists of time such as Terry Smith (2011) and Boris Groys (2009). The conditions of contemporaneity, referred to by Smith and Groys, a particular way of being both in and out of time, has been supported and scaled up over the last century by the engineering of time in the television’s audiovisual discourse systems. According to Groys the experience of history for most of the population these days involves an experience of presence in the present. A being-with-time involves a being-with the aftermath of history, the aftermath of the stories of modernity, which have been compartmentalised and now stored in warehouses of data. Like the YouTube footage, events are sucked into archives rather than projected into the future. Flow is replaced by analysis, an intense focus on the present. At the level of programming, the television has been very effective at segmenting the day into moments. Now platforms such as YouTube, hard-disk recorders

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and other on-demand services fulfil this role in new ways by segmenting the day into multi-temporal moments. In a similar way to the fragmentation of industrial life begun in the late eighteenth century, the time-motion studies introduced by Taylor and supported by the apparatus of chronophotography, television mechanically segments the day on both macro and micro scales. The time produced in order to contextualise the production of capital structured the day around a segment of work time. All other activities had to take place outside this demarcated section of time. In addition, Taylor’s time-motion studies segmented time on a much smaller scale, as workers’ very small movements were recorded, stored and analysed and the work day became able to be measured in terms of gestures, which were in that way able to be made more efficient. Television rehearses a similar segmentation of time. It segments the duration of the day, as shown above, into viewing ‘moments’ and also segments events at a much smaller scale into transmittable portions of light. This—the capacity for producing previously unfelt forms of temporality through transmission—is what gives television a uniqueness as a time-based medium and this is something that engineers, inventors, actors and producers have continually experimented with. When it was first stabilised in a mechanical form, publicly demonstrated by Baird at Selfridges in London, television’s capacity for instantaneous transmission of images was emphasised and the new relations that it established between vision, time and space. As detailed by Selfridge himself, under the pen name of Callisthenes (1925), ‘television is to light what telephony is to sound—it means the instantaneous transmission of a picture, so that the observer at the receiving end can see, to all intents and purposes, what is a cinematographic view of what is happening at the ‘sending’ end” [emphasis in original] (14). Now, the archive of YouTube, a medium for the production of memory, what Elodie Roy (2016, 153) formulates as a massive, disorder archive, offers viewers a connection to a different type of instantaneity—which, as with the example of Gaddafi, exemplifies the production of the present as a multiply timed present. The television was once predicated on the idea of liveness and a certain amnesia due to its operation as a non-storage medium (apart from the important camera invented by Zworykin which stores light in pixels for fractions of a second). Digital television is now predicated on the idea of storing liveness, archiving the temporary, and synchronising a global community of viewers to the temporary point in time and its aftermath. If the phonetic alphabet, as McLuhan famously argued, predisposed lineal thought and the idea of History as a progression, then the acoustic space of YouTube may signal a shift in this lineal engagement with events by predisposing viewers to a life in the aftermath of the temporary. To paraphrase Flusser, events no longer roll towards the future, but are now sucked in to YouTube, synchronised in acoustic space and made to repeat. “What we call ‘history’ is the way in which conditions can be recognised in linear texts” (Flusser 2011, 58). The apparatus of print projects itself onto the events of the world and thus projects its own linear structure of particular

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situations. It imposes a historical structure onto memory. Each piece of data, each memory, each separate event of History, when written down, represented on a line, is a unique occurrence that need not repeat itself. Digital television now carries out a similar operation with completely different results. The program of what Flusser calls the ‘technical image’ projects itself onto situations and turns events into ‘infinitely repeatable projections’ (Flusser 2011, 58). And it is within these repeatable projections, as events are turned into scenes that continue to occur on screens, which produce a condition of the aftermath. History becomes what can be collected, stored and searched through.

Conclusion In the face of distressing media events such as the one discussed above, what does it mean to be contemporary? In the case of the YouTube killing of Gaddafi this moment was thick with multiple temporalities, involving the present ‘fact’ of the killing, the comments under the video, arranged on a timeline that documents the video’s existence as temporal artefact, the archaic sacrificial rituals that it brings into the present moment and the other videos to which it links. Not just an element in a larger history of events, this temporary moment nests within it a number of events, from the recent to the archaic. To be contemporary then, in the face of this video, is to occupy a condition where the temporary moment of the present nests within itself numerous temporalities that are produced by material technology, from the phone that uploaded the footage, to the distribution channels that gave the footage its significance as a sacrificial ritual and the algorithms that create links between it and other videos. Rather than seeing the event chronologically, as a point in a series, the time of the present is topological. It is what Serres (1995, 60) refers to as ‘polychronic’ and reveals a time that is gathered together from multiple pleats into points. No longer a line, time is now experienced as points, pixels, punctuation, a full stop. The cinema first dissolved time into frames. The introduction of the television then went further and introduces a ‘radical cutting’, not only separating movements in time but “disintegrating connections or shapes into individual points in space” (Kittler 2010, 209). The computer then took this pixilation of events, as the mathematic organisation of particle elements, one step further. Not simply technical, these techniques seem now to be rehearsed on a phenomenological level as people of all ages, rather than being invested in a flow, learn to rapidly shift between tasks, with attention packeted into smaller and smaller parcels. In a talk at Transmedial in Berlin, Zielinski described this experience perfectly as melancholy, as being ‘too much in time’. I would add to this that melancholy, a chronic (time-based) ailment, is produced by the continual cutting up of time so much so that there is no alternative but to be overwhelmed by the measurement of the present.

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The cinema preserved its fragemented images on a carrier medium. Anyone could hold the film up to the light and see photographic images. It preserved events in a kind of photographic memory. Television images on the other hand disappear in the transmission chain. They cut up images in time, like film, and also in space. This ‘radical cutting’ is then transmitted as current, which, as soon as it is viewed, retrieved and made visible once more from the black holes of wires and circuits, vanishes again from the communication chain. The television does not act in the way film does as an external storage medium, as a way of preserving events in a collective photographic memory, with events preserved as they once appeared. It instead functions as the way both live and stored events are transmitted and as such its technical function as a medium that produces a ‘radical cutting’ fulfils the same role that other media such as oral stories, rituals and traditions used to in transmitting memory through culture. Memories, such as the horrific footage on YouTube, are characterised as they are passed on by a ‘radical cutting’ and the acoustic, multi-temporal space, provided by the moire pattern on the screen. Funding acknowledgment: This research was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Note 1 I am grateful to Wolfgang Ernst for pointing this out to me during a conversation that we had about pixels.

References Abramson, Albert. 1987. The History of Television, 1880–1941. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company. Anonymous. 1928. ‘Technical Notes.’ In Television: A Monthly Magazine Vol 1, March. Callisthenes. 1925. ‘Television.’ Times [London, England] March 24. Cubitt, Sean. 2014. The Practice of Light. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Davis, Wendy. 2007. ‘Television’s Liveness: A Lesson from the 1920s.’ Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 4(2): 36–51 Dessí, Roberta. 2008. ‘Collective Memory, Cultural Transmission, and Investments’. The American Economic Review 98 (1). American Economic Association, 534–560. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2017. ‘Tempor[e]alities and Archive—Textures of Media Connected Memory.’ In Digital Memory Studies edited by Andrew Hoskins, 85–109. New York: Routledge Feenberg, Andrew. 2002. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford: Oxfod University Press. Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Translated by Anthony Matthews. London: Reaktion Books.

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Flusser, Vilém. 2011. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gray, Frank, Horton, J.W., and Mathes, R.C. 1930. ‘The Production and Utilization of Television Signals’. The Bell Systems Technical Journal 6(4): 560–603. Groys, Boris. 2009. Comrades of Time, e-flux 11. Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/comrades-of-time/. Hansen, Mark B.N. 2015. Feedforward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holdsworth, Amy. 2011. Television, Memory and the Archive. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 2010. Optical Media. Translated by Anthony Enns. Cambridge, UK: Polity. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Sphere Books. McQuire, Scott. 1998. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, London: Sage. Parikka, Jussi. 2017. ‘Non-Human Media Time: Microtemporal Engineering of Network Culture and Politics.’ In Digital Memory Studies edited by Andrew Hoskins, 156–172. New York: Routledge. Pogačar, Martin. 2017. Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures. In Digital Memory Studies edited by Andrew Hoskins, 27–47. New York: Routledge. Roy, Elodie A. 2016. Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Grove. London and New York: Routledge. Serres, Michel with Latour, Bruno. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Serres, Michel. 2015. Rome. Translated by Randolph Burks. London: Bloomsbury Smith, Terry. 2011. Contemporaneity in the History of Art: A Clark Workshop 2009, Summaries of Papers and Notes on Discussions. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 1. Available at: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/17595/1/32-97-10-PB.pdf. Stoller, H. M. and Morton, E. R. 1927. ‘Synchronization of Television.’ Bell System Technical Journal 6: 604–615. Sumiala, Johanna. 2013. Media and Ritual: Death, Community, and Everyday Life, Oxon: Routledge. Waltz Jr, George H. 1932. ‘Television Scanning and Synchronization by the Baird System.’ Popular Science Monthly. February, 84–85. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Oxon: Routledge. Zielinski, Siegfried. 1999. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Translated by Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

9 MEMORY IN TECHNOSCIENCE Biomedia and the wettability of mnemonic relations Matthew Allen

Introduction It is both a hope and duty for digital memory studies to disrupt entrenched views on media and memory. Yet the coupling of “digital” and “memory” to designate an emerging and heterogeneous research agenda is already haunted by what Jacques Derrida called a ‘visor effect’,1 the apparition of an inheritance that obliges how an agenda is to be stated and enacted. The inheritance referred to in our context is that of a paradigmatic vista, common to both media studies and memory studies, that holds human dramas of symbolic communication at the center of its gaze. This visor effect casts the digital memory coupling with a shallow coherence that can be stated accordingly: digital memory studies means studying remembering in digitally mediated contexts. The problem with this coherence is that it derives, on both sides, from narrow and ill-defined assumptions about media and memory that fail to recognize that ‘[d]igital space is no longer an anthropological prosthesis to man but is rather a genuinely medially generated form’ (Ernst 2012, 134). Pursuing an agenda for digital memory studies means addressing more-thanhuman remembering situated by digital spaces. To this end, digital memory studies must eschew any visor effect by inheriting and inventing definitions of media and memory that expand our outlook onto their social enfolding. Brown and Reavey, for instance, outline an ‘expanded view on memory’ that ‘treats remembering as an activity distributed between persons, spaces and “things”’ (2015, 59). Such an expanded view anticipates that memory implies a ‘functional mixture of people and things in a particular material environment, rather than isolated individuals’ (ibid., 41). These authors invite an approach to memory that decenters the human rememberer to explore how environments as well as people

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invoke the past. This shares some concurrence with a conceptual tradition in media studies that frames communication technologies in ecological terms. Hoskins, drawing on Neil Postman’s original writing on ecology, defines media ecology as ‘the idea that media technologies can be understood and studied like organic life-forms, as existing in a complex set of interrelationships within a specific balanced environment’ (2016, 14). The prospect of this view for digital memory studies lies in explaining how technologies enter and disrupt the environments that Brown and Reavey consider to be vital for remembering. In this regard the ecological framing of media marks an important, oftentimes implicit, part of the intellectual heritage of recent materialist conceptions of media ontologies (Lash 2007; Kittler 2016), their affects (Parikka 2013; Pogačar 2016; Hansen 2006) and the ensuing reconfiguration of power relations (Couldry 2013; Manovich 2013; Galloway & Thacker 2007). In particular, such developments have drawn focus to the profound changes arising in social relations from a ‘complex underweave of power at play in the digital mundane’ (Beer 2009, 999). For instance, by studying memory using a media ecology perspective, Schwarz holds that ‘[d]igitization changed the status of our relations with memory objects in a way that renders the ownership metaphor inadequate’ (2014, 16). A concern for how the digital mundane enacts broader transformations is central to the following discussion; in Fuller’s media ecology this particular interest is couched in terms of “mutational fields”: The effect of the development of one technology is occasionally to create a mutational field between two discrete techniques, allowing them to come together in various ways until one or more of their conjunctive compositions is taken up by a scale, drive, mode of enunciation, or by productive or repressive compositional dynamics (2005, 42). Accordingly studying digital memory from an ecological perspective jars mainstream priorities in media studies, as Merrin puts it, an ‘ecological approach is largely incompatible with the mainstream discipline’ because it departs from ‘its specialised study of communication, of particular media forms or of isolated elements in a linear model’ (2014, 47). Media ecology does not prioritize investigating symbolic communication. This opens digital memory studies to adopt methodologies and explore media forms that fall outside the field’s conventional logocentric outlook especially, as Merrin highlights, media ecology presents ‘benefits over the traditional approach to media analysis’ because ‘it explores the relationship between biological and technological life’ (ibid., 48). Thacker’s (2004) research on “biomedia” provides a thoroughgoing investigation of precisely this relationship. By considering the computational and cultural layers that saturate a series of biocomputing practices, Thacker observed ‘novel configurations of biologies and technologies that take us beyond the familiar tropes of technology-as-tool or the human-machine interface’ (ibid.,

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6); importantly, to go beyond these tropes demands reconsidering what counts as “digital” and “biological”: The biological and the digital domains are no longer rendered ontologically distinct, but instead are seen to inhere in each other; the biological “informs” the digital, just as the digital “corporealizes” the biological. (ibid., 7) This ontological conception of the biological and digital domains as mutually woven underpins this study of mutational fields in mnemonic relations arising from novel configurations of bios and techne. Such configurations can be framed in light of a recent “connective turn” (Hoskins 2011), acknowledging the likelihood that emergent mutational fields are woven by extending connectivities between biotic and mediatic systems. Van Dijck’s observation that increasingly ‘we remember in terms of connectivity’ (2007, 9) has been reinforced by studies that show how connective media have transformed memory through global digital channels (Reading 2016), content generation (Garde-Hansen 2011) and consumerism (Sturken 2008). A key dynamic emerging in this area is the effects of connective media on temporalities. For example, in a study of the everyday uses of smartphones, Hand states ‘in reference to the connective turn, in contrast to modern archives of collective memory, many personal digital traces are being reworked in the present—both the content and the context—in anticipation of future visibility’ (2016, p.284). Mnemonic relations after the connective turn are increasingly stated in terms of post-scarcity culture (Hoskins 2011) and sharing (Jose van Dijck 2011). It is unclear how pervasive these principles may be for certain communities of practice. For instance, mnemonic relations in scientific cultures have been defined by regimes of classification that enact forgetting (Bowker 2008), parasitism (Mazzucato 2015) and enclosures (Papadopoulos 2015). And so this chapter examines the mutational fields of mnemonic relations enacted by the digital mundane in an understudied domain, namely the body as mediated in technoscience. The term “technoscience” has gained broad use in recognition that science and technology are “co-constituted” and “hybrid” (Latour 1987; Haraway 2013; cf. Clarke et al. 2009, 42). Latour suggested that the term highlights how the activities valued in society as ‘science and technology’ are but a subset of technoscience comprising ‘all the elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they seem’ (1987, 174). There is a growing feminist literature, which departs critically from Latour’s account of technoscience, associated with the work of Donna Haraway, Isabel Stengers, Karen Barad and others. A growing concern within this literature is to politicize how technoscience produces hybrids that ‘not only collapses the distinction between technology and science, but also between human and nonhuman, nature and society, factual and artefactual, subjects and objects’ (Michael 2006, 31). For

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instance, in a seminal text, Haraway identified the political ambiguity arising from our technoscientific worlds in which ‘we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others’ (Haraway 2013, 177–178). This chapter explores how, in contexts of technoscience, memory vacillates between biotic systems and communication devices. Adopting a media ecology perspective, I identify how the entry of media techniques and diverse mediatic forms into technoscientific worlds effect mutational fields in mnemonic relations. The discussion receives its empirical grounding through what might be loosely termed a media archaeological method insofar as the analysis examines a media technique called electrowetting in order to ‘read media history and media theory hand in hand . . . to investigate ruptures and continuities, intermedial relations and parallel histories’ (Parikka 2013, 10). Parikka’s use of the term “intermedial” in stating the media archaeological agenda registers a rich tradition of exploring intermedia (Higgins 2001), with increasing specificity particularly within literary studies (Rajewsky 2005) and growing attention in memory studies (Crownshaw 2009, 69; Erll 2016, 122). In the broadest terms, intermediality reflects the reconfiguration of a cultural text from one medium to another, for instance when a Shakespearean text is adapted to serve the mise en scène of a computer game (Mancewicz 2014). The orientation to intermediality that underpins this study is largely influenced by van Dijck’s (2005) cultural analysis of medical imaging. Van Dijck demonstrated how the desire to render the body transparent with medical technologies mobilizes bodily interiorities between different media with varying cultural consequences; the author explains: Despite switching between levels of representation, we tend to forget about the boundaries that we (tres)pass: the television screen, the walls of the studio, the operating theatre, and the patient’s skin. Operating room and television studio are no longer separate spheres, but merge on the screen in our living room. In the cultural deployment of clinical endoscopy, the surgeon becomes a crew leader, the television camera a vehicle for inspection, and the patient a corporeal universe. The onceprivate inner body has been transformed into a public sightseeing space’ (ibid.,73). Through clinical endoscopy a corporeal universe becomes the mise en scène to a whole series of intermedial relations—from the drama of the operating theatre to the screens in our living rooms—enacting mutational fields in the nature of surgical craftwork and the forgetting of medial boundaries. Studying intermediality in technoscience opens the discussion to consider memory in biotic settings including cells, infection and epigenetics as well as digital biochips. Following memory through these contexts poses the problem of intermedial relations of differing scale, framed here by Hoskins’ assertion that

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digital media drive ‘an ontological shift in what memory is and what memory does’ that gives ‘remembering new scale’ (2016, 15) and resonating with Barker’s (this volume) scalar analysis of digital televisual practices. To help navigate issues of scale I consult Pickering and Keightley’s (2016) notion of “interscalarity” but caution, echoing Merrin’s remarks cited above, against inheriting their work as a linear model of mnemonic transmission. The chapter closes with a review of different conceptions of “translation” that hone our vocabulary for describing nonlinear scalar dynamics when attending the intermediality of memory in technoscience. Ultimately I argue that this vocabulary deepens the departure from the anthropic-logocentric view on media and enhances our capacities for explaining how emerging technologies reconfigure memory through the co-constitutive and hybrid relationship between bios and techne.

Surfaces It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labor are recorded, and the products distributed. (Deleuze & Guattari 2004a, 155) Wetting is the technical term given to the intermolecular behavior of liquids as they interface with surfaces. High energy surfaces, such as glass, afford liquids to spread whereas low energy (hydrophobic) surfaces, such as polytetrafluoroethylene (commonly Teflon), bound spreading so that liquids form spherical beads that rest at a contact angle (think of the individual droplets visible on a waterproof coat). Surfaces afford varying degrees of wettability including totalwetting, partial-wetting and non-wetting. Spread or rest, liquid mobilities are bound up with the affordances of surfaces. Studying and harnessing these affordances has furnished technoscience with new possibilities, for example a steel mesh treated with a hydrophobic solvent coating can be put to work recovering oil in the wake of a mass spillage (Deng et al. 2013); this is possible because the non-wetting surface serves a filter, the oil spreads gaining one-way entry into the microporous mesh meanwhile the water rests ceding the boundary crossing. The theatre of wettability is not confined to what Maurice Halbwachs (1992, 161) called the ‘zone of technical activity’ (cf. Middleton & Brown 2005, 168); surfaces are pervasive throughout our mediated cultures.2 In 1908 Gabriel Lippmann was awarded a Nobel prize for passing an electromagnetic standing wave, in the form of an incident light, through a high energy surface, a glass plate coated with a transparent emulsion interfacing with a dielectric liquid, mercury. The diffracted traces of liquid “bled” into the glass plate to pioneer color photography, a technology that in turn culturally diffracted widespread cosmologies of memory and the soul.3 Lippmann’s technoscience apparatus marked an early mediatic use of a procedure now commonly called electrowetting,4 a

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microfluidic process of affecting wetting behavior by applying electromagnetic fields. In turn electrowetting ushered color photography into a media ecology that transformed mnemonic and corporeal relations: On the three fronts of war, disease, and criminality—the major lines of combat of every invasion by media—serial photography entered into everyday life in order to bring about new bodies. (Kittler 1999, 128) Digital microfluidics continue to bring about new bodies on these fronts, gaining application in harvesting bioenergy (Krupenkin & Taylor 2011), clinical diagnostics (Pollack et al. 2011) and detecting latent fingerprints at crime scenes (Mink et al. 2013). Moreover emerging capabilities in electrowetting have contributed to an immense miniaturization of technoscience material cultures, for example via the development of nanotechnologies such as the so called “labon-a-chip” (LOC) devices (Kant & Burns 2016). These devices facilitate shrinking individual laboratory processes, such as screening blood for infection, to a “workbench” console no bigger than a credit card.5 Typically LOC devices contain electrodes that affect the movement of sample droplets through microchannels with varying wettabilities into reservoirs of chemical reagents, likened to a game of “cellular pinball” (Murakami et al. 2015) in which the dramas of attraction and repulsion, spread and rest, betray the molecular properties of sample matter to digital microscopes. Electrowetting techniques empirically dovetail recent conceptual work on digital media (Sha 2013) and memory (Brown 2012) that both draw on the mathematical principles of topology to explore more-than-human lifeworlds. Briefly, topology concerns the differentiation and continuity of spatial relations that involve functions (connecting, bending and stretching but not cutting or tearing) that cannot straightforwardly be mapped to a Cartesian coordinate system; it is in these functions that analogue and digital wetting techniques differ: There is one notable exception to the analogy between conventional wetting and electrowetting with patterned substrates: changes of the topology of the liquid are affected by long range electrostatic attraction or repulsion at the contact line. For instance, the coalescence of neighbouring droplets can be suppressed by electrostatic repulsion. (Mugele & Baret 2005, 726) The microfluidic adventures of an electrowetting droplet cannot be sufficiently conceived in Euclidean space; the digital present of the droplet unfolds in a more-than-ordinate world, that is to say a lifeworld of n-dimensions. In practical terms this raises questions of scale and problem-posing. If the problem is a mass oil spill, then it seems sensible to approach matter as differentiated locally between discrete coordinates: is the oil inside or outside the boundary of the mesh?

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The boundaries involved in screening blood for infections are different, they are not locally discrete. Infection is not, as is commonly perceived, objectively in the blood but emerges across continua of transformations taking place inbetween molecular relations; infection exists in media res.6 So it is insensible to ask: where is the infection? Instead a new Thalean mediation is needed, one that is capable of tracing not only the shadow of geometric distributions but also their diachronic relational potentialities; only then can the clinician ask: what possible futures does this blood afford to a body? The coherence of a diagnosis depends then upon the mediation of qualities yet to actualize. By electrowetting a blood sample, a clinician can quicken or suppress the spread or rest of individual droplets interfacing with surfaces of differing wettabilities that channel the sample material into reagent reservoirs; the LOC console mediates the relational pathways enacted in a turn of cellular pinball and the clinician reaches a diagnosis: the cell hosts relations that are consistent with infection. . . this blood is infected. Much of this may seem contrary to our everyday experiences of space and objects in space. We are lured to sense in every thing its discrete locality and interiority.7 This can be helpful when problems are posable at certain scales, such as oil spills. At the molecular scale, however, we observe even individual droplets are themselves continua of potentialities. This point destabilizes the ontological distinction between droplet and surface; in its topology, the droplet is a surface. What matters for miniaturization in technoscience is less a concern for how to locate boundaries between surfaces than knowing how the interface between boundaries affects surfaces to differentiate themselves. The question of locating boundaries can be mapped in Euclidian space, but the latter task requires empirically grappling with unfolding qualitative variances and invariances from continua of potentialities. This necessarily involves spatial relations that are n-dimensional: Thus if the surface of the sphere is studied as a space in itself, it has its own geometry, and even if the familiar latitude and longitude are used as the coordinates of points, the geometry of that surface is not Euclidian. (Morris Kline, cited in DeLanda 2013, 40) We often think of surfaces as depthless boundaries to interiority, but recognizing surfaces as spaces suggests that interiority, much like the electrowetting droplet, continuously spreads or rests in media res.8 It is important to state, these are not the caprices of an abstract system; these are the extracorporeal adventures, mediated by technoscience, of the bloody viscera that make us up. This invites a radical proposition: in topological terms, we are surfaces, each of us a multiplicity of interfacing surfaces, and what matters for our understanding of the confluence of digital media and memory is scale and problem-posing. For instance, miniaturization in the laboratory works because LOC devices are designed to

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host and “remember” variances and invariances between surfaces in the course of their effervescent comingling under electromagnetic conditions or, put differently, LOCs mediate differentiation and consistency in times of transformation.9 When my blood is screened in this way, surface continua that I otherwise prefer (mistakenly) to believe are bounded by the surface of my skin participate in the relational unfolding of potentialities, thus blood and technoscience device become “machinic phylum”10 and the drama of its surfaces becomes a potential memory hostage to a play of cellular pinball; I am no more inside the device than it inside me.

Scales The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise. (Haraway 2013, 153) Electrowetting is a media archaeology parable for digital memory studies and an operative concept for following media and memory through technoscience. Tracing the junctures of these adventures will allow us to collect issues that memory studies must now engage with. But this lacks context without an adequate framework to situate the intersections of digital media and memory, that is to say our discussion deserves a way of engaging with ‘the scalar dynamics of remembering in modernity’ (Pickering & Keightley 2016, 39). This agenda was recently set by Pickering and Keightley with their call for a methodological sensibility to “interscalarity” in studying media and memory. The authors highlight the lack of attention given to methodology in memory studies and challenge the field ‘to develop a closer-in, empirically demonstrated understanding of how individual and collective memory are interrelated as well as distinguished from each other’ (ibid., 38). In outlining a notion of interscalarity to address their provocation Pickering and Keightley recognize the trappings of methodological individualism as well as over generalizing collective memory, and seek to overcome these by conceiving of individual/collective relations along a continuum from micro (subjectivity and the sense we all have of a personal self/ personal memory) through meso (intersubjectivity and the awareness we all have of situated remembering in the multiple social groups to which we belong in modern societies) to macro scales of remembering (national or transnational memory transmission and the reference we all make to memory phenomena in some sense involving whole societies (ibid., 39–40) This continuum presents a mathesis of memory, that involves ordering cases of individual recall, conversational remembering or commemoration according to

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their respective level for analysis. But this is not unproblematic, and the authors anticipate that the mobility of mediated memories across the continuum is neither unilinear nor irreversible. It can operate across different lines of mnemonic transmission and communication; it can have upscale and downscale movements and it can involve shifts and alterations of meaning, value and significance in the memories which are transmitted across its differentiated scales. (ibid., 40) Memories travel, upscale and downscale, imparting with them remediated significance, meanings and values. This is perhaps most explicitly the case when individuals are called upon to account for the past by giving public testimony;11 for example, what may be a deeply ambivalent memory of a traumatic event has been recruited and remediated as a remindful vindication of a national security agenda that re-frames an ongoing conversation with a neighbor (Brown et al. 2015). Memory studies is well rehearsed in theoretical explanation and empirical demonstration of the dynamics of memory reconstruction in different ‘organized settings’ (Bartlett 1995), especially for occasions whereby language promulgates memory; much more nascent however is a view on the digital mundane intermediality of memory through grey media.12 This is precisely the empirical challenge that studying media and memory in technoscience presents. To elaborate, let us be briefly lured by a proposition: infection is memory working across multiple scales of mediation. To be clear, I do not mean for us to patch a psychologized metaphor of memory onto the foibles of biotic goings on; this is an appeal to consider the mnemonic affordances of media that do not conventionally gain recognition by the field, with the ambition of expanding the empirical vista beyond a logocentric and anthropocentric memory studies. In the previous section we considered infection as a state of potentialities in media res and not, noumenally, a thing-in-itself. The following account considers key moments whereby infection becomes phenomenal through diverse media generating varying scalar affects. When a pathogenic attack occurs the drama of infection is said to “reprogram” cellular materials, such as the chromatin that is responsible for controlling gene expression by cell division. Such reprogramming leaves the cell with lasting immunological affects (changes in capacities to respond to malignancies) that make up an “immune memory” (Rölle et al. 2013). Cells remember infection. If this notion jars with the study of “more social” adventures in remembering, it is due to a tendency for analysis to cut the continuum too early and reify the division between biological reductionism and social episteme, nature and culture, mind and body. Instead, the prospect of interscalarity is to address cells (and all grey media) as surfaces, within a media ecology of surfaces, that remediate the same memory with intermedial affects.

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It is possible, from the perspective above, to trace transmissions of immune memory beyond the biology of the individual organism. We have already considered that, through a play of cellular pinball, LOC devices mediate the adventures of a blood droplet beyond the meat of ourselves; infection is the intermedial “message” of both blood and technoscience device as the grey media attending the interscalar moment of diagnosis. Before a diagnosis is reached, the material semiotics of immune memory are likely “read” through culturally-laden interpretations of bodies performing their (mis)functions; this urges that certain biowaste i.e. bloodied phlegm and its enveloping handkerchief, should feature in any view on the media ecology of immune memory. Linguistic semiotics join this media ecology when the visual art of electrowetting, curated in a miniaturized laboratory, affords sufficient modality for working over immune memory into a narratable memory of infection. From there, it is the related communicative nexus of infection as logos that has, perhaps quite rightly, been prioritized in problem-posing the relationship between infection and memory. It is in logos that infection gains its more familiar interscalar mediations. For example, observing Pickering and Keightley’s continuum, at a micro scale the episode of receiving blood test results may be folded into autobiographic memory to ruminate the semantic significance of a life with or without infection (Yanes et al. 2012). Elsewhere, lodged in the meso scale apertures of personhood and institutions, infection becomes a “vital memory” that a person expresses to ‘jointly make use of the past with others to make the present liveable and the future desirable’ (Brown & Reavey 2015, 10); such as telling a “preferred story” about the nature of an infection to unlock otherwise inaccessible healthcare (Bowker & Star 2000). These examples of subjective and intersubjective remembering are, of course, themselves occasioned by a macro scale cultural memory of infection that recalls ‘[t]hroughout history, infected people have often been depicted as vessels containing a disease, as extensions of it’ (Sturken 1997, 148); but memories at this scale are not immutable, for example since the so-called 1990s AIDs epidemic ‘infection has also shifted meaning. What was once considered reckless and selfish behavior is recorded as heroic, an expression of true love’ (ibid., 167). The scalar continuum advanced by Pickering and Keightley clearly has caliber for distinguishing and clarifying the shifting dynamics of remembering in varied organized settings, particularly when those dynamics are interwoven by the communicative logics of linguistic media. However, following memory through technoscience means addressing transmission in a media ecology that is not always straightforwardly representational (chromatin, blood, LOC device) and consequently gives rise to scalar dynamics that are not only “neither unilinear nor irreversible” but demand an elaboration of the continuum. Staying with infection remains illustrative here. There has been longstanding, often controversial, speculation about the prospect of “cellular memory” (the thesis that experiences can be stored at a synaptic level) for intergenerational memory transmission.13 This position has been routinely rebuffed as pseudoscientific.

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Even so, it would be uncommon to encounter a contemporary geneticist who disputes that ‘environmentally induced changes of the organism can be transmitted to the offspring’ (Papadopoulos 2011, 446). Certain developmental and environmental factors (nutrition, exercise, disease) are now generally viewed to modify “epigenetic mechanisms” that regulate gene expression in the host and are heritable by cell division in future generations; the short-term (generational) and long-term (intergenerational) persistence of these changes has drawn researchers to study “epigenetic memory” (D’Urso & Brickner 2016). Within epigenetic research there is growing support for the idea that, when infection reprograms chromatin, more than an immune memory is created; an epigenetic modification takes place and since ‘chromatin modifications may be transmitted to daughter cells during cell division, leading to heritable changes in gene function, it is possible that a bacterial infection could generate heritable marks after pathogen eradication’ (Bierne et al. 2012, 17; cf. Pereira et al. 2016). This suggests that the viscera, we too readily assume to be individual, already carry the mnemonic traces of past social events in their programming and generate future affects at the collective level. This has a broader implication for following media and memory through technoscience stated as follows. How are we to locate the mnemonic qualities of chromatin along a scalar continuum that also comprises autobiographic memories, vital memories and cultural memories of infection? Given the capacity for intergenerational transmission it cannot simply be dismissed as “too small” to register as a micro scale dynamic. Instead, the “intra-actions”14 of cellular matter appear to be immanently multiscalar. That is to say, the intermediality of infection is more than interscalar because its media dispense affects simultaneously at multiple scales. We have already observed two such examples reported through the biological description above that would seemingly locate infection at opposing ends of a scalar continuum: Biomnemonic1 (supra-micro scale), immune memory engenders lasting ontogenetic change in a living system (Fischer 2014), for example the orientability of an organism to future infection is reprogrammed as more or less susceptible to the kind of malignancies that impair what cognitive scientists call ‘explicit memory’ such as Alzheimer’s disease (Maheshwari & Eslick 2015). Biomnemonic2 (supra-macro scale), in the same instance, the epigenetic memory of reprogrammed chromatin has a role in phylogenetic change at the level of the species. Therefore infection presents ontogenetic and phylogenetic possibilities with no necessity for its media to make interscalar boundary crossings; the same chromatin mediates mnemonic transmission and produces affects at organism and species scales. At least one further scalar dynamic should be noted here in order to pose infection as a mnemonic problem in technoscience. Biology, short of possessing epistemic immediacy to its objects of interest, is itself mediation and materialization of technoscience situated by what Michel Foucault called a “field of memory” defined as ‘statements that are no longer accepted or discussed, and which consequently no longer define either a body of truth or a domain of validity, but

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in relation to which relations of filiation, genesis, transformation, continuity, and historical discontinuity can be established’ (2002, 64–65). Accordingly, chromatin not only happens to be the grey media of our individual and collective bodily maladies and differentiations; it also works agentially upon historical bodies of knowledge, recalling lines of continuity and discontinuity to the past while defining future possibilities for transformation and genesis in technoscience. This scalar dynamic expands the view on media and memory by pointing to what Karen Barad (2007) has called the “ontological inseperability” of objects and agencies; chromatin is both an object and agent of memory production because of its simultaneous entanglements at multiple scales. This cannot be gleaned as the cultural dimension of an otherwise natural world;15 once again it is the prospect of interscalarity to show how memory is transversal of these reified relations. To this end a different mathesis is required.

Continua We need to conceive a continuum which yields, through progressive differentiation, all the discontinuous individuals that populate the actual world. (DeLanda 2013, 72) In tracing the scalar dynamics involved in mnemonic transmissions of infection we have encountered the limitation of assuming the continuum proposed by Pickering and Keightley is distributed across a Cartesian grid comprising micro, meso and macro regions. The problem is, irrespective of the figurative geometry used to represent the continuum,16 such a conception necessarily “cuts” the continuum in ways that obscure scalar dynamics that bear ontological inseparability. Recalling the n-dimensional lifeworld of the electrowetting droplet provides a helpful point of reference for conceiving an alternative continuum here. In topological terms we found the surface of the droplet considered for its own spatial qualities. Within the theater of the LOC device, these spatial qualities matter not for their geometric boundedness but their potentialities for differentiation and continuity. In this way it is possible to conceive the surface of a droplet as spatial continua of potential relational pathways, that is possible qualitative entanglements with other surfaces throughout the apparatus. If we could map all the possible continua at play in a turn of cellular pinball, not only across the surface of the droplet but every surface present to the apparatus, we would be able to trace equivalences between spaces that otherwise appear discontinuous and, to recall from above, multiscalar. To illustrate this last point, consider the clinician who observes blood spreading through a chip’s microchannels, entering and recoloring reservoirs of chemical reagents. The anthropic perspective is only a macro view on microfluidic activity. The blood droplet has already undertaken a series of molecular entanglements as a result of interfacing continua. Some entanglements generate variants in

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spatial relations, such as the droplet’s differentiation of spread and rest within microchannels of varying wettabilities. Crucially there are also invariant qualities of continua that shape the diagnostic outcome, for instance an imbalance of electrolytes in the blood will constrain the possible entanglements of continua and canalize the relational pathway of the droplet in such a way that orients toward a diagnosis (in this example diabetes). Previously we noted that LOC devices mediate differentiation and continuity in times of transformation; the blood droplet undergoes geometric differentiation but certain of its invariant orientations are continuous throughout entanglements with continua at different scales (electrode, microchannel, reagent). A transformation that maintains equivalences between topological spaces is called homeomorphic. LOC devices afford a diagnosis because the resting blood droplet (topological space1) and the spreading blood droplet (topological space2) are homeomorphic. This means, despite their geometric differentiation, they preserve the invariant qualities that matter for interpretation (e.g. in diagnosing diabetes, an imbalance of electrolytes). The notion of a homeomorphic function is useful in returning to the broader discussion of the intermediality of memory. Brown and Reavey (2015, 58–60) have used the concept of homeomorphism to discuss a case in which one survivor’s childhood memories of sexual abuse and an affair in her adult life possess a topological equivalence that spatially ordered the rememberer’s agency. For our purposes, if the differentiated blood droplet of topological space2 is homeomorphic to the molecular qualities of topological space1, then we can say the same of the diagnosis determined by the affected chemical reagent (topological space3) and its subsequent mediation in linguistic semiotics is a spatial differentiation that preserves the invariant that defines a positive or negative diagnosis of, for example, diabetes. Furthermore, certain biowaste, such as the snotty handkerchief (topological space4) held up for cultural interpretation, though spatially differentiated is also homeomorphic to the malignant molecular neighborhood. In every case the same invariant generates varying scalar affects; immune memory, epigenetic memory, the field of memory in bodies of knowledge (topological spacesn) are homeomorphisms that bear the transversal flight of memory across these spaces, and register here through a conception of the scalar continuum that can adequately conceive multiscalar differentiations. If we were to look to replace the linear continuum (micro, meso, macro) mapped onto a Cartesian grid with an image of homeomorphism across topological continua: A better image here would be a nested set of spaces, with the cascade acting to unfold spaces which are embedded into one another. (DeLanda 2013, 72) The figure of a nested set of spaces affords a conception of mnemonic transmissions between and across scales in a way that a more conventional linear

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continuum forbids. In spatial terms the potential of epigenetic memory, for example, to express phylogenetic change in the next generation is already nested in the mediation of infection through chromatin, cells, blood, organism, logos and technoscientific apparatus. Such scalar movements are seldom linear functions (from point A to B = micro to macro scale) but cascades that generate affects in the interfaced surface continua. Now, instead of facing the analytic conundrum of tracing a heterogeneous line of mnemonic transmission between agencies that are ontologically inseparable but nonetheless reified as too small or too big, we might anticipate that memory cascades through simultaneous entanglements with linguistic media and non-representational grey media generating homeomorphic affects across scales of mobile thresholds. It is possible and beneficial to assign this scalar dynamic a shorthand term, and in the following section I discuss this further as a function of translation.

Translations Translation in the case of humans and machines involves practices through which capacities taken to be inherent in one are shifted to, or realized through, the other. (Suchman 2007, 260) There is well-travelled ground in media and communication studies that considers transmission in terms of translation. This is marked by a series of important interventions in the received notion of translation as a rational conversion of meaning from a “source” to “target” language. For example, Julia Kristeva’s concept of “intertextuality” highlighted that ‘any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (1986, 37). The implication of intertextuality for translation is that there can be ‘no beginning or end to any text, but endless connections and references to other texts’ seriously problematizing ‘the concepts of origin and source’ (Farahzad 2009, 126). Gayatari Spivak identified the asymmetries of translation in postcolonial contexts due to the inherent ethnocentrisms of language The translator has to make herself, in the case of third world women writing, almost better equipped than the translator who is dealing with the Western European languages, because of the fact that there is so much of the old colonial attitude, slightly displaced, at work in the translation racket. (2012, 212) Importantly for the purposes here, translation has also has been considered beyond a literary definition. One such approach to translation that has received considerable attention is presented by proponents of Actor Network Theory (ANT). Sometimes dubbed “the sociology of translation” this perspective involves studying how actor interests are modulated by ‘a loose structure or “network” of associations between

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ideas, things, people and resources’ (Brown 2002, 6). In a text widely cited for elaborating translation for ANT Michel Callon argued The repertoire of translation is not only designed to give a symmetrical and tolerant description of a complex process which constantly mixes together a variety of social and natural entities. It also permits an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized (1986, 224). The emphasis given here to a symmetry in descriptions of “social and natural entities” is a defining feature of ANT and marks an important intervention for decentralizing the human in an analysis of more-than-human worlds; chromatin, as we have observed above, is a “silent actor” of social and natural worlds. Briefly, and skirting some nuance, Callon understood translation comprising four “moments”: (first moment) a problem is posed that (second moment) “locks in” other actors to (third moment) roles that bear definition and interrelation that (fourth moment) structure the mobility of actors to represent the problem throughout a network. Callon’s “moments” of translation are identifiable in the account of infection offered above; clearly certain actors receive greater mobility to represent and pose the nature of infection as a problem, namely those actors enrolled in diagnosis (clinicians, LOCs, diagnostic manuals), in ways that “lock in” the interests of other actors (patients, blood samples, chromatin) to being problematized by others. I will not survey the many important critiques of ANT here; the problem with adopting this model of translation wholesale for studying media and memory in technoscience was anticipated by Star and Griesemer, these authors argued that ‘the Callon-Latour-Law model of translations . . . can be seen as a kind of “funneling”—reframing or mediating the concerns of several actors into a narrower passage point’ (Star & Griesemer 1989, 390). A model of translation as “funneling” memory between different media would only be appropriate to the linear continuum of scalar dynamics. With unique appeal for studying translations between nested spaces, Star and Griesemer departed from the ANT model, encouraging ‘a many to many mapping’ that acknowledges ‘an indeterminate number of coherent sets of translations’ (ibid.). For insisting on symmetrical descriptions of actors involved in the translation processes, ANT provides a useful alibi for attending to the diverse range of human and nonhuman surfaces that participate in any media ecology. However, this view falls short for the purposes here because of the priority given to the perspective of the “narrower passage point”. Although invariant homeomorphic functions tend to matter most if they materialize at pinch points that redistribute agencies, this does not begin to address the profusion of variance within a media ecology.17 And so this ANT-inspired view on translation promotes an analysis that acknowledges but remains indifferent to the differential qualities of media content. This is why memory studies must look elsewhere to develop

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the concept of translation as part of an analytic vocabulary for studying the intermediality of memory in technoscience. Let us also briefly consider an approach to translation that places the specificity of biologically mediated messages at the center of analysis. Biosemiotics is an emerging interdisciplinary project that examines the role of sign relations in life systems. With direct relevance to the example of infection, Donald Favareau has outlined this research agenda as ‘the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of sign processes—from intercellular signaling processes to animal display behavior to human semiotic artifacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought’ (2010, p.v). In an influential contribution to this field Thure Von Uexküll, the son of a pioneering biosemiotician, and his medical colleagues wrote: in biosemiotics we are dealing with problems of interpretation—that is, of translation. Translations may be understood as “linkages of meaning”; translations of endosemiotic sign processes will have to link, for example, cytosemiotic signs to word signs. This leads to “meta-interpretations” in which an observer has to interpret a cell’s behavior toward its environment as a clue indicating its responses to its own interpretations (Uexküll et at., 2010: 318). Biosemiotics poses a radical gesture to open and subject the black boxes of biological reductionism to interpretation as dynamic sign relations. The prospect of empirically studying translations by analyzing “linkages” between, for example, cell signs and word signs is especially appealing for the view held here on the intermediality of memory. Surely investigating sign relations between living systems demands an expanded model of semiotics that includes non-linguistic sign processes, as such displacing the logocentrism of mainstream biology is fundamental to the biosemiotic movement. Moreover, proponents of biosemiotics seem keen to eschew a predominantly anthropocentric outlook by refusing to elevate the status of human sign relations above those of all living systems. For now it is moot how well this “young” project will overcome the inherent “centricisms” (logos, anthropos, ethnos) belying the linguistic signs needed to mediate biosemiotic analyses;18 nonetheless the gesture to pursue these directions already surpasses the paradigmatic hold of symbolism in memory studies that threatens a digital turn with endless textual analyses. The principle challenge that biosemiotics levels to biological orthodoxy is to oppose ‘the “blind faith” that these sign processes can be studied only in their material aspects’ (Favareau 2010, 62). Thus biosemiotics seems especially well placed to attend to the translation of memory in non-linguistic media in ways that ANT would be, at best, indifferent. Even so there are limitations in reducing the intermediality of memory to sign relations, especially if analysis is drawn to cut the continuum along superficial axes of form and content. The danger involves overlooking how media technologies themselves differentiate and generate new possibilities for translation.

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Let us consider this last point further through the lens of a Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. In Understanding Media McLuhan reformulated the Aristotelean view on techne and physis when he argued that all media translate nature into art. It seems ticklish now to bracket nature from cultural activity, but McLuhan invested these terms with specific dominium that avoided, at least momentarily, an essentialist nature/ culture binary. Nature, for McLuhan, includes sensory experiences and art comprises all communicative media, hence he claimed ‘[w]ords are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses’ (2001, 63). A translation implies more than a conversion by factor; it cascades experience through the logics of communicative technologies to other senses. This is more helpful for understanding mnemonic transmission between scales where McLuhan alludes us to the thresholds of translatability: The “common sense” was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image. (ibid., 66–67) Translation only occurs when media can present experience as a unified image to common sense. It was absolutely crucial for Lippmann’s electrowetting experiments to translate nature into a unified image if his adventures in technoscience were to matter at all to photographic communities. In a similar way, mnemonic transmission from reprogrammed chromatin to a diagnosis is ‘dependent on alternately grasping and letting go in order to enlarge the scope of action’ (ibid., 62). Homeomorphic translations mediate potentialities as unified images after a lively interplay between “grasping” invariant and “letting go” of variant qualities. This interplay allows a translation to enlarge the scope of action, say from individual to collective action, if it strikes a common sense between “one kind of experience” and “all the senses”; what McLuhan called a “unified ratio among the senses”. Above we have seen that memories do not float freely across scales, the very possibility of translation between and across a scalar continuum is shaped materially by interfacing surfaces, each defined as continua of potentialities, mediating differentiation and continuity to some level of human and nonhuman experience. As the media theorist famously posited, media extend the senses. For McLuhan traditional media presented lesser extensions of sense ratios and he anticipated that digital media would extensively unbound degrees of freedom for mnemonic transmission, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again. For it is now possible to program ratios among the senses that approach the condition of consciousness. (ibid., 67)

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The social mobility of memory depends upon reaching a media-sensory ratio between two homeomorphic points in the continuum. It is insensible, for example, at least I assume for the time being and in most places (offensive even) to think that any media might present a ratio to translate a mundane olfactory experience of flatulence into humanity’s collective ambition for perpetuity, that particular revolution will not be televised; whereas one author’s textual account of a timefolding Madelaine cake translated into a collective imaginary of biological memory for communities of neuroscientists (Bray 2013). Even so, we should expect that digital media are (re)making the ratios of mnemonic transmission more elastic; look out The Fart that Saved the World coming soon to a digital movie streaming service near you (Dias & Ressler 2014). This is a playful way of otherwise saying, a view on translation is insufficient if it merely eschews anthropomorphism by treating actors with indifferent symmetry. The view would be equally inadequate if, in pursuit of an interpretative sensibility on sign processes, it sought to challenge logocentricism by overlooking the ratio capacity of media for material (morphological and ontological) genesis and differentiation that redistributes and reconfigures sensory experiences. This is why, in tracing the adventures of media and memory in technoscience above, I have insisted on a vocabulary of “surfaces” and “media ecologies”. If a scalar translation of memory is a function of equivalences in spatial relations between surfaces, and the continuum of grey media is not prematurely cut (i.e. between cell, blood, human, apparatus, institution, species), then the spread and rest of invariants is a productive dynamic of new sensory ratios within a media ecology.

Conclusion: Rise of the silicon surfactant In 2015 the Design Museum (London) honored the work of a team of scientists based at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute with an award for Design of the Year (Design Museum 2016). The interdisciplinary team had advanced lab-ona-chip technology by combining developments in microfluidics and cell biology to innovate the first human organs-on-chips. These devices are engineered with their own micro-pinball architectures that host living human cells and microfluidic channels to simulate, on a miniaturized scale, the biomechanical functions of organs. The human lung-on-a-chip, for example, contains living lung and capillary cells lining a membrane that is stretched and relaxed by twin vacuum channels, mimicking the functioning of a human lung. This technology presents applied possibilities to screen and test human organs in vitro and, for this reason, the commercialization of such chips has been promoted as an alternative and end to animal testing. Going forward, the Wyss Institute has already announced its ambition to develop and link together ten different organs-on-chips to achieve the first human-on-a-chip (Wyss Institute 2016). By way of offering some conclusive remarks here let us consider how the above view on the intermediality of memory in technoscience casts light on the

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prospect of humans-on-chips. To summarize, I have pursued an “expanded” outlook on media and memory that considers diverse surfaces throughout media ecologies and resists cutting the continuum of equivalences between memory at multiple scales (e.g. immune, autobiographical, cultural, epigenetic). Departing from a linear conception of the scalar dynamics involved in mnemonic transmission I have argued that memory translates between surfaces within a media ecology. From the perspective of translation, media cascade memory by simultaneously generating affects on multiple surfaces at varying scales. To empirically trace the drama of intermediality, without falling back on anthropocentric and logocentric symbolic frameworks, we can identify homeomorphisms that preserve nested potentialities throughout conditions of spatial differentiation. To elaborate the above view on memory and media, I have attended to the archaeology of media practices related to wetting behavior. Now, to situate organs-on-chips and anticipate the emergence of further digital technologies within this view, I propose that we might consider the wettability of mnemonic relations and recruit one more concept from these episodes in technoscience. The term “surfactant” is a portmanteau of surface-active agent. Surfactants are substances that enter the theater of wettability and lessen surface tensions between interfacing elements. The emulsion that coated Lippmann’s glass plate is an example of a surfactant. The glass plate, itself a high energy surface, without the right surfactant would afford the mercury too much spread interfacing with too much surface tension to host diffraction, which would effectively diffuse any lasting impression left on the plate and prevent the photographic apparatus from translating nature into a unified image. We might consider how new technologies entering media ecologies analogously go to work as surfactants, disrupting the tensions between surfaces that make up our mnemonic relations. How intensely a technology will “diffract” through the surfaces of relations depends on whether the right tensions are lessened to allow homeomorphic translations that “enlarge the scope of action”. Harold Innis alluded us to what might be considered a deviant case in the wettability of mnemonic relations: As late as 1628 Sir John Davis wrote: ‘So the customary law of England, which we doe likewise call jus commune as comming neerest to the lawe of nature, which is the root and touchstone of all good lawes, and which is also jus non scriptum and written onely in the memory of man . . . doth far excell our written lawes, namely our statutes or Acts of Parliament (2007, 157). The wettability of mnemonic relations between the English peasantry, at least until the 17th century, were hydrophobic to the surfactant of paper media and prevented written law from diffracting through cultural memory. Let us now ask: will the wettability of contemporary mnemonic relations afford the spread or rest of memories mediated by organs-on-chips? Are these devices the right

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surfactant to diffract “the scalar dynamics of remembering in modernity”? These are less helpfully posed as closed problems, they are already questions of degree and their answers reside in emerging homeomorphisms of the media and memory in technoscience.

Notes 1 Derrida considered ‘[t]o feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law’ (1994, 7). 2 ‘We perceive the world not in terms of abstractions, such as time and space, but as surfaces, which mark the physical qualities of objects in our environment (texture, shape, size, color) and as events, which embody the changes those surfaces undergo (deformation, transition, destruction, emergence)’ (Väliaho 2014, p.34). 3 ‘in 1900, the soul suddenly stopped being a memory in the form of wax slates or books, as Plato describes it; rather, it was technically advanced and transformed into a motion picture’ (Kittler 2010, 35). 4 In electrowetting Lippmann ‘found that the capillary depression of mercury in contact with electrolyte solutions could be varied by applying a voltage between the mercury and electrolyte’ (Mugele & Baret 2005, 707). 5 For a detailed media history of biochips, see Thacker (2004). 6 For a rich account of how this kind of multiplicity becomes singular in patient narratives of pain, see Mol (2002, p.36). 7 A fallacy that Alfred North Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead 1967, 51). 8 Lacan famously adopted the image of the Mobius strip to illustrate how interiority of the psyche is continuous with its external environment. 9 ‘What was of interest to mathematicians was how to define the invariance—that which stays the same—in such spaces of continuous transformation’ (Lury et al. 2012, 8). 10 A term introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (2004b) that DeLanda describes as ‘processes in which a group of previously disconnected elements suddenly reaches a critical point at which they begin to “cooperate” to form a higher level entity’ (1991, 6). 11 Consider the famous case of John Dean’s memory (Neisser 1981; Edwards & Potter 1992). Sue Campbell’s (2003) work is crucial for highlighting how public fora reconstruct and redistribute a rememberer’s agency. 12 Grey media is a term drawn from Fuller and Goffey’s work observing a ‘crucial but often unremarked grey media form, the database [has] . . . importance in the generation of digital media infrastructure and the topological continua they help produce’ (2012, 324). I will use the term in a slightly broader, archival, sense to highlight how biomedia are also “databases” of memory. 13 Although the details of their positions differ, John-Baptiste Lamark, John von Neumann and Carl Jung have each espoused a version of the cellular memory thesis. 14 Intra-action is a term coined by Karen Barad that Haraway explains ‘[i]ntra-action implies that already existing actors get together and act. Intra-action implies something much messier, much less determinate, ontologically speaking’ (2004, 300–301). 15 ‘Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.’ (Haraway 2013, 151) 16 See Kreek and Zoonen (2013) for their onion geometric depiction of the micro, macro and meso scalar dynamics of community memory.

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17 The concern here is that this ANT view on translation lures us to what Derrida (2016, 336) has called the ‘metaphysics of presence’ for which he criticises phenomenologists. 18 I am thinking here of Lacan’s remark ‘there is no such thing as a metalanguage’ (1998, 118)

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SECTION 3

Economy

10 ICONOMY OF MEMORY On remembering as digital, civic and corporate currency Joanne Garde-Hansen and Gilson Schwartz

Introduction Have we worked through the ‘impasse’ in ‘collective memory’ research (Huyssen 2009; Brockmeier 2010), perhaps where findings were too narrowly determined by or contained within singular (historical) case studies? If we are to use case study examples from specific cultural containers, then what connections can we make across territories enabled by digital communication and researcher connectivity? What scope is there for theorizing memory from the margins? While this chapter is Brazil-focused, it is a collaborative response from a UK– Brazil research perspective on environmental, economic and cultural issues that concern memory studies. It offers a consideration of digital memory embedded in, and flowing across, social–digital–environmental spheres. While digital memory is structured by certain linguistic, cultural and social relations, it is also agentic within the unevenly available resources we have encountered, and creative in its connectivity to new communities (as noted by Hoskins in this volume). Recent developments in social psychology (Brown and Reavey 2014), digital law (Tirosh 2015) and the Anthropocene (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen 2016) offer new considerations of memory embedded in and moving across social–digital–environmental spheres that are structured (yet agentic) within unevenly available resources (social–psychic, material–economic, spatial–geographic, symbolic–medial). In part, this chapter’s approach to digital memory studies accords with research that explores the increasingly permeable boundaries between abstract concepts of space, time, technology and the energy–food–water nexus that have come to shape understandings of, for example, ‘urban metabolism’ (Kennedy et al. 2011), and are articulated by Reading and Notley in this volume (234) as ‘globital

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memory economies’ that ‘work in uneven and unequal ways’ with ‘costs to both the environment and the less privileged left outside of the global north’. This is especially the case for young people, whose (non)participation in formal modes of cultural practice draws upon memory as utility (from family, community, nation) for creating new sites of memory. What can memory studies say of and to young people in Brazil for example (or anywhere for that matter) when the field is so shaped by trauma, genocide and historical abuse: parental failure in all its senses? How can memory as recollection, story, restoration and imagineering futures from the materiality of narrative be evented in such a way that it draws younger people together to create actionable knowledge? If young people increasingly act as ‘grassroots intermediaries’ in a ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006) within new economies of the creative and mediated city, what role does digital memory play as the primary resource for their survival and learning? Critically, where is the university in this iconomy of memory? In this chapter, we explore the iconomies of entangled memories that are digitally produced in São Paulo, Brazil, in order to expose and explore the creative connections between the birthplace of global industrial capitalism (the UK) and the emerging representation of Brazil as a frontier of resource resilience. As a source of new ways of thinking about post-industrial and social–environmental challenges, Brazil presents to digital memory studies a place of re-existence at the edge of creative capitalism. Mediality is key here. It flows as currencies and new rites and rights of passage, while access and future/confidence building emerge from the bottom-up. These ‘mediality flows’ (social media, service economy, creative industries and so on) are associated with social skills and reflexivity so as to co-create ‘protensions’ and an affective economy as discussed for instance in Bernard Stiegler’s recent work (2016). Stiegler’s ‘Dans la Disruption’ reviews this Bergsonian–Spinozan phenomenology of époches and the zeitgeist at the root of terrorism and youth identity crises in contemporary startup-ist Darwinism and continuous disruption. To re-exist it, it is necessary to picture oneself as a re-mediating agent who participates in the circulation of medialities (and media-mentalities). As this mediality expands beyond the Internet to the streets and local–social movements (Gerbaudo 2012, Kavada 2013), within the horizon of a transmediatic ‘Internet of Things’, communicative memories become amplified and converge into new cultural memories produced on the move or even involuntarily. This may be an opportunity for trauma and secular violence to produce new local versions of the holocaust narrative. The distinction between communicative and cultural memories is important in this context. Anglo-European theoretical and conceptual frameworks of ‘memory studies’ have tended to focus more on historical, collective and cultural memory, with less applied research on ‘communicative memory’ (Assmann 2008). In a Brazilian context, ‘communicative memory’ functions as a form of personal and community remembering in the face of official memorialisation. Our focus is to present communicative memory in its digital

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connectivity, as a further contribution to the expanding notions of cultural memory provided by Brown and Hoskins (2010) in their attention to versions of the past and the role of media, personal and public. Throughout this chapter, we seek to present an understanding of memory as shared and shareable beyond more traditional notions of collective memory as defined by Halbwachs (1980). Furthermore, the underlying economic and political relevance of the critical memory value chains we explore contribute to their becoming icons of contemporary civility in Brazil, with potential to play dialectically with more institutionalized memory cultures, archives and portals. In our conceptual framework, digital memory needs to be put to work in ways that are not simply addressing the materialisation of histories but are affording new kinds of relationships with human and non-human actors. In what follows, we push memory studies beyond nationally framed readings of trauma and war (Huyssen 2012) while also nudging cultural research in Latin America determined by ‘area studies’ (Szurmuk and Waisbord 2011) to consider new thinking that exposes the ‘polyvocality’ of social action (Ruiz 2014). Scholars who have worked with marginalized and hidden communities in Brazil and the UK (Worcman and Garde-Hansen 2016) note that digital media offer memory workers (heritage managers, local archivists and civic trustees, for example) tools predetermined by economic, environmental and material factors. In what follows we present the concept of an iconomy of memory as a framework for exploring these factors in combination.

Iconomy The political economy of attention to difference and to the semiotic processes of difference-creation has become a key element in memory studies. Memory studies scholars recognize the global commodity chains that afford (or not) the development of digitally and socially mediated memory (see Reading 2014, Hoskins 2011) as well as the vertical and horizontal cultural and media strata that produce memory (van Dijck, 2007; Pickering and Keightley 2013). Underscoring the political economy of active remembering/forgetting, a ‘trans’ memory studies thinking (Erll 2011) offers a conceptual framework for exploring digital memory as an ‘iconomy’ that defines the relationship between personal narratives and cultural/political economies in a globalized digital age. ‘Iconomics’ is a neologism developed by Michael Kaplan (2003) on the economic value of rhetoric, and has since been developed by Gilson Schwartz (see Lopes and Schwartz 2006) within the University of São Paulo’s City of Knowledge to express the triadic structures that underlie local, national and global media ecologies. These are entanglements of the ‘I’ or the individual (as citizen, consumer, person); iconicity (memes, codes, symbols, narratives); and industry (supply–demand, scarcity–abundance, production, distribution and investment). The human, the post-human and the non-human converge into value creating chains.

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In our observations of the shifting roles of Brazilian and UK audiences, users and markets in relation to ‘iconomies of memory’, we offer critical thinking on digital memory as the formation of new civic–corporate–cultural currencies. These activate cycles of memory creation with different layers of temporalities and heterogeneous levels of historical consciousness, i.e. the internalization and externalization of memories on the part of the networked actors, institutions and archives. Moreover, the trans-national connections we suggest here offer key thinking from Brazil that contributes to Anglo-European theoretical and conceptual frameworks that have tended to focus more on historical, collective and cultural memory and less on ‘communicative memory’ (see Assmann 2008) as noted above. The mobile, emergent, fluid, digital and iconic dimensions of communicative memory are thus affectively connected to potential new value chains in a political economy of remembrance and recognition or ‘millieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1996), marked by contemporary brutality, inequality and alienation.

Memory capital and speculation Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of heritage and memory via digital technologies are fast becoming key goals/outputs of lay, civic and community initiatives, which in the case of Brazil are more likely sponsored by public agencies, subsidies and tax exemptions. In other words, we start from the point that there is a relevant social (and profitable) market for digital memory (as a form of communicative memory that shares valuable cultural memories) and this requires new metrics and analytics. In order to achieve this new projectbased framework, value chains must be adequately identified from an interdisciplinary perspective, that foreground memory as open source utility. Otherwise, most of the memory monetization processes involved will rely on governmental resources and agendas or entirely commercial schema, which may not converge with open, public and shared expectations. While NGOs, universities and local governments secure the funding to initiate such projects they soon find them framed by economic conceptualizations of engagement and sustainability that have a speculative quantitative currency (e.g. the percentage increase in demand for hotel accommodation around a museum; the projected increase in footfall to a heritage site; number of clickthroughs to online community events; number engaged in civic campaigns or training and skills-building processes; percentage of booked visits by education groups). Whether we are considering UK Capital of Culture bids, UNESCO’s ‘routes to memory’ projects or Brazil’s Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person), ‘memory work’ (collecting, recollecting and circulating story as data/data as story) comes at a cost and one that is increasingly driven by cultural currencies via digital interfaces, infrastructures and regulations. Within and between these increasingly structured domains, ‘memory agents’ and remembering agency can be lost.

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Furthermore, creative industries have been taken up by countries keen to place economic drivers at the forefront (China, Jamaica and South Korea for example), but in the transfer back, as in UNESCO’s 2013 Creative Economy Report we find a new role for culture in questioning the nature of the ‘economy’. This is particularly the case in places such as Brazil (with economies that have difficult colonial pasts, increased sovereignty of indigenous peoples, growing environmentalism and many hidden histories). Here, digital memories become part of the national industries, maybe its most strategic input and form of cultural capital. In this context, Brazil stands out as a particularly strong case study of social inclusion via digital media with an emerging impact on value chains in the digital memory industry (see Clarke 2012). Therefore, the movement at the heart of this chapter concerns transfer (of knowledge, ideas, media and cultural policy) and accords with researchers such as Adair Turner (2012) who have noted the shift from a state project of culture to a consumer or entrepreneur driven one: from the communal to the individual, from public good to the market with newer forms of organization, monetization and reception of goods and services. These are related to what we term the creative memory industries at the core of an iconomy (such as crowdfunding, social–complementary currencies and local solidarity chains). How is digital memory mediated by iconcreation skills that require not only digital literacy but innovative, emergent and disruptive forms of time consciousness in different social and institutional realms? It makes sense to explore this in Brazil as the relationship between cultural and economic drivers is also in large-scale crisis involving not only fiscal constraints but also the unprecedented review of public contracts and social policies due to recent corruption investigations and regulatory changes in electoral funding.

Memory policy While UNESCO, for example, has worked hard to fund projects focussed on cultural memory policy, whole industries (private and public) have emerged to take control of memory in their articulations of an ‘implicit’ shaping of (digital) culture (Ahearne 2009). Herein, organizations not normally associated with memory research, policy or practices have endeavoured to prescribe their own as well as social, cultural and family histories. In order to design and implement policies of memory, Brazil has been a striking example of tax breaks that have incentivized the corporate sponsorship of community arts, culture and heritage initiatives run by NGOs, museums and educational outreach. In particular, digital cultural policies have consistently expanded their focus on identity, territoriality and solidarity. Banco do Brazil, Petrobras and Votorantim have invested in corporate, social and personal memories, becoming entangled in iconomies of memory (see Costa et al. 2013). From retailers to oil companies, telecommunications to the water sector, communicating digital cultural memories locally and globally has become increasingly common (e.g. Capturing the Energy in Scotland or Memoria Votorantim in Brazil).

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Thus, digital memory studies should address ‘the shared underlying economics of cultural memory as a shareable resource that has a use value and requires labour’ (Worcman and Garde-Hansen 2016, 7). While we can theorize the spreadability of industrial memory as producing liquidity (readily available cultural value for sustainability, adaptation, resilience and growth within an oil company for example), we can also see, as does Allen in this volume, that liquid memories are infectious across scales in a digital media economy. What he defines as the ‘intermediality of memory’ (194) can in our case be seen as a desire to capture memory’s energy and technically direct its intermediality for profit. With this in mind, a cultural policy of (digital) memory ought to consider the wider (continental and global) economy and not simply focus on trans-national memory in a European context. While preserving and protecting local and national cultural practices is important, we do need to rethink memory in terms of scales beyond the national (urban–rural or micro–meso–macro for example). Moreover, a digital memory policy requires a different relationship and consciousness of cultural memory (as defined by Brown and Hoskins 2010), with an emphasis on shared versions, digital creative flows and future imaginaries rather than only raiding existing, archived or preserved heritages. The focus would be on the emergence of digital memory through creative communicative memories, so that memory culture is not taken hostage by dominant legacies or spontaneous and unfiltered (that is, not subject to policy) ideas of homogeneity. It should become clearer that a digital cultural memory policy is always about remediation, premediation and intermediality to expand upon Erll (2008), so that effective policies of memory should be open to being (re)shaped as well as (re)shaping memory. Thus, we may be witnessing not memory policy ‘in place’ but cultural policies that foster flows of memories across places and between scales. This will require researchers to undertake relational analyses, combine different levels or modes of time consciousness and ‘iconification’ literacies. In our examples below, we understand memory (through its increasing digitization and connectivity) as moving from the periphery to the centre, not only in the way that postcolonial memories of the global south are making their way into mainstream Anglo-European public spheres, but also in the movement of ideas, policies and theories of memory around the world, and from the margins to the mainstream. These have been and are being exchanged by researchers, teachers, NGOs and social movements, as well as by entrepreneurial individuals keen to tell different stories and stories of difference to new audiences.

Memory in flux John Urry argues in Mobilities that ‘[f]lux involves tension, struggle and conflict, a dialectic of technology and social life [. . .] the complex intersections of immobilities and mobilities’ (2007, 25). Such a definition raises key questions about memory’s currency in digital life, the currents through which it flows. How does

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memory migrate across borders and who are its human and non-human carriers? To what extent do new media innovations, known for their de-territorializing effects, imply the reframing of temporalities, narratives and rituals? What is the future tense of memory work in such tense futures? How restorative can the future be as a projection of icons collected from the past? Can we speak of a new affective public memory sphere, enabled by technologies of mediation and innovative, open and critical reception patterns that entangle memory publics? Who and for what agenda are we collecting, curating and communicating? These are some of the questions that underpin our focus on young people in Brazil that demonstrate an emerging iconomy of global and uneven transnational memory publics. They have come into existence because of migration and digital connectivity (produced from virtual migration, distance education, global outsourcing and precarity). Any value added by the individual’s (often free and digital) labour is often time-bound to specific themed projects that are frame-worked by existing explicit or implicit memory policy objectives. Nevertheless, the micro level of memory is itself in a permanent state of flux, constituting communicative memory (short term) that once digitally remediated becomes a critical factor for the perception and agency of longer, diversified time frames of desire, responsibility and skills. The contributing element in the digital remediation of communicative memories is the networked, multi-layered and multitemporal system which being open-sourced can be a shared infrastructure for the production of icons. These icons are time machines premediating and remediating the flow of human and non-human memories: they are affective chains of value. The purpose of an iconomic science of memory is thus to expand the focus on the flux of information that constitutes the connection process between communicative memories and cultural policies as human rights and citizenship. The iconicity of memories is thus a portal or access point for the open and democratic exploration of cultural and temporal movements, leveraged by digital mobility and connectivity in cities. Remembering and forgetting are both at work in the iconomy of urban collectives (or para-memory publics) outside of the cultural memory policy schema. New policies address memory emergencies that often draw upon histories of protest, catabolic media archives, connecting memory cross-culturally and using collective public memory as leverage. Our examples will address ‘forgotten’ memory agents in São Paulo. Their (in)visibility, connectivity and temporality will be highlighted so as to stress the political iconomy of emerging memories in flux. As these are projects mediated by a public university, the impact on research and learning becomes a relevant dimension.

‘Brazilianization’ of memory? Worcman and Garde-Hansen have recently explored Brazil’s investment in cultural, communicative, collective and corporate memory in Social Memory Technology: Theory, Practice Action, (2016). In response, we would say that a ‘Brazilianization’

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of remembering and reviving conflict, protest and social unrest is in operation. On the one hand, we see a re-feudalization of memory, the powerful role of corporations and the private sector in memory industries. Regardless of messages of corruption, Brazilian companies have invested heavily in memory (representation, communities, communication, technologies, archives and storage). The economic context of Brazil has moved itself from inflation to economic development at a rapid pace and back again, with continued (re)investment in iconic Brazil as the future of human existence (from the protection of the Amazon rainforest to an NSA/GCHQ-free Internet). A critical review of Brazil´s human rights issues during the military regime (1964–1988) is also at stake as ‘Truth Committees’ come into place. Corruption scandals and an unprecedented cleansing of the political architecture of the country is in the making (i.e. the 2016 ‘impeachment’ of President Dilma Rousseff at the time of writing). Geopolitical motivations have already been key sources of concern, conflict and soft power creation in Brazil’s past. There has been a spectacular levelling up of Brazil among the community of nations as well as the emergence of a new middle class, supported by a record expansion of public education and subsidies to private education, bringing millions into the labour market (an estimated 60 million entered the middle classes after 2003). The expansion of cell phone infrastructure and ownership, the record presence of Brazilians online and the extension of digital TV are the basis for the next wave of innovation and convergence among people, things and signs. What if the future of digital memory were to come from such a place? As this ‘national project’ imposes itself as a development drive, which we would argue is here to stay whatever the short-term economic and political fluctuations, the underlying and sustainable development impulses and conditions favour the search for re-mediations between social memories, media technologies and icon creation. It is, thus, no surprise that Brazil has become iconic as a country creating or being appropriated by icons anew: driving the ‘BRICS’ as a new frontier of global growth to a determining role in global climate change negotiation, to millennium goals of overcoming hunger, while creating a public sphere of ‘science without borders’. In championing sustainable business, grassroots community cultural and solidarity economic policies, to leveraging industrial heritage into a post-industrial innovation, Brazil is a stakeholder in the conversion of social memories into human welfare. However, as the national stage scales up, the more complex matrix of actors, roles and projects compete for the uses of state subsidies as well as a gradual revision of commercially funded culture, media, education, welfare and sport. Powerful energy businesses with global technological infrastructure plans as well as a prominent position in the global Internet governance agenda have had a direct impact on memory and digital literacy (Clarke 2012). The evidence, the ‘icons of Brazil’, point also to the emergence of new identity and value-creation chains among historically marginalized segments of society as a result of policies

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of social appropriation of digital tools, skills and ethics. This is critical, for this appropriation is connected to and shared by marginalized segments all over the world. Such iconicity is also fundamental to national development since it mixes the pre-historic (indigenous) with the religious, the modern, with the postmodern, the grassroots protest with the feudal, as well as issues of gender and ethnicity. Add in a strengthening environmental consciousness and big business, and the mix is iconically Brazilian, with the proposal that the future of memory is outside Europe. Yet, the deeper and older roots of the Brazilian ethos for developmentalism in a national project timeframe reach as far back as the post-war European angst in the face of the holocaust and the existentialist drive for state, territory and power. The Jaspers-inspired elite youth of the 1940s (both in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) gave birth to the ‘Itatiaia Circle’, which stressed the implications of destiny, race, tropicality, nationalism and class struggle in the makings of an iconic Brazilian future (or Zweig’s ‘land of the future’ in 1941). There is an underground or foreclosed communication sphere between European and tropical memory or at least the sharing of the same ‘Achsenzeit’ (time-axis), that requires further research if we are to develop transnational agenda on climate, capitalism and culture. The ‘Brazilianization of memory’ has since the 1950s been translated into a figment of the future: as a development of national identity for instance in the works of sociologist and lawyer Helio Jaguaribe who questioned the underlying economies: Every elite has a certain cost. So the question of the functionality or dysfunctionality of the elite, measured generally, may be understood as being: the functional elite is that whose service, when given to society, is worth more than the cost of maintaining it. What is the cost of maintaining an elite? (Jaguaribe 2009). The functionality of (digital) elites both at the centre and at the periphery of the global economic system as well as their capacity to design and legitimately manage the social sphere of icon creation (memories as well as future fantasies), in a cost-wise sustainable pattern, is clearly at stake in the current global crisis of post-industrial, networked capitalism. Thus, we ask how do we (as scholars– teachers) create a more functional rapport between elites and peripheries and to what extent could the mediated spheres of mediality and social memory technologies change their and our performances and skills-building strategies?

Case study context Experimentation with icon creation from a peripheral perspective has been a major research-action challenge for the University of São Paulo’s ‘City of Knowledge’ since 2001: a transdisciplinary research, outreach and open learning network

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since 2005 at the Department of Film, Radio and Television in the School of Communication and Arts. As an open creative hub at the largest public university in Brazil, the ‘City of Knowledge’ evolves around continuous review of methodological perspectives. These may be sensitive to various voices while building into the research-action methods the icon-creation moment as the index to value-impact. From this long enduring research programme we have identified two examples that illustrate the memory flux emerging from civic as well as corporate interests. Their visibility, connectivity and temporality are an expression of local development processes matched by icon-creating value chains of individual and social memories. In short, social memories are technically appropriated for the benefit of new temporal perceptions and constructions. The value added in the process results from the conversion of communicative memories into cultural memories remediated by digital infrastructures and interfaces. The medium is the memory flux: that is, icons are a condensation of symbolic accumulation leveraged by a symbiosis of individual and collective memories. As the projects are mediated by a public university they also have an impact on research, outreach and learning processes on a transnational scale, while operating at three related scales (micro–meso–macro) and dynamically relational to the time perception of an I, his/her icons, his/her interests. The two activist research projects are: ‘MotoAngels’ and the ‘Youth Portal’. These initiatives were and still are opportunities for open forms of engagement in the creative struggle to develop individuation through memory organization leveraged by digital technologies that become assets made visible, and thus endeavour to sustain value–memory–icon flows. In each case, icons play out as an expression of renewed social ontopower (Massumi 2015): they give visibility to the affective potential of systems of people, things and signs. I will be remembered, thus we exist. In practice, the research-actions we present are inspired by the hypothesis of social emancipation potential (i.e. affective communicative memories) being converted into interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder activation of social memories (i.e. effective cultural memory policies). This is key because memory workers at all scales are always seeking to turn memory into actionable knowledge and value. The underlying funding sources (a sole donor in the ‘Motoangels’ project and the São Paulo Prefecture in the ‘Youth Portal’ project) are variously leveraged by the systems of icons and economic sustainability. In what follows, our analysis seeks to demonstrate different forms of monetization, so that new digital, civic and corporate currencies circulate, expanding the temporality of citizenship through the democratic appropriation of individual and social memories.

Case Study 1: Motoboys In 2007, under contract with Fundación Telefónica in a project coordinated by Manuel Castells, the research team at the ‘City of Knowledge’ undertook a field survey on the economics of cell phone usage by ‘motoboy.’1 It was intended as

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an econometric study of price elasticities among low income workers and a potential development was the creation of usage plans for cell phones that would bring the lower and emerging middle classes to the consumer market in big cities.2 The empirical, econometric test never made it to print, for the telecom operator would not share the usage data of about 1,000 volunteer motoboys. As a result of this research impasse, there remained a list of motoboys and motogirls that signed in as voluntary subjects for the econometric survey that never was. Despite the research failure, it exposed the existence of a social group willing to be exposed to information, communication and networking projects. They were willing to be recorded, remembered and their communications networks analysed in order to contribute to knowledge production projects sponsored by the ‘City of Knowledge’ research group at the School of Communication and Arts of a public university. Among the motoboys there was a group of former participants in the ‘Canal Motoboy’ street art project sponsored by the government of Spain and led by Antoni Abad. Since 2004, megafone.net invited groups of people marginalized within society to express their experiences and opinions. Using mobile phones, they created audio recordings, videos, text and images that were immediately published on the Web. According to Abad, participants would ‘transform these devices into digital megaphones, amplifying the voices of individuals and groups who are often overlooked or misrepresented in the mainstream media’ (see https:// megafone.net/saopaulo/about). In São Paulo, the Canal *MOTOBOY was envisaged as an opportunity for motorcycle couriers to ‘report their experiences and document their environments, generating on the Internet a new mode of collective awareness and knowledge. [. . .] communication networks and urban networks are superimposed, connected and complementary within the same pattern of collective intelligence’.3 Once the Fundación Telefónica and the Spanish Art Project were complete, a group of motoboys accepted an invitation to join the ‘Digital Media Management for Local Development Programme’ led by the ‘City of Knowledge’ (2009–2011). The project was named ‘Motoangels’. After seven years,‘Motoangels’ became a feature film project, approved by the National Film Agency (ANCINE) for US$1 million fundraising with full tax exemption among private companies (fundraising is still in progress at the time of writing). Luiz Biccionhi, one of the leading motoboys in the Abad project, intensified his personal engagement with audio-visual recording into a unique, creative experience.4 As background to the film, there are over 300,000 ‘motoboys’ in São Paulo alone, where every day at least one dies from a preventable accident. They are the expendable front line army for the business class in Brazil, without whom the city’s economic activity would suffer near collapse. From years of research comes a film project that makes sense out of the life of one single motoboy, while depicting the limited choices in his life. Through workshops conducted at the University of São Paulo, and numerous in-field interviews, the director

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and screenwriters witnessed the desires and frustrations of the ‘motoboy culture’, along with its inherent contradictions. Out of the workshops grew a scholarshipbased initiative to provide a group of motoboys with training at the university, supporting Bicchioni as a performer, lecturer and video artist. While still a work in progress, the ‘Motoangels’ project is an example of non-linear development leveraged by chance and a very unlikely connection between the elite public university and the low income army of delivery boys and girls who are as visible and invisible in the flow of São Paulo.5 The casual convergence of interests and diverse temporalities (from daily deliveries to longterm, movie production chores) continuously reinforce the humanity of remembering in the big city, a major non-human factor affecting the economics and livelihoods of millions of people. The icon-creation experiment required motoboys to engage with the remediation of their lives through a digital audio-visual collection. These memories in flux (literally) were a means of bringing visibility to the daily trauma of hundreds of young couriers that fall prey to the violence of urban traffic. From communicative memory to icon creation, motoboys engaged in a mobile form of affect that is technologically entangled with urban infrastructures and value chains, traffic regulation, informality and marginality but also with new media tools (such as GoPro cameras on helmets) and social networking (Facebook). There is a marked shift from the most immediate of temporalities (the need to deliver packets as fast as possible within a day) to a self-conscious expansion of images of Self, Other and City into a transformation of critical time–space. In short, the self, the politics of urban occupation, their bodies as embodying urban metabolisms and their lives as local development, the iconicity of new media and the transformation of temporality are clearly in operation as the ‘Motoangels’ icon fabricates its story and labours and the traumas of being young, poor and uneducated in São Paulo. The project itself has led motoboys to the creation of new icons of self-expression while the ebb and flow of videos, meetings and lectures gradually promote the emergence of collected memories that may inform the co-evolution of human and non-human systems in the contemporary urban life-scape. It is this remixing of civic and corporate scales through digital media appropriated differentially by individuals, academia and corporations that takes digital memory studies in new directions.

Case Study 2: Youth Portal The ‘City of Knowledge’ was commissioned to produce the ‘Youth Portal’ in 2015–2016. The curatorship, technical development and training of young, poor, black citizens from the periphery of São Paulo, as well as the news coverage of and technical support to the Municipal Youth Conference all combined to circulate as a collaborative space of opportunities. The Municipal Secretary of Human Rights and Citizenship, through the Youth Department, is the contractor.

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Motoboys and motogirls are mostly young, in a state of flux, unskilled or unable to connect beyond the packet delivery business (synched to the fragility of their bodies on motorbikes). They are victims of their visible ubiquity as well as to their precarious invisibility among the traffic jams in São Paulo, without the right to celebrate their traumatic experience. Moreover, the ‘Youth Portal’ is not restricted to one professional category subject to the contemporary urban youth holocaust. The ongoing genocide of the young, black and poor living in the periphery of Brazilian cities has been documented (see FLACSO 2014). Violence, police brutality, unemployment above average and criminalization of drug addiction all converge to define a reality that is as complex as that of young motorbikers dying for the sake of delivering in the very same streets. However, the ‘Youth Portal’ is part of public policy and the memories of the project are entangled with networking initiatives for the sensitization and engagement of young, black, poor leaders in a not-so-silent insurgence. The organizational and ‘onto-political’ dimensions of the Portal are a challenge to the temporality implied by its existence, as the administration will be subject to electoral validation in 2016. What kind of institutional, identificatory and territorial memories are capable of calling into action those who are not only without a past, but most likely without a future? How to reconfigure individuals, groups, churches, gangsta rappers and other stakeholders in the deep memories of youth in the city? What if the testimonials of disintegration, trauma, deterritorialization and even loss of memory could be summoned by the Portal so as to constitute an emergency visualization of what is about to be lost, already dead? If only the Portal could capture the memory flows of a not-yet-memory of destruction by communicative tactics designed to bypass the orthodoxy in order to give visibility and expression to the oppressed. The publishing and training methodology implemented so far (since January 2016) favours the valuation of audio-visual icons produced by this not-yetmemory but affective-‘potential’ (a ‘pretension’ in the Stieglerian sense) in the making. The challenge to bring the collective pretension to the fore was faced in 2015 with a public call for short films. ‘Audiovisual Emergence: Territory’ was a public call for short videos about young people’s memories of their territories (open to any genre). First prize was the screening of the audio-visual project in Paris at the Last Focus conference. As in the ‘Motoangels’ approach, the production of iconicity requires affect, bodies and interests flowing in the contemporary city (trans-nationally) to both visualize and occupy a new sphere of connections, mobility and meaning in order to result in cultural memory and policy. Again, an engaged exercise in the economics, aesthetics and ethics of temporality and value creation—a privileged observation spot for the emergence of iconomies of memory. For the ‘Youth Portal’, with the institutional support of USP and partnering with an emerging visual anthropology lab in Paris (‘Visual Focus’), a final set of seven short videos (less than three minutes) was produced to respond to the Call on ‘Territory’.

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The winner was invited to France and participated in the Visual Focus conference, returning to Brazil on the day after the terrorist attacks of 2015. Moved by the success of this initiative and its tremendous iconic productivity, the creative audio-visual platform was proposed under a call published by the three state universities of São Paulo (USP, Unicamp and Unesp) for FrancoBrazilian chairs. In December 2015, ‘ReVilleAction’ was among the twenty-one selected proposals. The project will sponsor new exchanges, academic and activist, to connect young people producing communicative memories in the peripheries of São Paulo and Paris. The temporality and the very digital and global possibility of memory (communicative, cultural or even casual) is then put at the centre stage of a trans-national iconomy. Such a creation of value, facilitated (premediated and re-mediated) by academics requires a re-engineering of our skills and capabilities to move among spheres and scales (individual, collective and cultural), so as to connect past and future for a non-violent present. Both Motoangels and the Youth Portal are academic–activist or what we would like to term, as a nod to Henry Jenkins, aca-tivist. They are experiments geared towards this iconic re-engineering of time perceptions as a necessary condition for the identification of new rights, territorialities and identities.

Conclusion Digital memory work at the margins is risky work. Both initiatives (with ‘motoboys’ and the ‘youth portal’) play with the individual and the collective, the public and the private, the instrumental and the artistic dimensions under similar virtual space/community-creation methodologies. They are opportunities for the revelation of variable degrees of appropriation of identity, organized power and monetary creation. Each defines a specific pathos for the connection of personal narratives and cultural/political economies in a digital age. These iconomies of memory (for the motoboys or the youth) also express the triadic structure that underlie local, national and global media ‘archaeologies’. Their changing mobility, visibility and reputation may be the last resort of underserved communities facing daily violence and physical destruction as citizens, consumers or workers, while suffering a sustained, automated, programmed ‘iconicide’, as their memes, codes, symbols and narratives are disciplined into extinction. Although open to live instability, the remediation role of free academia is under test as the ‘City of Knowledge’ in São Paulo, as it affectively engages in projects geared towards the transformation of flows in the real, social economy so as to overcome inequality and expand the opportunity in the public as well as in the private spheres. In other words, the re-membering of socially vulnerable citizens is leveraged by a collaborative audio-visual production of memory through networking projects led by this different kind of ‘university’ so as to support its own re-mediation projects. The resulting, altered flows affect mobility, visibility and

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market value as long as these initiatives bear on the constraints of supply–demand, scarcity–abundance, production, distribution and investment. The inherited memory as well as the institutional framework of memory and confidence building is now subject to a deep crisis in all peripheries of the world (in particular Brazil), as the past is cleansed by leaktivism. Maybe this time it will be possible to take advantage of the digital deep time of citizenship to empower marginal memories. If our case studies signal emerging iconic capabilities among the under-served citizenship, then the emancipatory horizon could be kept open to rationality as the iconicization of social memories is expressively promoted and (re)evaluated by local communities in the digital realm. The role of the inter-scaled university and the partnerships of academic–entrepreneurs (digging the data story for iconic memory creation) requires new self-reflexive and persona–social–professional analytical frameworks for understanding the increasingly implicit transnational cultural policy of digital memory research.

Notes 1 ‘Motoboys’ (and ‘motogirls) are fast delivery workers on motorcycles in São Paulo. 2 The final report was published by Fundación Telefónica in 2001, available at https:// publiadmin.fundaciontelefonica.com/index.php/publicaciones/add_descargas?title= Mobile+Communications+and+Economic+and+Social+Development+in+Latin+ America&code=97&lang=en&file=comunicacion_movil_y_desarrollo.pdf. 3 Born in 1956, son of the sculptor Antonio Abad Gil and poet Teresa Rosas, Abad´s artistic work evolved from traditional sculptural concepts to the use of new technologies. See http://megafone.net/saopaulo, http://banquete.org/banquete08/Canal-MOTOBOY2007-08 and http://megafone.net/user/index for participants worldwide. 4 See http://www.motoanjos.com/ for the feature film and https://www.youtube.com/ user/luiz1setde2010/videos for the collection of Bicchioni´s vídeo-memories. 5 The economic flows associated to this icon creation project leveraged by communicative memories involve research funding by the University of São Paulo but also active entrepreneurship in the film industry. See http://www.cidade.usp.br/wp-content/ uploads/2011/07/Variety_071811.jpg and http://joetripi.ipower.com/AlmanaqueTVINTEVIEW-ENG.pdf.

References Abad, Antoni. Canal*MOTOBOY Net.Art and Installation. (2007/8) http://banquete.org/ banquete08/Canal-MOTOBOY-2007-08. Ahearne, Jeremy. “Cultural policy explicit and implicit: a distinction and some uses”, International Journal of Cultural Policy, (2009) 15: 2, 141–153. Allen, Matthew. “Memory in technoscience: Biomedia and the wettability of mnemonic relations”, in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition edited by Andrew Hoskins, 190–213. New York: Routledge, 2017. Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and cultural memory”, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 109–118. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008.

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Bond, Lucy, Steff Craps and Peter Vermeulen (eds). Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. Brockmeier, Jens. “After the Archive: Remapping Memory”, Culture and Psychology, (2010) 16: 5–35. Brown, Steven. D. and Reavey Paula. Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a Difficult Past, London: Routledge, 2015. Brown, Steven. D. and Hoskins Andrew. “Terrorism in the new memory ecology: Mediating and remembering the 2005 London Bombings”, Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression (2010) 2: 2, 87–107. Clarke, Margaret. “Digital Brazil: open-source nation and the meta-recycling of knowledge”, in The “Noughties” in the Hispanic and Lusophone World edited by Kathy Bacon and Niamh Thornton, 203–217. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Costa, Alessandra Mello, Barros, Denise Franca., and Celano, Ana Christina. “The Social Engagement of Individual Memories: The Petrobras Workers’ Memory Program”, Academy of Management Journal Proceedings January 2013. Available at: http://proceedings. aom.org/content/2013/1/16372.short. Accessed 1 April 2016. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory”, Parallax (2011), 17: 4, 4–18. Erll, Astrid. “Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory”, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar. Nünning, 389–398. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. FLACSO, Mapa da Violência—Os Jovens do Brasil 2014. Available at http://www. mapadaviolencia.org.br/mapa2014_jovens.php. Accessed 12 March 2016. Gerbaudo, Paulo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, London: Pluto Books, 2012. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory, London: Harper & Row, 1980. Hoskins, Andrew. “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn”, Parallax, 2011, 17: 4, 19–31. Hoskins, Andrew. “Memory of the Multitude: The End of Collective Memory.” In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 85–109. New York: Routledge, 2017. Huyssen, Andreas. “The Crisis of Success: What Next in Memory Studies?”, in “Dispersal and redemption: the future dynamics of memory studies—A roundtable” edited by Peter Vermeulen et al. Memory Studies 2012, 5: 2, 226–228. Huyssen, Andreas. “Memory Culture at an Impassse: Memorials in Berlin and New York”, in The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Essays in Honor of Martin Jay, edited by Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk, 151–161. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Moses, Samuel Moyn and Elliot Neaman, 151–161, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009. Jaguaribe, Helio. Brazil, the World and Man Today Various Studies, Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão, Brasilia. 2009. Available at http://funag.gov.br/loja/download/657-Brazil_ the_World_and_Man_Today.pdf. Accessed 4 March 2016. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kavada, Anastasia. “Internet Cultures and Protest Movements: the Cultural Links Between Strategy, Organizing and Online Communication”, in Mediation and Protest Movements edited by Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni and Patrick McCurdy, 75–94, Bristol: Intellect, 2013. Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation”, Public Culture 2003, 15:3, 477–493.

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11 GLOBITAL MEMORY CAPITAL Theorizing digital memory economies Anna Reading and Tanya Notley

Introduction Like all memory, 21st century memory is both energetic and material. Digitalglobal memory is material since it is made of and with many objects: wires, hardware, software and all the natural and man-made resources used to make these; and it is energetic because it is made up of the labour we employ to think, act, recall, respond and share. In this way, memory involves the energetic work or labour of remembering or forgetting which through our own actions—and those of others—becomes accumulated in various materialised states of memory capital. However, unlike previous epochs, 21st century digital-global or ‘globital’ memory involves us in a complex infrastructure of networks, devices, cables, transmission towers and more. Technologies like mobile phones, cameras, tablets and computers as well as memory-making platforms like social media sites and websites are used to create our digital memories. In turn, devices and hard drives as well as underground and undersea cables are used to store and circulate our digital memories across temporalities and territories. This requires vast industrialised commodity chains and hidden material infrastructures that are all animated by electricity. Globital memory might be charaterised as being ephemerally ‘up there’ in ‘the cloud’—like a digital version of heaven or the afterlife—but, in fact, it rests on an economy that is dug up from the ground; globital memory requires the harvesting of natural materials that are industrially produced such as rare earths, silicon, copper, lead, tin and gold as well as the wresting and burning of gas, oil and water-fueled energy to both create and activate digital devices at a scale never previously known. This chapter begins by outlining the economic and social context for globital memory, pointing to the significance of digital inequalities in relation to digital

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infrastructures and environmental impact. We then examine relevant literature that has emphasised the digital inequalities and environmental impact of digital-global memory. Following this, we introduce our concept of globital memory capital as a conceptual tool that we believe offers a new way for memory researchers and activists to understand and interrogate digital-global memory economies. This chapter on globital memory economies develops our own original analytical framework for understanding digital and unevenly globalised memory economies. We use this framework to define and ‘see’ the uneven mnemonic economy of our digital devices beyond the screen, the hidden digital infrastructures required of them as well as the ethical imperatives of this economy in terms of addressing the uneven environmental impact on the planet. The aim of the chapter is to provide researchers and students with a conceptual and analytical overview that they can then apply in more detail to a wider range of case studies and empirical examples. In this way, we hope to contribute to a critical rethink of the commercial and public sector rhetoric surrounding digital media—including the associated digital-global memory this media creates—as essentially cheap, green, clean and abundant. Rather, we argue that digital memory studies scholars need to pay more attention to the economic and political dimensions of digital-global memory in order to understand how local and transnational memories work in uneven and unequal ways that result in substantial costs to both the environment and the less privileged who are left outside of the global north or what Peter Sloterdijk characterises as the ‘privileged Inside’ (2013, 8).

The digital-global memory divide Within 21st century corporate discourse, ‘digital memory’ is often ascribed greater value than the flesh and blood of human memory, which is increasingly characterised as limited, unreliable and obsolete. The discursive, commercial construction of fallible organic human memory promotes a seemingly more reliable commodified digital memory: relieved of the unpaid labour of having to organically remember our own lives or the lives of those who have passed away: an electronic chip located in a data centre can do this for us with the investment of very little material resources, or indeed much energetic effort. This kind of commercial discourse on digital memory suggests that human beings will no longer be required to labour to remember or indeed forget their own lives or the lives of those who have passed away: data retained on an electronic chip either at home or on a server somewhere can do it all for us. Magically, these dis-embodied memor ies, can be accessed, analysed, deleted, hidden and shared whenever we so desire. The external storage of personal and collective memory is not new: tools, practices and technologies have always been used—capturing images on a mobile

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phone and storing this in ‘the cloud’ or ‘on social media sites’ (i.e. on servers in data centers) in this respect is on a continuum with humans recording memories by painting them on cave walls. We can say also that whenever memory has been stored externally there are vulnerabilities introduced in terms of how safe and secure that memory is and also in terms of how mobile and enduring that memory is. But then that is true for personal organic memory too. Our own memories, our brains, are also unreliable. We can create false memories, we forget, we change details, we connect memories in imprecise ways. When we choose to store memories externally, however, we make some decisions—consciously or unconsciously—about our need for recollection, about the desire to make these memories shared or enduring. Yet, globital memory is distinct in two key ways: first globital memory assemblages are mobilised across what Pierre Bourdieu would term ‘a field of cultural production’ (1993) that is both external and internal: for example, medical imaging penetrates our bodies and turns us inside out; digital probes and listening devices capture and record data memories from the far reaches of the universe and bring that knowledge to earth. Humans are moblised and moved by these complex assemblages. Secondly, the globital memory field is highly industrialised. It involves far more actors to make and recall memories than in any previous epoch: highly complex machines, companies, policies, institutions, industrial supply chains, hardware, software and algorithms. More than 2.3 billion people (almost one-third of the world’s population) are now estimated to be creating and sharing personal memories on social media sites (We Are Social 2016), while one commercial provider claims that 38 per cent of internet users are now storing their personal data in cloud services (Cisco 2015). This growth is driving data traffic flows: used cross-border bandwidth has grown 45 times larger between 2005 and 2014 (McKinsey Global Institute 2016). These dramatic numbers are closely connected to the fact that just over half of the world’s population now have a mobile phone device with an active subscription (We Are Social 2016), which enables ever-more pervasive personal memory recording and sharing. Social network sites, cloud services and digital recording technologies—including computers, mobile phones, still and video cameras—comprise just some of the critical components of digital-global memory infrastructure. Drawing on Larkin (2013, 328) however, we can more broadly define digital-global or globital memory infrastructures as the material and energetic sociotechnical systems that allow us to create, enable, record and/or distribute memories across time and/ or space. In this way, the creation, mobility, animation and security of globital memory rests on a complex assemblage of human and non-human infrastructures and global supply chains involving natural and man-made resources, capital and labour, in which perhaps the most invisible but essential element required is electricity. Without electricity there is no digital or globital memory: there is no access to mobile phones or the internet. Without electricity we are left

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without easy, mobile access to distant friends and family and, for many, without access to family photos, groups discussions, news, information and culture. But rarely do we think about the environmental resources and physical materials digital-global memory uses and relies on. As John Durham Peters suggests in The Marvelous Clouds (2015), 21st century humans do not notice the wifi-enabled gold fish bowls we eat, sleep and make memories within: except when the bowl is threatened or momentarily drained. The political economy of globital memory is perhaps best highlighted when we pay attention to where mnemonic infrastructures are absent or at their weakest. For example, when storms cause failures in electricity grids and this impacts data centers or internet service providers, which in turn restricts our access to our data and our ability to create or share new memories; when the global undersea broadband cables are damaged and the internet—or part of it—works slowly for a day in or between some countries (making some websites or web services appear to work slowly); or when we find ourselves in a place without or with restricted mobile phone connectivity. Similarly, we rarely consider what it means that globital memory is far from equal or even in terms of inclusion and participation: while 3.2 billion people were using the internet in 2015, two-thirds of the world’s population from developing countries were still not using the internet. Mobile developments, in particular, are accelerating access to internet-based communication in developing countries: yet 3G mobile coverage varies significantly between rural and urban locations and between developed and developing countries (ITU 2015). The cost of broadband access and the quality of broadband (both very important for memory storage and sharing) also still vary enormously (ibid.). These everchanging but also fairly persistent infrastructural disparities mean that our digitalglobal memory production, storage and circulation practices may be widening and deepening inequalities in terms of individual and collective memory-making capacities. The macro unevenness of the globital memory economy is built on longestablished global inequalities in terms of economic infrastructures as evidenced through inequities in terms of access to electricity. The World Bank‘s Report Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) Global Electrification Data Base for 2011–14 shows substantial inequalities in terms of access to electricity, making digitalglobal memory not just a challenge, but impossible for millions of people worldwide. There are those countries where between around one-half or twothirds have access to electricity such as Afghanistan with 43 per cent, Bangladesh 59 per cent, India at 79 per cent and Nicaragua 78 per cent. But these are well off in comparison with some countries in the African continent that have such low levels of access it makes the creation, storage and circulation of digital-global memory just a dream for most people: thus Burkino Faso has just 13 per cent of households with electricity, Burundi, just 7 per cent, Chad 6 per cent, and South Sudan 5 per cent. Electricity infrastructures therefore very much determine

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people’s capacity to create, store and circulate digital memories. As Lisa Parks (2015, 121) writes, ‘In Zambia it is the movement of water . . . that generates the capacity to access the Internet and use mobile phones’ since the country is powered by hydro-electricity. However, since the cost to electrify a home is around US$15,000 most people instead are forced to find other piecemeal ways to generate electricity using small solar panels, car batteries or the use of local services. For the global north however, electricity access is near 100 per cent and considered a prerequisite for living along with clean water, shelter and food (World Bank 2016). There are other notable macro economic and technological inequalities that evidence not so much the economic ubiquitous abundance of digital memory, but its globitality. Data centers and associated “cloud computing” services are the core components of the digital-global memory creation and storage industries. Recent research (for example, the Media Culture & Society April 2014 Issue on Mediated Mobilities), highlights the importance of materialities, fixed points and immobilities embedded within our digital media use. To begin with, the United States is home to the world’s largest cloud service companies and it has the largest concentration of data centers; therefore this is where the most wealth is accrued from our decision to store memories in data centers (Mosco 2014). The most popular large-scale knowledge filters or search engines that enable users to easily search and filter the World Wide Web for relevant online digitalglobal memory records—everything from digitised newspaper content to Instagram image collections—are also primarily US based (Jin 2015).While alternative search engines are certainly available, and in places like China necessary, it is Google that has dominated the search of globital memories in recent years and therefore has the ability to most impact on memory recall and circulation. Google accordingly accumulates further capital from our mnemonic requirements. At the micro level there has been some flattening out of memory inequalities over the past two decades due to the rise in access to mobile phones. Yet, there remain significant gaps in digital memory capacities at the micro economic level in terms of inequalities of access to technical and training support as well as other affordances that include, as we have mentioned, electricity but also time, money, information, skills, literacy, language as well as the ability to evade (where required) surveillance and censorship. (Parks 2015). There are also major disparities in digital memory economies in terms of intersectional access relating to gender and class. For example, studies of mobile phone use show that in some economies women are subject to mobile phone data loss in ways that men are not: a study in northern India shows that upon marriage some women are expected to give up their own mobile phones and instead must share them with men, thereby losing their contacts and information (Doron 2012). Similarly, a study in North America shows that if couples are economically disadvantaged, the woman is more likely to give up having a mobile phone and thus social media access too and instead share her partner’s phone, losing data security and privacy (Garcia, 2011). This is very different from the use of mobile phones as memory prosthetics in the UK in which two studies

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in 2006 and 2015 showed that middle class women had control over their own smartphones (Reading 2016). We could continue to provide examples of the unevenness of memory capital across class and gender, but the overall picture is that, while mediated memory is globalised and digitised, the political economy of digital memory is as unequal as the capitalist economy of which it is a part. This unevenness has not gone unnoticed by academics in the fields of media and memory studies (see Reading 2016) In the following section we examine important studies and literature that have focused on digital memory economy inequities and we introduce literature relating to the material environmental costs and burdens caused by an expanding digital memory industry.

The forgetting of memory economies Despite the massive growth of and growing reliance on digital memory production and storage and a strong academic interest in these developments as well as associated issues of wealth and power, until recently, very few memory or media scholars have acknowledged that there is a political economy to both micro and macro digital memory. Mnemologists (those who study or work in the fields of memory and heritage) have focussed largely on the politics and power of memory and forgetting for the individual and for collectives. There has been a forgetting in the field of memory studies of the role and importance of the economy and very few studies, as we shall see, have sought to explore the ways that this is founded on a complex materiality that is often connected to the fraught supply chains involving exploited labour and substantial environmental damage. This, we believe, points to the need for a conceptual tool to see and analyse what we refer to as memory capital. Emergent work seeks to consider the economies of memory more broadly in a variety of ways. Jessica Rapson has examined how the memory of slave economies of sugar plantations are effectively refined in contemporary tourist attractions to separate out and eliminate the difficult pasts associated with the slave labour (Rapson 2016). Zeina Tarraf (2016) argues that not only has private finance effectively covered up the memory of the civil war in Beirut through a neoliberal building scheme of ‘luxury restaurants and designer boutiques’ that has pushed out refugees from the war, but that Western finance behind films about the war has also served to structure filmic memories. However, what such research largely seeks to understand is how elements of the global economy are ‘remembered’ within mediated or literary memory, or perhaps within heritage sites. Our work is more concerned with how historic (and unequal) infrastructures are being socially inherited because they are embedded within the mnemonic economies of the 21st century. Because of this, we contend that the inherent economic dimensions of memory in the context of globalised digital memory require a new approach to conceptualise and productively

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analyse the political economy in relation to the role of mnemonic capital, labour and value within digital infrastructures and supply chains. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2010) argues that in the 21st century the working class or less privileged are made economic agents whose knowledge and memories are exploited by machines. Stiegler contends that a new sociotechnics of memory and the reworking of the temporal dimensions of knowledge are critical to understanding 21st century economies. His work suggests the need in memory studies to analyse not only the technological infrastructures required to create, store and circulate digital memory, but also the broader economy of the globital memory field in terms of how it involves a struggle over resources by economic agents (and we would add memory agents) within 21st century capitalism. However, Steigler’s work does not consider the way the environment is made an economic agent in this process. Stacy Alaimo (2010, 5) points out that humanities and social science scholarship has actively ignored human and nature interconnections and dismantling this requires that we reject ‘gendered dualisms—nature / culture, body / mind, object / subject, resource / agency, and others—that have been cultivated to denigrate and silence certain groups of human as well as nonhuman life’. This view is further endorsed by Jane Bennett (2010, viii) who urges us to consider the ‘vitality’—by which the capacity of things like edibles, commodities, storms, metals—to ‘not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’. By critiquing the ‘vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans’, Bennett’s work points to an understanding of digital memory that considers how political economies and events might be altered if we recognised ‘the force of things’ rather than seeing them dead and inert (Bennett 2010, viii). This is also suggested in work that comes from theories of the Anthropocene: Timothy Clark’s (2012) study points to the necessity within digital memory studies to be attentive to a mnemonic economy that includes the effect that the labour of memory and forgetting has on the future of the planet. The emphasis on including within the humanities an examination of environmental issues on a planetary scale (Heise 2008; Nixon 2011) points, as we shall see, to including within any analysis of digital memory economies recognition of ecological memory capital. The lack of research on memory materialities and environmental impact within memory studies more broadly can to some degree be attributed to the origins and development of this field of study in relation to media studies. The most cited popular media texts used in the global north to teach media studies do not include anything significant on the environmental consequences of media and communication technologies and products (for example, Curran 2010; Croteau, Hoynes and Milan 2012; Fiske 2010; Branston and Roy 2010; Hartley 2012; Flew 2014). One important exception is Maxwell and Miller’s (2012)

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Greening the Media, a seminal text that points the way for digital memory scholars to engage with the environmental consequences of media production and to investigate their materiality more generally. They show the historical and current environmental damage caused by different media technologies and include significant data on the ongoing impact of digital communication technologies. For example, they highlighted the findings from an industry report that found in 2008 the proportion of the world’s metals going into media technologies, from televisions to telephones, was 36 per cent of tin, 25 per cent of cobalt, 15 per cent of palladium, 15 per cent of silver, 9 per cent of gold, 2 per cent of copper, and 1 per cent of aluminium, while the best available estimates for 2007 suggested that media technologies and production accounted for around 3 per cent of greenhouse gases emitted around the world. However, what their work also highlights is the difficultly of investigating and accurately reporting on the materiality of media, in part because of complex supply chains, but also because of a lack of enforceable environmental impact reporting requirements at a company, national or global level. The figures provided by Maxwell and Miller are often piecemeal, based on the data they were able to find in industry and industry watchdog reports. In this regard, this is also then the challenge for any analysis of the political economy of digital memory. Vincent Mosco’s (2014) To The Cloud has also been influential in drawing attention to the political economy and hidden costs of digital communication technologies critical to globital memory. Mosco delves into the opaque operations of cloud computing and finds aggressive lobbying and industry consolidation, persuasive advertising and marketing, and a lack of transparency and openness, are acting to not only define the reality of cloud computing, but also the discourse that surrounds it. By scrutinising the activities of cloud companies and the threats and vulnerabilities of cloud computing, Mosco illustrates the importance of understanding the social, economic, cultural and (less so) the environmental impact of a rapidly expanding digital memory industry that has increasing control of—in ways most people are yet to fully understand—our memory and knowledge reservoirs based largely on our own reporting on our everyday lives and archiving practices. In terms of environmental destruction, Mosco argues that the first obstacle we have in identifying the problems associated with data economies lies in the use of ‘the cloud’ as a metaphor to describe the hardware, labour and software responsible for digital storage. ‘As long as [officials and citizens] continue to think of data centers as clouds rather than as factories, they will continue to have problems making sound decisions.’ (127) Jussi Parikka’s essay, The Anthrobscene (2014) and his subsequent A Geology of Media (2015) encourage us to critique the environmental destruction caused by media technologies through the conceptual lens of ‘deep time’ where we are encouraged to see media as geophysical, comprising millions of years of productive work by the earth to create minerals that make media possible. Earlier (2001, 2) Parikka employed the term ‘medianatures’ (drawing from Donna Haraway’s

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idea of naturecultures) to refer to ‘the topological continuum between nature and culture, the material entwining and enfolding of various agencies, meanings and interactions’ based on a starting premise that ‘media are of nature, and return to nature.’ Parikka’s attempts to emphasise and richly explore the material consequences of media are in many ways pioneering. Deep time, for Parikka, is useful because it helps ‘force media theory outside the usual scope of media studies to look at the wider milieu in which media materially and politically become media in the first place’ (2015, 44). He points out the materialist emphasis in the study of media perhaps first emerged in Germany and particularly with Friedrich Kittler whose approach involved ‘understanding of the science and engineering realities that govern the highly fine-structured computer worlds in which we live—without ignoring the fact that technical media did not start with the digital’ (2). By acknowledging the complex materiality of media through the concept of ‘deep time’ (a term originally developed within geology in the 18th century by James Hutton and since used by a number of cultural theorists) we are then able to better see the diversity of environmental implications, not only in our own time, but also in past and future time. Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker’s edited book, Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016) also points to the impact of digital memory in the future, when it comes to its end of life: the dumping of e-waste within the rivers and land of the global south means that ‘those who are already lacking money and resources suffer more from environmental despoliation’ (15). Their work again points to how digital memory studies needs to ‘grapple with the massive amount of energy drawn and expended to power media systems, the extraction of materials to construct media technologies, and the toxicities of use and disposal’ (15). In our own work we highlight the global supply chains of labour and capital in relation to the environment by tracing important minerals necessary for our digital gadgets such as rare earths (Reading 2014; Reading and Notley 2015). Most research in this area, however, has been carried out by journalists and activists—particularly in relation to the human and environmental destruction and abuse caused by unregulated coltan mining in the Congo. In Blood and Earth (2016), researcher and activist Kevin Bales writes: Our consumer economy is driven at its most basic level by resource extraction, pulling things from the earth, an extraction that we never actually see. We pull food from the earth, of course, but we also pull our cellphones from the earth, our clothing, our computers, our flat-screen televisions, our cars—it all comes from the earth, ultimately. And pulling things from the earth can be a dirty business. To make our consumer economy hum and grow and instantly gratify, costs are driven down as low as they can go, especially at the bottom of the supply chain; this can lead to abusive conditions for workers and harm to the natural world. Taken to the extreme it means slavery

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and catastrophic environmental destruction. But all this normally happens far from any prying eyes. It’s a hidden world that keeps its secrets. The infrastructural and industrialised distinctiveness of the digitally mediated world requires us to forget the infrastructure. Infrastructures are also designed to conceal themselves, sometimes literarily through being buried—our water, electricity, broadband all go underground and behind walls (Peters 2015, 35). In addition, Peters suggests that remembering infrastructures also points to the extent to which media is ‘fundamentally logistical’ (37). Digital media, and by extension we would suggest digital memory, relies on complex logistics. Bringing together packets of data, zeros and ones, to URL addresses through GPS and triangulated mobile phone masts or complex underground and undersea cable systems or wifi spectrum is then about making the logistical and infrastructural elements of digital memory ontologically visible. These logistical operations are designed to produce media and memories about citizens: they record what people have purchased, where they have been and what they have been doing while vested interests use this information to develop powerful algorithms that serve to manipulate experiences and behaviours (Rossiter 2016). Building on Peters (2015), Larkin (2013), Rossiter (2016) and other useful infrastructuralist accounts of digital media and memory, we seek to develop concepts and methods that may support us to address the inequalities and unsustainabilities of digital-global memory in terms of the economy at both the macro and micro everyday levels. In the third part of this chapter we thus propose a new tool for ‘seeing’ and analysing globital memory capital and the economies which drive and determine how it functions.

Globital memory capital In this section, building on the approach of Pierre Bourdieu who argued that capital is not always monetised but may be social, cultural or symbolic, we suggest that digital memory labour creates digital-global or rather globital memory capital (Bourdieu 1986). Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital seeks to recognise the non-financial assets that result from the accumulated labour involved in cultural production and consumption. Similarly, we argue that digital memory in and of itself should be considered a cultural field that involves the accumulation of mnemonic capital given value through mnemonic labour. Capital, Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, is ‘accumulated labour’ in ‘materialized form’ (1986, 81). However, capital is never purely fiscal or objectively monetised: in Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, which includes language, he makes the distinction between three states of capital: embodied cultural capital, objectified cultural capital in the ‘form of goods’ and institutionalised cultural capital (1986, 81). By extension, we suggest that to understand the political economy of globital memory, we need a new analytical tool which we term ‘memory capital’. This

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we suggest is the accumulation of energetic mnemonic labour (of remembering, of forgetting) in materialised form. Globital memory capital, like cultural capital, is not singularly fiscal or monetised—though it may become so. Rather, it takes various states comprised of mnemonic assets, mnemonic resources, mnemonic reserves and mnemonic affordances and it is accumulated through mnemonic labour. Drawing on this concept, we argue that memory capital provides one lens through which we can recognise the historical, accumulated labour associated with the production, storage and circulation of digital memories. The concept also allows us to see how inequalities arise in the production, storage, and circulation of globital memory and how these inequalities are exploited, resulting in hidden memory costs and consequences. Globital memory capital is accumulated from human and machine labour. Globital memory capital—whether this takes the form of a digital photograph posted to Instagram or a digital book sold on websites like Amazon—has four potential states. The first state is embodied memory capital. This can be understood as accumulated human dispositions that include repertoires required for walking and talking and everyday activities, specialist knowledge such as acquiring language and digital literacy and creating, remembering and forgetting personal and shared stories about the past. This embodied memory state, through mnemonic labour, is continually being transformed and accumulated as objectified memory capital. This includes semi-fixed memory artefacts such as webpages, photo albums, digital books and archives as well as mobile phones, USB sticks, computers and data centers. Further collectivised mnemonic labour can then move, transform and accumulate further globital memory in the state of institutionalised memory capital. This involves recognition conferred on memory capital by institutions that can include the family, the school, the state, the corporation, the public museum as well as less formally recognised non-governmental bodies such as charities and social movements. These four states are not distinct and discrete. Rather, the labour of memory agents mobilises, transforms and accumulates memory capital in and across each state. This is because, as Hoskins (this volume, Chapter 1) notes, digital technologies have ‘re-engineered memory, liberating it from the traditional bounds of the archive, the organization, the institution, and distributed it on a continuous basis via a connectivity between brains, bodies, and personal and public lives’. However, while Bordieu’s concept usefully expands our capacity to understand how historical and current labour is used to produce, store and circulate globital memory, we find it problematic in its disregard for the role played by the natural environment. We find that all of these three described capital states—and the associated connectivities that exist between and among them—can be seen to both rest on and return to ecological memory capital. Within the age of the Anthropocene, this involves planetary geology and environment that goes beyond human ecosystems but that has already been irrevocably altered by human activities,

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embodied memory capital

ecological memory capital

accumulated human dispositions such as repetoires, specialist knowledge and stories about the past

(un)natural elements such as forests, water, rare earths and digital waste

mnemonic labour the labour of memory agents mobilises, consolidates and accumulates memory capital in its various states

institutionalised memory capital

objectified memory capital

conferred recognition of memory capital by institutions such as the family, the school, the states, the public museum

semi-fixed memory artefacts such as webpages, photo albums, digital books and archives as well as mobile phones, USB sticks, computers and data centers

FIGURE 11.1

The four states of globital memory capital

including mnemonic practices many tens of thousands of years old. Ecological memory capital is exploited, altered and destroyed in the process of creating other states of memory capital. Thus, we add ecological capital as a fourth memory state essential to digital memory. By recognising these four states of memory capital, we believe that memory capital can begin to surface from beneath the digital screen and out of the apparent invisibility of the ‘cloud’. These four states of memory capital are accumulated through various kinds of mnemonic labour by memory agents who work to make, mobilise and consolidate memories. So how then might this analytical tool be used and what might it help illuminate about memory capital for the researcher or student? We suggest it can be used to identify and analyse the economic base to digital memory that tends to be ignored within digital memory studies, as well as to highlight the contradictory and complex character of digital memory in the 21st century, its exploitation of labour in relation to its impact on marginalised groups and the environment. We can illustrate how the concept of memory capital can be applied through an examination of the relationship of the digital imaging of the Quinkan Australian Aboriginal rock art figures—that are rapidly available via a Google search and can be displayed on demand in full colour wherever there is a digitally connected device—and the actual, original artworks. The original Quinkan figures were painted in caves and on rocks across an area covering around 230,000 hectares in northeastern Australia (Matthews 2016; Gordan 2014; Flood 1997). In this case, mined white, yellow, black and a rare blue ochre (rock) was exported

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and traded across Australia and this—alongside practices that helped sustain the artworks (such as protecting areas and re-tracing the artworks)—allowed the embodied memories to be stored in these figures for as long as 30,000 years. Researcher, Rosy Whelan describes the art as: almost like looking at somebody’s photo album where they’re explaining to you the meaning of their life, their culture and how they live. . .Their stories are painted on the walls, if only you know how to interpret them. The food they ate. The animals they lived with. I mean we’re talking about some animals like diprotodons which have been extinct for an incredibly long time. . .You’ve got all of that right through to first contact, man on horse. (Cited in Gordan 2014). The Quinkan paintings themselves—and the mining used to make them—resulted in changes to the planet, and the exploitation of ecological capital to create objectified memory capital. But as Jacqueline Flood (1997) shows in her study of indigenous rock art, ochre was mined in Australia using a low environmental impact method. In many ways these artworks are today protected and mobilised through institutionalised capital: the paintings are now referred collectively as the Quinkan Galleries and local Aboriginal community members work with town and regional authorities to manage a cultural center and tours while the artworks are also being considered for nomination for World Heritage status (Gordan 2014; Quinkan Centre 2009). Yet while many of these artworks remain available in the original location where they were first painted (largely due to their very remote location), many rock paintings have been destroyed by mining and developers in Australia, or degraded because mnemonic practices by indigenous Australians were lost through British colonial invasion and forced movement. Other sites are at risk because of mining proposals to extract materials considered essential for our digital devices and infrastructures such as gold (essential to computer chips), diamonds (particularly important for quantum computing) and coal (used for electricity) (Gordan 2014; Matthews 2016; Milman 2014). Much of the ongoing protection of the artworks and the memories they embody will in part be determined by government legislation that has so far not valued this ancient memory sufficiently to ensure the preservation and protection of the paintings of Aboriginal communities in the face of these pressures. (Matthews 2016). In this way we can see that the production of globital memory in the form of objectified memory capital—our mobile phones, laptops, tablets and PC devices as well as the vast hidden infrastructures of data centers, cables and satellites—destroys the objective memory capital accumulated through the mnemonic labour of indigenous people over tens of thousands of years. In turn then, when we wish to upgrade our memory capital, our objectified memory capital must go somewhere—and

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indeed it does—recycled and stripped of its essential elements, with the majority dumped in the river systems and landfill sites of the global south (Maxwell and Miller 2012; Gabrys 2011).

Conclusion: Understanding Memory Capital In this chapter, we have set out how digital-global memory economies need to be situated within a context that understands they are unevenly globalised and digitised (what we refer to as globital). We suggest that globital memory is energetic and material and is distinct from mediated memory in previous epochs in two important ways. Firstly, what we might understand as globital memory assemblages are moved across ‘a field of action’ that is both external and internal. Secondly the ‘field’ of globital memory is unlike previous mediated memory epochs in that it is ever more industrialised: it requires highly complex industrial supply chains, machines, and technologies with intense skills sets by the memory agents involved in remembering and forgetting. Finally we argue that our concept of ‘memory capital’ provides a useful analytical tool for ‘seeing’, tracing the contours of and understanding the economies of globital memory. Memory capital is the materialised accumulation of mnemonic labour across different states. At the center of these states is the labour employed to create digital memories: from the mining of minerals to the act of remembering past events. One often ignored state is ecological memory capital that is exploited and transformed into other forms of capital that we argue, building on Bourdieu, include objectified, embodied and institutionalised memory capital. These forms of memory capital, we suggest, are critical for understanding the economic dimensions that now underpin all memory work, but they are particularly critical within a 21st century context where corporate actors work to obfuscate the economic costs to the planet and people by naturalising and rendering invisible digital memory inequalities through the commercial rhetoric of ‘the cloud’ and by promoting the idea that digital technologies are clean and immaterial. We argue that the concept of memory capital can be used by media and memory studies academics and students to analyse the consequences of personal and collective memory including the impact on less powerful actors and on the natural environment.

References Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter a Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Bale, Kevin. Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecoside and the Secret to Saving the World. United States: Spiegel & Grau, 2016. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Forms of Capital’ (1986) Cultural Theory: An Anthology. Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy (eds) 2010 pp. 81–93.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity. 1993. Gill Branston with Roy Stafford. The Media Student’s Book. 5th Editirion. Abingdon: Routledge. 2010. CISCO. ‘Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2013–18.’ San Jose: CISCO, 2014. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge the Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. Edited by Corporation Ebooks. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Croteau, David. Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. Edited by William Hoynes, Stefania Milan and David Croteau. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 2012. Doron, A., ‘Mobile Persons: Cell phones, gender and the self in North India’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 13 (5), pp. 414–433. 2012. Fiske, John. Introduction to Communication Studies. Edited by Henry Jenkins and Ron Becker. 3rd ed. Abingdon: Routledge 2011. Flood, J. Rock Art of the Dreamtime: Images of Ancient Australia, Sydney: Angus & co, 1997. Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. 4th ed.: South Melbourne, Vic. Oxford University Press, 2014. Gabrys, Jennifer. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Garcia, O.P.M. ‘Gender Digital Divide: The Role of Mobile Phones Among Latina Farm Workers in South East Ohio’, Gender, Technology and Development, 15 (1), (2011), pp. 53–74. Gordan, Kent. ‘Percy Trezise: One Man’s Passion for Quinkan Rock Art Helps Preserve Aboriginal Cultural History.’ Australian Broadcasting Corporation News (2014). Published electronically 31 March 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-31/quinkan-rockart-percy-trezise/5255960. Hartley, John. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies the Key Concepts. 4th ed. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2012. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hoskins, Andrew. 2017. ‘The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Media and Memory.’ In Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 1–24. New York: Routledge. International Telecommunications Union. ‘ICT: Facts and Figures.’ International Telecommunications Union, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf. Jin, Dal Yong. Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political Culture. Edited by Corporation Ebooks. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2015. Matthews, Jacqueline. ‘Why Is the Quinkan Rock Art ‘Endangered’?’ (2016). Published electronically 14 January 2016. https://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com. au/quinkan-rock-art-endangered/. Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Milman, Oliver. ‘Race to Protect Australia’s Rock Art: “I Don’t Know If We Need to Do an Ice Bucket Challenge or What”.’ (2014). https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/sep/13/-sp-race-to-protect-australia-rock-art. McKinsey Global Institute. ‘Digital Globalisation: The New Era of Global Flows’. United States: McKinsey Global Institute, 2016. Mosco, Vincent. To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2014. Nerone, John. ‘Mapping the Field of Media Studies.’ In The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, edited by John Nerone: Blackwell Publishing, 2013.

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Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Parks, Lisa. Signal Traffic Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Edited by Nicole Starosielski, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015a. Parks, Lisa. ‘Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia.’ In Signal Traffic Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures’ Edited by Nicole Starosielski, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015b. Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Quinkan and Regional Cultural Center. ‘Quinkan and Regional Cultural Center: Welcome.’ http://www.quinkancc.com.au/welcome. Reading, Anna. ‘Seeing Red: A Political Economy of Digital Memory’. Media, Culture and Society. 2014. Vol. 36. No. 6. pp. 748–760 Reading, Anna. Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. Basinstoke: Palgrave. 2016 Reading, Anna, and Tanya Notley. ‘The Materiality of Globital Memory: Bringing the Cloud to Earth.’ Continuum 29, no. 4 2015: 511–521. Rossiter, Ned. Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016. Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Edited by Corporation Ebooks. 1st ed. London: Wiley, 2014. Starosielski, Nicole. Sustainable Media Critical Approaches to Media and Environment. Edited by Janet Walker, Berlin: Taylor and Francis, 2016. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Daniel Ross, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010. We Are Social. ‘Digital in 2016.’ wearesocial.com/uk/special-reports/digital-in-2016. Worcman, Karen and Joanne Garde-Hansen. Social Memory Technology: Theory, Practice, Action. London: Routledge, 2016. World Bank’s Report Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) Global Electrification Data Base for 2011–14. http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/sustainable-energy-for-all.

SECTION 4

Archive

12 MEMORY INSTITUTIONS, THE ARCHIVE AND DIGITAL DISRUPTION? Michael Moss

Introduction Even before members of the human race learned to write, there have been repositories of ‘useful knowledge’, call them what you like archives, libraries, registers of documents, memory institutions and so on. Recording and inscribing of information is an essential ingredient in human social interactions. At first records were kept using such devices as knotted strings or marks made on stones or animal skins (Upton 2003). The earliest cave paintings are now known to be thousands of years old (Valladas 2003). The first time someone left a print of their hands on the wall of a cave to signify their presence, Facebook was prefigured. The use of writing to record transactions dates back thousands of years in Asia, the Middle East and much of Europe. The evidence is scanty and depends on the chance survival of clay and wax tablets, and bark, which were widely used as writing surfaces in many parts of the world, and of course paper. Bark and paper easily decompose and only survive in exceptionally dry conditions, such as in certain parts of Egypt, or when petrified as in the boggy conditions on Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. (Franklin 2002, Leach and Tait 2000). Printing, which developed in the fifteenth century in Europe, is a relatively new innovation. There are some remarkable survivals of very early libraries, such as that at St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, which dates from the fourth century (Sinaimonestry, 2016). There are far fewer early collections of administrative records, although their existence is well documented and some examples survive (MacGinnis 2002). How else could the great empires of pre-history have been administered? Early writings are full of references to letters and decrees. For over a thousand years the contents of libraries are entirely manuscripts, in other words hand written. The existence of libraries and administrative records held in what we might call

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‘archives’ required means of finding items within ever-growing collections and illustrating how they were inter-connected with each other (see for example Besson 1988 and Moss 2017). Most of these systems have long since been replaced, but evidence survives in press marks on books, references on documents and registers of these early ‘sense-making’ tools. If we claim the digital is novel and that we have moved into the realm of post-archival sensibility where everything is remade and re-connected, as some commentators do (Floridi 2014, Macpherson 2013), we have to explain what has brought about such radical disruption in the same way as McLuhan tried to claim for the invention of printing, which he linked to the Protestant Reformation (McLuhan 1962). The Counter-Reformation made just as good use of printing in much the same way as hegemonic powers have made use of the Internet to disrupt protest and destabilise their opponents (Wright 1982, Moss and Popovsky 2015). Arguably the digital is simply an extension of the analogue, with some important exceptions that Debra Ramsay touches on in her chapter (this volume). Sir Hilary Jenkinson, speaking in 1955 was unequivocal in the abiding timelessness of the archival imperative: the mere manufacture of documents is only one element in the creation of Archives: another and much more potent one is their preservation for reference; that is to say their substitution not merely for the spoken word but for the fallible and destructible memory of the people who took part in whatever the transactions may have been that gave rise to them. Recordari still means, as it meant in the twelfth century, to remember. So long as memory is a necessary part of the conduct of affairs so long will it be necessary to put that memory into a material form, and so long as that is necessary so long will you have Archives, whether they take the form of writing on paper or parchment or palm leaves by hand or that of steel tape (shall we say) engraved by mechanical means with microscopic grooves which enable you to reproduce at will the voices of men who forgot or have been themselves forgotten’ (Jenkinson 1980, 321–2). Jenkinson does well to remind us that much of what is held in the archive is what the French would call ‘parole’—the spoken word or at least reported speech, for example statements from witnesses taken down verbatim and speeches. Although Jenkinson linked record keeping and archives to memory, it has become a common place to bundle libraries, archives and museums together as memory institutions, with little regard for their differences and competing traditions (Robinson 2012).

Supply and demand Until recently and still in many curators’ minds there is a very clear distinction between ‘archives’ that are described as unique objects (single instantiations) and books that usually exist in multiple copies and are wrapped in a binding with, in

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most cases, straightforward referents by which to describe and locate them—name of the author, title, printer and date of publication (see for example SAA 2016). However the ease with which printed material can be catalogued often disguises as much as it reveals (Currall et al. 2006). The name of the author and the title often only gives the vaguest indication of what a book might contain. Cataloguers decide how they should be described following prescriptive and sometimes arcane protocols (Bowker and Star 1999). Not all printed objects are indexed and, even when they are, the indexes are often partial. As with any resource, they usually require prior knowledge to know if they might be worth reading or that they contain information pertinent to a line of inquiry. Nevertheless archives are thought to be original sources and printed literature secondary sources. This is an arbitrary distinction that is misleading. It might be better to draw a distinction between contemporary printed material and later studies, but even this would be arbitrary as later studies usually refer to earlier works and to archival sources. This is the way after all that memory works; it is both reflective and reflexive. Antoinette Burton explored the encounter with the archive in a collection of essays in her Archive Stories (2006) where she argued that the reader’s background, gender, race and wealth all impact on the way in which the archive is experienced. There should, perhaps, be nothing surprising about such a perspective, except that archivists have always claimed a certain unwarranted objectivity in the way in which records are defined, captured and catalogued, something that Debra Ramsay explores in her chapter. It is like the old adage ‘the camera never lies’, which we know not to be true, even of a digital image taken in the heat of the moment. Niamh Moore and her colleagues take issue with those who have gone further and ‘valorised’ the subjectivity of the researcher at the expense of more traditional reflexivity with its concern for ‘the genesis and processes of knowledge production’ (Salter et al. 2016, p. 24). This is the reflexivity of immersion in the archive and of course the reader approaches the content with all sorts of baggage and the experience is situated as we shall see. Schofield et al. found ‘that being in the archive conveyed a sense of temporal connection with the people and events of the past’ (2015). Such critical reflexivity prompts reflection and stimulates the imagination. As Scott-Baumann, writing about Ricoeur, reminds us, the ‘archive’ must be approached without wonder and with suspicion and it is suspicion that leads to ‘innovation, open-mindedness, and movement towards new formulations’ (Scott-Baumann 2013). There are those, such as the neuro-physiologist Susan Greenfield, who worry that the velocity of the digital environment precludes reflection (Greenfield 2015). This is open to doubt, but cannot be ignored in the realm of big data with its four pillars—velocity, volume, veracity and variety, to which some have added crucially value (see van Rijmenan, 2014). These impinge inexorably on the archive, which confronts five grand challenges as it enters the digital domain: • •

appraisal, what to keep to meet demand and expectations on a new scale; how to identify content that cannot safely be released—termed sensitivity review;

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long-term preservation of digital objects, very different from paper; how users are going to explore and analyse content whose bulk precludes conventional cataloguing; finally, who is to pay for all the new services?

We will come back to these, but first it is essential to understand something of the background to record keeping and the concept of the archive. Today the word is used vicariously and does not necessarily refer, except in the most extended interpretation, to a place where records are held (Moss 2008). There are two quite distinct traditions in the supply of records—the library manuscripts tradition and what can be termed the archival tradition. The library manuscript tradition is older, for the simple reason that libraries have been around much longer and were arguably the first ‘memory’ institutions holding, as we have seen, from their inception what are termed manuscripts. Many collections in library manuscript departments are synthetic, put together by collectors such as Sir Robert Cotton in the British Library or Dr William Hunter at Glasgow, or are the accumulated papers of a family. Such collections were often part of much bigger collections of books, paintings, archaeological finds, botanical specimens and so on—in other words anything that was collectable that might represent useful knowledge. Curatorial practice has led to the distribution of such holdings, sometimes referred to as ‘wunderkammer’, amongst a variety of memory institutions and, as a result, robbing them of their intrinsic unity, however eclectic it might appear. This is what Ricoeur characterises as the ‘archiving of things’. In the library tradition manuscripts are catalogued in considerable detail, often down to item level and indexed by name and sometimes place (Clemens and Graham 2007). It used to be assumed that ‘serious’ users would know the names of people to search for in a given subject. They are often arranged and bound in date order. This makes it easy for researchers, who know what they are looking for, to locate items buried deep in collections and in places where they may not expect to find them. This approach has become increasingly unaffordable as collections grow and budgets are cut, but may still be used for ‘significant’ analogue holdings, such as the correspondence of leading politicians or literary figures. It remains to be seen how such an approach can scale to address the born digital where volume has increased out of all recognition, partly because the default is to keep everything (Leerintveld and van Otegem 2003). The archive tradition, which arose largely out of administrative records preserved for posterity by due process such as national archives, adopts a different approach by respecting original order, in other words the order in which the records were found before deposit. This normally reflects the order in which the records were stored or ‘put away’ after they were created or first used, but not necessarily as often as records were reorganised or particularly sensitive or incriminating papers removed. In most administrations, papers, often referred to as dockets, were registered before files became popular in the nineteenth century individually in

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elaborate systems that facilitated cross-reference (they could be indexed under different headings) and easy retrieval. Records of financial transactions were registered in ledgers, journals and cash books, which were designed to prevent misallocation and duplication, assist management and enable audit (Moss 2017). These systems in complex organisations were sophisticated and, although designed to aid retrieval, needed the expert knowledge of registry clerks and book keepers to fathom. As Martin Campbell-Kelly and others have shown, these elaborate manual systems foreshadowed the digital (Campbell-Kelly 1994). For this reason it is not surprising that the first mechanical and then digital computers were adopted in office systems, sometimes reluctantly (see Randell 1982). It is a mistake, as Wolfgang Ernst does in his chapter, to think these systems were not dynamic and lacked temporality: they were and they did. Transactions were linked together with previous instantiations and the possibility was always left open for both lateral and future connections that might result in the re-ordering or reindexing of collections. This was all the more the case after the introduction of filing on a large scale, which was predicated on inter-connectedness. If there has been an error, it is in the failure of computing scientists to recognise that they were reinventing a very old wheel that may have appeared crude and unwieldy but was nevertheless remarkably elegant (Moss 2005). Unlike the library manuscript tradition of placing objects in date order, or for that matter email systems, the concept of original order does not reflect the sequence in which they were posted or received. Only infrequently are they catalogued down to item level; more often than not they are described by bundle or by file title in the belief that what it says on the wrapper is what is inside; this is rarely the case. Debra Ramsay in her chapter investigates ‘the construction of the interface [catalogue] as a site of negotiation and struggle between technological, economic, cultural and institutional factors’. This at times is undoubtedly the case, but often inadequate or abbreviated descriptions simply reflect happenstance or lack of knowledge rather than ‘secrecy about how and why a record was created’. It is just as much a function of the available technology as the ‘coding’ that Wolfgang Ernst (this volume) claims has rendered the very term ‘archive’ anachronistic. Of economic necessity, records are only occasionally indexed by the archive itself (see for example Fox and Wilkerson 1998). The originators usually had file plans developed by registries. These rarely find their way to the archives, as they are either deemed to be confidential or have simply been overlooked. The use of records arranged and catalogued in this way requires skill and prior knowledge. However good the catalogue, users often rely on help from archivists familiar with collections in knowing where to search for material to satisfy their enquiry (see for example Schmidt 2011). So as to provide effective advice, the archivist has to some extent be an historian, familiar with the content and how one group of records can inform another. In both traditions memory was heavily mediated by curators, who controlled or at best advised on what should be preserved and what was discarded and

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usually destroyed. In Wolfgang Ernst’s words (this volume) the archive becomes ‘a function of transfer processes’, but this may be to endow it with too much agency. This process, dignified with the term ‘appraisal’, was governed in part by available storage space and what today might be described as a simplistic understanding of user needs. Conventional appraisal presupposes a linear flow of records from the creators to the archive, which processes them and makes them available to users. Peter Sigmond reflected: ‘Since there are no absolute objective values, appraisal decisions always will be decisions reflecting the cultural awareness and appreciation of our own time, archivists being the instruments of this’ (Sigmond 1992, 147). This may be true, but it is questionable if archivists can continue to be the sole arbiter of what is kept and discarded. Selection in the archival tradition in the United Kingdom and elsewhere is largely predicated on principles enunciated by the Grigg report of 1954, which emphasised the importance of records relating to policy formation and implementation (Grigg 1954). The report was enshrined in statute in the United Kingdom by the 1958 Public Records Act (PRA), which established the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council (LCAC) on National Records and Archives to ensure regular transmissions from departments, but not the process of appraisal itself. Even without the advent of the digital in public archives, such an approach is no longer tenable. Public and scholarly use of archives has pluralised and, as a result, there are pressures to keep more. This was recognised as long ago as 1981, but little action was taken (Wilson 1981). Today appraisal policies have become very frayed at the edges, largely as a result of pressure from family and social historians and because records that the public expected to be in the archives have been found to have been discarded or lost. Sir Stephen Sedley, in an investigation of missing evidence, discovered in many United Kingdom government departments ‘weak rules and chaotic systems’. (Sedley 2016). The PRA also introduced the thirty-year rule whereby records were released into the public domain thirty years after the last paper on a file or entry in a minute book or ledger unless it was deemed necessary for it to remain closed for longer. The reasons for closure or withholding information were codified in the appendices of the Freedom of Information Act of 2000 (FOIA). More recently the closure period has been reduced to twenty years following the Dacre Report and the protection afforded to personal information strengthened by European directives (Dacre 2009). Already the volume of transmissions to the National Archives (TNA) in the United Kingdom and requests for closure has made it difficult for LCAC to provide effective oversight (Allan 2015). For many local administrative archives in the United Kingdom it is non-existent. A glaring omission in the legislation is oversight of the appraisal process itself, which leaves the archive exposed to the criticisms in Debra Ramsay’s chapter that had such fatal consequences in Germany during the Fascist regime. In the library manuscript tradition, appraisal reflected what survived in the donor’s hands or what they were prepared to transfer to the public domain.

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Quite often records have to be transferred in an emergency and there is no time to follow recognised procedures. Although practice varies, libraries mostly adopt the statutory closure periods. In both traditions in the United Kingdom selection depends on the depositors, albeit with curatorial advice, whereas in the German tradition (shared with the United States) appraisal at least in the public archives is undertaken by curators (Kenosi and Moatlhodi 2012). However this is not a straightforward division, as both methods of appraisal involves regular interaction with depositors, particularly over closures. Appraisal of physical content depends in the majority of cases on relatively well-organised record-keeping systems from which a choice could be made for permanent preservation. Irrespective of the approach, less than five percent of content found its way into the archives (German 2006 and Rock, 2017). Appraisal, as Groys has so firmly reminded us, is never absolute, but permeable in what he terms the: ‘cultural economy’: the exchange that takes place between the archive of cultural values and the profane space outside of this archive. In the archive, things are collected and preserved that are regarded as being significant, relevant, and valuable for a certain culture. All other things that are regarded as being insignificant, irrelevant, and worthless remain in the profane space outside of the archive. Yet the cultural archives change constantly: some things from the profane space are incorporated, while others from the archive’s collection are considered no longer relevant and sorted out (Groys 2012). Groys is not entirely conjectural, as some archives are beginning to dispose of unused collections since they can no longer justify the cost of permanent retention. Such action, which is not taken without efforts to promote use, is an inevitable outcome of falling demand and shrinking budgets. The relationship in the cultural economy between the ‘sacred’ and the profane or better the tame and feral is fundamental to any understanding of the conception of the ‘archive’ and ‘archivable’ in the digital economy. A feature of all preserved objects as long as they are archived is that content was and is held fiduciarly and that it could be guaranteed to be what it purported to be when it was deposited. In other words its evidential value was assured (Petersen 2014). Manuscripts are by their very nature unique and require greater protection than printed books, which in the majority of instances survive in multiple copies. The same can be said of other media, such as photographs, film, video and sound recordings Gracy, 2009. Veracity (evidential value) remains a crucial element of record keeping and is one of the four pillars of ‘big data’, to which might be added provenance—where does it come from (Cosentino 2013, and Soares 2016)? This, of course, does not guarantee the contents are to be trusted. They may be just as constructed or deliberately manipulated as the content of social media and need to be approached, as we have seen, with scepticism and caution.

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Everyone knows that the famous film of the battle of Stalingrad was filmed after it was over. As Holger Schott Syme has shown, the evidence against the Earl of Essex and his accomplices in the rebellion of 1601 against Queen Elizabeth I was carefully constructed by the Attorney General Edward Coke to ensure convictions (Syme 2012). Natalie Davies, in her careful analysis of letters of remission to the French Royal Chancellery from 1523 to 1568, has argued that they are nearer to fiction than the truth behind the murders for which pardon was sought (Davies 1988). Andrew Prescott has made the same point about the Peasants’ Revolt almost 300 years earlier (Prescott 2017). Scepticism is what led Lord Acton to instruct historians to be ‘hanging judges’: You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac [Henry IV of France’s assassin]; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science (Acton 1887).

The advent of the digital Although library catalogues were automated from the 1970s—often referred to as Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs)—library manuscript catalogues did not fit easily into bibliographic schema and many catalogues, even if useful to researchers, were haphazard and inconsistent. Moreover, automated library catalogues did what ‘it said on the can’ and made the catalogue with all its imperfections machine readable. It would take computing scientists to show how printed content itself could be made searchable, providing the intellectual property rights could be resolved. Archive catalogues had structure, but were also inconsistent and often, as we have seen, poorly described. Archives, however, took the lead either individually or severally. They developed cumbersome mechanisms that conformed to international standards and built gateways that did not necessarily improve access and hid content from commercial search engines; but like everything else in the digital domain ‘something was better than nothing’. Library manuscript collections are only slowly catching up with all the advantages of late entrants (Balnaves 2013). Recently, Tom Schofield and a team at the Culture Lab at Newcastle University have over-turned this approach ‘by considering the process of archiving as live and taking this as the focus of our design interventions we address an area of concern to archival institutions. . . That is we take, the incompleteness and long time scales of archiving as significant features and not as problems to be overcome’ (Scholfield et al. 2015). In both libraries and archives, there has been a reluctance to expose catalogues to indexing by commercial search engines. The excuse has been a fear of being overwhelmed with

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requests, but the result has been to leave the market wide open for organisations, such as Ancestry and FindmyPast, even if they are simply supplying content licensed from the archives. It is the tensions inherent in this transition that Debra Ramsay explores in her chapter (this volume) and which David Nicholas has done so much to illuminate (Nicholas 2010 and 2012). The arrival of the genealogists and the decision to make census data available online in the 1990s changed everything, as users came to expect more and more online content where access was not restricted by gateways. Some of these new users had no interest in the niceties of the distinction between primary and secondary sources or the difference between archives and libraries; they just wanted ‘stuff ’ that would satisfy their need to elaborate their familial memory (Moss 2007). At the same time, a huge raft of digitised machine-readable archival content began to appear online and was indexed by search engines. The walls that surrounded the archival fortress were besieged. Archivists were very slow to respond (Whiting 2013). Scholarly users, even if they disapproved of genealogy, came to realise that what they too wanted was ‘stuff ’ and providing they could resolve problems of authenticity and provenance it did not matter much where it came from (Fickers 2012). Where both libraries and archives were quick to recognise the impact of the digital was in the preservation of digital objects created in different formats and with different characteristics. Many organisations and individuals adopted a print-to-paper policy until the widespread use of email in the 1990s resulted in the almost total extinction of existing office practice and the disappearance of well-ordered record-keeping systems on which appraisal depended (Currall et al. 2001). A great deal of effort internationally was put into trying to solve the problem. A whole academic industry developed, funded in Europe largely by the European Union, regardless of the fact that this was an issue industry would need to resolve if users were to migrate data from one platform to another (Strodl et al. 2011). There was much scaremongering talk of a digital black hole and endemic bit rot. These have been found to be largely untrue and a huge amount of readable data has been found to survive, mostly as a result of government inquiries, such as that into the war in Iraq in the United Kingdom. Archives, instead of finding the cupboard bare, are about to be inundated by a veritable tsunami of born digital data that rarely has a discernible structure (Gollins 2012). This is very evident from born digital content that has already been released, either legitimately or illegitimately, into the public domain, such as WikiLeaks and the Enron emails (Klimt and Yang 2004). Well before the advent of the digital, memory institutions had begun to acquire sound recordings, photographs and film. Both the British Library and the Imperial War Museum took the lead in the United Kingdom in capturing oral testimony of contemporary events, including the Second World War. These new formats presented distinctive curatorial challenges, both in conservation, cataloguing and interpretation (Thomson 1978). Since early film is very combustible, the reaction was to create special repositories, such as the Scottish Film Archive (now

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incorporated in the National Library of Scotland), which were specially equipped for the purpose. Photographs and sound recordings found their way into libraries and archives, but were often split from the rest of a collection or simply left as afterthoughts and in so doing their inter-connectedness was overlooked. Once film and sound recordings began to use magnetic tape, preservation shared equivalent challenges with all other digital technologies. This led inexorably to the creation and capture of all forms of communication and memory keeping on single devices, which then formed an indivisible ‘archivable’ content on an unparalleled scale. Much of this content now, just like photographs in physical albums, is not described but is often connected directly to other content controlled by the owner, such as social media, messaging, and email. Only recently has the significance of such new media begun to be recognised and become the subject of scholarly concern (see for example Gracy, 2009 and Sluis and Rubinstein 2013). Well before this web content itself began to be captured by the ‘Internet Archive’, the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, and later in the United Kingdom after the passing of legislation in 2013 by recognised places of legal deposit (British Library 2013). This is a huge undertaking that should provide a new dimension to resources for research (Merrin 2014).

The shock of the digital paradigm Consequently only recently has what might be described as this ‘paradigm shift’ wrought by the digital hit the archive, not just because of the volume of born digital data awaiting appraisal and accessioning, but also as a result of a sharp decline in reader numbers, ironically more evident in archival reading rooms than library manuscript departments where the granularity of the catalogues and the profile of users has come to the rescue (TNA 2014). The decline is largely unexplored and consists of a complex deadly cocktail of reduction in expenditure for research by both established academics and postgraduates, the massive increase in machine-searchable online content and the expectation that most research can be done largely in the office or more commonly at home from the desktop. The most lethal ingredient is machine-searchable content that has demolished the arbitrary boundary between the manuscript and print culture and where, as we have seen, commercial providers secured an early advantage. Contemporary printed literature can now be explored in a previously unimaginable level of granularity, everything from a growing mass of newspapers and journals to an astonishing range of literature. Some of this content is made available by big providers, such as Google, Amazon, the British Library, the Bibliotechque Nationale de France, and others by a welter of organisations and individuals. Against this backdrop all memory institutions have been uncertain how to respond. The natural reaction is to retreat into arguments about material culture and stress the importance of the physicality of objects in the analogue world. Another is to extol the sanctity of the catalogue and resist any attempt by outsiders to interfere by adding content, explored by Debra Ramsay in ‘the junctions and

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points of resistance within the networks’ and Wolfgang Ernst in his archival quest for privacy (both this volume). These fortress archive approaches fly in the face of user expectations and behaviour on social media, and of course the very nature of born digital content. In many archives users are capturing content from archives and libraries on digital cameras and making it available on their websites irrespective of any injunctions not to. Memory content has gone viral and is being mashed up in unexpected ways, particularly on family or local history platforms, resulting, as Wolfgang Ernst rightly observes, in the relinquishing of the privacy of the archive from public discourse. There is little memory institutions can do to stop this happening. They have to find ways of working with the grain of societal expectations that is spawning memory institutions with new characteristics, such as memory boxes that help people overcome dementia or address trauma, family and local history sites that enrich communities, and sites of resistance that address injustice or seek to right wrongs, such as the Hillsborough disaster in the United Kingdom or the unlawful killing of African-Americans by the police in the United States or widespread child abuse in many countries (see for example BLM 2016). They may not respect the ‘practices and procedures’ of acknowledged ‘memory institutions’ in the shape of what are often termed social media sites, but they have their own validity and utility. The content may be taken out of context or be partial, but memory institutions are not in a strong position to cast aspersions (Stainforth 2016). A report commissioned by the Canadian Council of Academics in 2015 issued a clarion call: ‘To keep pace with the fundamental and unavoidable digital change now reshaping society, Canada’s memory institutions must exercise their capacity to be leaders’ (Council of Canadian Academics 2015, xii). Although social media must be approached with the same, if not more, caution, than the archival and print culture, nothing will be gained by castigating it. It is increasingly part of the born digital environment and is used to shape and manipulate policy and attitudes and in an archival context often to add value to publicly available content by including private data that would otherwise remain hidden. To quote the Canadian Council of Academics again: The digital world has the potential to fundamentally change the relationship between memory institutions and people for the better. The integration of a participatory culture into the daily operations of memory institutions will ensure that they establish a sustainable, authentic relationship with the public. This often messy inter-connectedness may be a clue in re-defining archival services (Council of Canadian Academics 2015, XVIII). Anna Reading has explored this phenomena in the context of the memory of the London bombings on 7 July 2005, where she argues: Digital media technologies have not simply collapsed the event and its memory into one another, as, perhaps, it may seem at first sight. Rather, events are

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witnessed in time and people’s mediated witnessing, including mobile witnessing of events is articulated, rearticulated and disarticulated through intersecting temporalities in what she terms ‘globital time’ (Reading 2011). However, even in the physical archive, records now move back and forth from historical to juridical time as a result of shorter closure periods, FOI, advances in forensic investigations and enquiries (Moss and Thomas 2017). The sociologist, Helga Nowotny defines the experience of the past and imagined future states as an ‘extended present’ irrespective of technology (1994). Reading any historical object is in some senses always in the present as Robert Topinka puts it in the context of new technology: ‘Understanding urban governmentality thus requires attending to the urban archive of visual mediation in which the relationships between past and present, image and reality, and surveillance and spectacle are always contingent and open to revision’ (2016). The Dutch archivist Eric Ketelaar would claim this applies to any record from any period, which are viewed in what is dubbed ‘the archival turn’ as being in an eternal state of becoming (Ketelaar 2012). This perpetual emergence is reinforced by practice and procedure in the archival search room, as Siân Echard and Andrew Prescott explain in their delightful essay ‘Charming the Snake: accessing and disciplining the medieval manuscript’, which echoes the notions of sequestration in the archives of Foucault and Groys (2017, and Foucault 1969): To read a medieval book today, on the other hand, is a constrained exercise. If one has access to the ‘original’ manuscript, it must be read, not by the fire or in bed or aloud with exclamations and gesticulations to a group of friends, but at a reading desk, on a book stand (no matter its size), and in silence. However in the new paradigm when captured on a digital camera or distributed digitally, it becomes feral, like a cat let out of doors. For the consumer this liberation creates all sorts of opportunities: it can be enlarged, viewed in different lights and with different contrasts, flattened, cut up, annotated, compared side by side with other objects and, above all, set free on social media for others to play with. All this flies in the face of the sentinels guarding the archive and ‘produces more archive’ and, as Derrida rightly observed, ‘that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future’ (Derrida 1998, 68). By realising the potential of the archive and what then becomes archivable on the most powerful distribution channel the world has ever seen is not the harbinger of a post-archival universe, but rather returns curation to its roots in the wunderkammer of Enlightenment Europe where everything can appear to be simultaneously disconnected and connected. Sir Walter Scott captured this confusion perceptively in his novel The Antiquary. His description of Jonathan Oldbuck’s study accurately represents what might be found in the private space of our computers, except the cat would be an avatar and the rust fragmented bits (Scott 1816, and Moss 2006).

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A large old-fashioned oaken table was covered with a profusion of papers, parchments, books, and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws, which seemed to have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity which it indicates. In the midst of this wreck of ancient books and utensils, with a gravity equal to Marius among the ruins of Carthage, sat a large black cat, which to a superstitious eye, might have presented the genius loci, the tutelar demon of the apartment. Although liberation of the archive on social media may be largely benign, it is no more neutral than archival and library catalogues even if the limits of what is archivable are greatly extended and in so doing run the risk of greater ambiguity. The physical world context was often the clue to bias as we have seen, but the digital context is often much harder to define. A letter on paper has a good deal of implicit evidence, post marks, addressee, handwriting and so on; this is largely lacking in an email and context can only be inferred from metadata and its place in a chain of communication. In posts on social media it may be well-nigh impossible, unless the content itself discloses the context—for example a sequence of tweets that archivists would construe as ‘original order’. It may well be, as we shall see, that emerging sense-making tools will compensate for an absence of such familiar signifiers. Natural language processing techniques may allow us, for example, to identify authors and their relationship with recipients (see for example Apoorv et al. 2014). Such sophisticated exploration of texts can go a long way to identifying intentionality, which may not be obvious at first sight in physical sources as Andrew Prescott has shown in Letter Book H in the London archives, which covers the reign of Richard II (Prescott 2017). Nevertheless as Niamh Moore and her colleagues remind us ‘the ontology of digital forms needs some serious attention’ (Salter et al. 2016).

The challenges of the digital For memory institutions the born digital environment represents a huge step change, both in terms of scale and of intellectual control, but that in itself does not imply radical disruption. As we have seen there are five grand challenges; to recap: • • • • •

appraisal, what to keep to meet demand and expectations on a new scale; how to identify content that cannot safely be released—termed sensitivity review; long-term preservation of digital objects, very different from paper; how users are going to explore and analyse content whose bulk precludes conventional cataloguing; finally, who is to pay for all the new services?

These five challenges are inextricably inter-related and are not sequential. They have only partially been addressed by the archival community worldwide.

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Societal expectations of the digital environment together with the growing plurality of scholarly enquiry makes much more content of enduring interest than ever before. Even if the Grigg approach was still employed, the volume of accessions will inevitably increase because established record-keeping systems have collapsed despite the best efforts of records managers (Allan 2015). There is nothing to suggest that they will be more successful in the future. This will make the well-organised archive, which Wolfgang Ernst warns us in his chapter not to confuse with memory, a thing of the past. Policy is now largely made through email exchanges and often implemented by ad hoc bodies constituted for the purpose. A good example is counter insurgency (COIN) operations, which invariably are collaborative and generate enormous quantities of data (US Government 2009). It is possible to reduce the bulk of such collections by extinguishing duplicates and trivia, but, experience has shown that this only results in a reduction of about thirty percent (see for example Klimt and Yang 2004). There is as yet no agreement on how to select content for preservation. What is self-evident is that conventional approaches to appraisal will not translate to the digital. Some advocate the so-called ‘CAPSTONE’ approach where the mail boxes of key individuals are captured (NARA 2015). This begs the question of who, in a flat organisation, such individuals are? This bureaucratic view of records would also make certain kinds of detailed research impossible at a time when micro studies are shedding new light on both areas of scholarly concern and public policy. It also runs the risk of overlooking the ad hoc bodies formed to undertake key projects, which admittedly were often overlooked by conventional appraisal. Moreover in the digital forensics world, the approach is to capture all email content for analysis with no filtering, essential for public enquiries (Waugh 2014). There needs to be much more experimentation using novel interrogation techniques characteristic of big data, which we will come to. These themselves will almost certainly result in calls to keep more. In addition there are ineluctable public pressures to keep much more, especially case papers, particularly those relating to individuals known collectively as particular instance papers (PIPs) in the United Kingdom. In the wake of the Hillsborough and child abuse inquiries, they provide the evidence that will make prosecution possible and the knowledge that records are being kept will act as a deterrent (Hillsborough 2012, and for example CFCA 2015). They are also the life blood of genealogists and social scientists. Moreover new ways of analysing data demands volume and variety— two of the other four pillars of ‘big data’. All records of government from every source made publicly available must be reviewed as we have seen to ensure that they do not contain any sensitive content. In the United Kingdom, as already explained, exemptions are described in the appendices to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 2000 (FOIA 2000). These are not the same as protective marking applied to documents at the time of their creation, such as ‘top secret’, ‘restricted’ and so on. They include obviously personal data, which is covered by the EU data protection directive,

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information likely to harm an individual’s health and well-being, information that enjoys an absolute exemption under international treaty obligations such as the Geneva Convention, information likely to harm international relations and so on. As might be expected the majority of instances, some seventy per cent, are personal information. Once identified, the information is either redacted (blanked out) or the relevant piece withdrawn from the file. Only rarely in the United Kingdom are whole files closed, whatever critics might have to say (Cobain 2016). Closure periods beyond the now twenty-year rule vary from a further ten years and exceptionally to a hundred years. Most personal information is closed for a hundred years less the age of the subject if known and, if the age is not known, it is assumed to be sixteen. However even this is not straightforward as many people publish data about themselves on the web or leave traces that can then be aggregated. Such aggregation is protected by IPR and can be thought to be in the public domain, even if no consent has been given. In Europe the response to requests for release of information because some, if not all, is in the public domain is to ‘neither confirm nor deny’, whereas in the United States it is assumed that those in the public eye are ‘fair game’. It was relatively easy, if time consuming, to review paper files for sensitivity as the content had a common theme and in any event, large number of detailed papers relating to individual cases were discarded. The sheer quantity of borndigital records and their lack of discernible order make manual review impractical, as the process of reviewing Hillary Clinton’s 50,000 emails by the US National Archives and Records Administration has shown (NARA 2016). Efforts are being made to semi-automate the process by flagging and ranking content that reviewers need to examine. Sensitivity is a much greater problem in the digital environment, because unwarranted release is much more easily discovered by users whose expectations are that they can conduct their research at their desktop at home using ubiquitous search engines. There were mistakes in the past, such as the inadvertent release of a file showing the presence of members of the United Kingdom SAS at the Indian operation against the massacre at Sri Harmandir Sahib—also called the Golden Temple—in Amritsar in June 1984, but these took time to find (Allan 2014). Although the sheer scale of born-digital records will require organisations to reassess the risks embedded in release, there is a need for caution as inadvertent release of, for example, names of informants and collaborators can potentially result in their deaths. Outside the national institutions, there is a lack of consistency in the application of closure periods for a variety of reasons, but principally a chronic lack of resource. In the United Kingdom national government, records are reviewed for sensitivity under the terms of the PRA and FOIA before they are transferred to TNA where their existence is made public in the catalogue. If closures apply to either parts or the whole, the exemption under which they are closed and the length of the closure period are explained. No records can be transferred unreviewed to TNA. In some jurisdictions, records can remain unreviewed until

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someone asks to consult them, often by way of FOI requests. This tends to lead to huge backlogs in requests (OGIS 2015). Another approach might be to destroy records, even if there is an identifiable demand, on the grounds of the cost of retention. This was often why records were discarded in the past (Denning 1966). In an open democracy there is no alternative, however, to the release of records by due process under the rule of law. Information retrieval researchers at the University of Glasgow have recognised the challenges of sensitivity review by records deposited with TNA under the PRA. They have been working on assistive technology, that can make predictions about the sensitivity of records, and thereby assist reviewers in assessing sensitivity. Indeed, techniques using machine learned classifiers (McDonald et al, 2014, 2017) have shown that some sensitivities can be easily predicted, but the perfect prediction of the sensitivity of a record will likely remain a difficult challenge, and hence the need for assistive approaches, including techniques that can learn in an active manner as reviewers assess documents (Sebastiani et al, 2015). It used to be believed that long-term preservation of born-digital records presented a formidable obstacle. This is no longer thought to be the case, although there are concerns about the cost (Gollins 2009). What is much more problematic is how to make such content available. As we have discussed, it cannot be listed using conventional cataloguing techniques. There is simply too much of it. Regular data held in database form, such as PIPs, does not present so much of an issue as it is easily indexed. What is much more of a challenge is the content of an email box, which can only be described generically with dates, for example ‘mail box of permanent secretary HM Treasury 1998–9’. Apart from the scale, it is not that different from a physical letter book, with the exception that it is likely to include a whole variety of attachments in varying formats. Users will expect such records, like their digitised counterparts, to be made available online over the web. Because reading huge accumulations of ill-sorted material will be impossible, there are significant questions about how they will be used, what tools will be needed, and who will provide them.

New uses for old wares Memory institutions, as we have seen, have always been in the business of sense making by cataloguing and listing their holdings, but in the digital domain sense-making tools not only help address the problem but also magnify it. On the one hand ‘sense making’ can expunge duplication, identify derivative instantiations and provide pathways through a morass of data; on the other, because they allow data to be addressed in novel ways, they contribute to the debate about long-term retention (Kang et al. 2009). For example, users may want to analyse traffic between nodal points that might provide unexpected signposts for further investigation or they may wish to know who might be expected to know what and when. They may wish to visualise a network of correspondence or rework large blocks of data to validate or challenge preconceptions (History Lab

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2016). Such tools are in their infancy, but they are already being used both to analyse born-digital and analogue holdings (Prescott 2015). There are many examples of visualisation of data and sophisticated tools are becoming readily available to undertake such analysis. James Cheshire, of Spatial Analysis, has, for example, just completed a project mapping London: We have spent the past year collating and visualising a huge range of data to create 100 maps and graphics about the world’s greatest capital city. They cover topics ranging from the police helicopters’ daily activities, to London’s Twitter hotspots, to art in the Tate galleries. We benefitted from public data to identify our subjects, and from the power of the latest computers and software to turn them into graphics. Given how high-tech this all sounds, a tablet-friendly e-book or website might seem to be the natural way to present our graphics (Cheshire 2016). The History Lab at Columbia has been experimenting with analysing data released by the National Records and Archive Administration (NARA) under the banner ‘History as Data Science—We turn documents into data and develop tools to explore history’. The approach is to analyse the data and then attempt to interpret the results, for example determining the most important events in US foreign policy. The claim is, the best reason to attempt automatic event detection is simply that we do not always know exactly what we are looking for. Think of how much data future historians will have to deal with, like the approximately one billion emails the State Department is now generating every year. . . Would it not be better to have some way to detect patterns and anomalies that reveal—and rank order—events that might not have gotten the attention they deserve? (History Lab 2016) Francis Morretti, the founder of the Stanford University Literary Lab, has advocated what he terms ‘distant reading, understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data’. Such radical interpretive techniques need to be approached with caution as the reviewer of distant reading in the New York Times commented: ‘whatever’s happening . . . is neither powerful nor distant’ (Schulz 2011). More objective and measured is Ian Milligan’s perspective in the book, written with others, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (Graham et al. 2015): We are not implying that this is the way historians will ‘do’ history when it comes to big data; rather, it is but one piece of the toolkit, one more way of dealing with ‘big’ amounts of data that historians are now having to grapple with. What is more, a ‘macroscope’, a tool for looking at the

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very big, deliberately suggests a scientist’s workbench, where the investigator moves between different tools for exploring different scales, keeping notes in a lab notebook. Similarly, an approach to big data for the historian (we argue) needs to be a public approach, with the historian keeping an open notebook so that others may explore the same paths through the information, while possibly reaching very different conclusions. This is a generative approach: big data for the humanities is not only about justifying a story about the past, but generating new stories, new perspectives, given our new vantage points and tools (Milligan 2015). Employing such techniques requires access to data in bulk, either analogue data that can laboriously be converted into machine-readable content or born-digital data that was generated in bulk. Inevitably data will have to be downloaded as it is unrealistic to expect memory institutions to provide sophisticated analytical tools. However as Milligan suggests, ways will have to be found of linking results back to the raw data held by the archives so they can be verified, reworked or extended. This is new territory as archives have not been accustomed to act as repositories for research data. Only exceptionally are links provided to publications based on holdings, but not iterative links between research output and evidential data held in the archives. NARA in the United States has characterised such content as ‘wholesale’ as opposed to ‘retail’ familiar to traditional productions in the reading room and the search for particular pieces of information (NARA 2016b). A good example of analogue content that can be characterised as big data are the time series that can be found in long runs of records that are held in every archival collection, such as ledgers, letter books or registers of one kind or another. In the digital, examples are ubiquitous and do not need any explanation (Blanke and Prescott 2016). However, the use of ‘big data’ also demands ‘velocity’, in other words the ability to reinterpret and recombine data very rapidly as Milligan (above) proposes. This is the last of the four pillars of ‘big data’. A simple example is the rapidity with which time series data can be represented in different visual formats, sometimes using different variables or co-ordinates at the press of a button. Although curators have to learn specialist skills to interpret and become familiar with physical assets, such as diplomatic, palaeography, accountancy practices, cataloguing conventions and so on, when content becomes in effect ‘big data’, curators will lose hegemony over collections in two ways. They will be dependent on computational engineers, mathematicians and statisticians to build the analytical tools required to explore the possibilities inherent in their digital holdings (Cohen 2012). Moreover users will want to download a mass of data to analyse by using different tools on their own desktops. This may be only qualitatively different from taking notes or photographing documents, but it represents a huge step change that needs to be aired. Curators will have no control over content when it leaves their servers. It will be much easier to tamper with than photographs. Nevertheless, as already discussed, users will want to be

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able to link outputs and findings to ‘original’ sources held fiduciarily and sequestered, just as in the past by the institutions from which they were captured, in much the same way as footnotes link text to sources. In the digital environment, they may well want or funders insist that such links be live and persistent, which of itself presents a further challenge. Curators will need to ensure that such links cannot be broken and guarantee the long-term stability and veracity of online holdings to prevent unscrupulous misrepresentation. Such persistent links would be required even if content is held remotely outside the direct control of the ‘archive’ itself, for example by an originating department (sometimes referred to as a post-custodial model) or held in the cloud. This is the inter-connectedness that is now expected of web content and is sometimes referred to as the semantic web, which is designed to transmit machine-processable meaning through a logical framework named RDF—Resource Description Framework (Gray 2015). As Gray explains, the semantic web is at the heart of the linked data paradigm (Cohen and Rosenzweig 2005 and Walpole 2012). It may be much harder and more costly to deliver than it would seem. The University of Oxford has just closed its Online Research Data Service because of escalating costs of maintaining and developing the software (Rumsey and Jefferies 2013). This does not mean we should not continue to try and respond to David Weinberger’s clarion cry in his book Too Big to Know: We now have more reason than ever to join in the collective pursuit of knowledge. There is little standing in our way of learning and contributing that the weakest of reasons can be reason enough to bring us to contribute. We do not yet have any good idea of what cannot be done by connected humans when working at the scale of the Net (2011).

Who is to pay? All these developments, as the experience of ORDS suggests, come at a price and will put pressure on resources that in most of Europe are largely met from national or local government, as there has been an assumption, as with so much else, that access should be a free good. The only sizeable income stream comes from family history internet providers, such as Ancestry and FindmyPast, which pay to mount content on their sites. This business model is not sustainable. Increasingly archives are viewed as a ‘cultural asset’ to be valued in much the same way as any other cultural assets, such as museums, galleries and libraries. It is debatable if archives can be simply defined, even in broad terms, as a cultural asset. One of the reasons for releasing public records into the public domain after twenty years in the United Kingdom is to ensure transparency and accountability of government (German 2006, and Moss 2016). This is different from freedom of information, which is selective, whereas, with the exemption of the security services, due process is all embracing. After time passes, records become more and more cultural assets, but given that many people can be expected to live to be over ninety this can be a

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long time. If accountability and transparency are the purpose that lies behind preservation then the cost should fall on the Exchequer and not the user either directly or indirectly. Defining record-keeping as integral to the democratic process has a long history and the analysis of records often long after the event contributes directly to policy making. For example, in the United States, the fact that Ben Bernanke was well versed in the history of the Wall Street Crash was vital in the Federal Reserve Bank’s response to the 2008 financial crisis (Bernanke 1983). Unlike libraries, archivists have been very slow to unravel the cost of their services, which need to be calculated so as to work out the added economic value. Library experience suggests that the costs are front-loaded, the costs of accessioning, cataloguing and conservation and preservation is a long tail. Value is calculated from a variety of indicators, footfall (increasingly low in archives as more and more users move online), contribution to health and well-being, contribution to other cultural heritage assets, use by scholars and other researchers and so on. Again the sector has been very slow in recognising the need to engage with such approaches in the belief that they are inappropriate. A study by Archives Libraries Museums Alliance UK (ALMAUK) and two others, one of university archives and special collections by Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) and another of libraries by Arts Council England (ACE) concluded that there was a lack of consistent data that could be used to calculate economic value (ALMAUK 2010, ACE 2014). The RLUK OCLC recommended that the sector ‘determine the potential value and uses of reporting core statistics’ (2013, 21). As a result, the sector is starved of resources and lacks the crucial financial knowledge to negotiate contracts with external providers. The scholarly community has held itself aloof in the expectation that their requirements, however ill-defined, will continue to be met. This cannot be guaranteed. Recently the AHRC has completed a study into cultural value, but archives hardly feature in the final report (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016). The problem is a lack of meaningful dialogue and a failure to recognise that the digital of necessity demands fresh approaches to doing and resourcing old things.

New ways of doing business. An obvious way to address all these challenges, which some memory institutions have already embraced, is to enlist the support of users directly in the process of co-production and co-curation, by inviting them to not only become involved in selection of records for permanent preservation, but also in improving access to both analogue and digital holdings. Mike Featherstone invited archivists to rise to this challenge a decade ago when he wrote: ‘How are decisions on what to collect, what to store, what to throw away and what to catalogue to be made?’ (Featherstone 2006). The production and definition of the ‘archive’ will become collaborative in a co-creation enterprise or what might be described as a ‘curated conversation’ that extends well beyond the existing customer base, but as Debra Ramsay makes clear in her chapter (below), this is likely to be met with resistance.

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There is considerable interest in the broader concept of co-creation that spills over into concepts of entanglement and heutagogy, an open context model of learning (Heutagogic archive 2016). It may be that the archives in all this have much to learn from genealogy, its principal customer base, which in a way has similarities with Foucault’s concept of a genealogy of knowledge, which sought to trace out ‘a historical ontology of the individual to concepts of truth, for it is through such concepts that people constitute themselves as subjects of knowledge’ (Crowley 2009). Genealogy is rarely if ever a simple relationship between the archive and the user, but a hermeneutic interaction between public sources and private recollections that may be simply memory, photographs, letters and memorabilia. It nearly always depends on networks of connections that the web makes dynamic and extensive. Like all history, it evolves, but is more often than not situated in a familial (individual) rather than a grand narrative, except when the grand narrative impinges directly on the familial, most obviously in the two world wars of the twentieth century. Even here the intensity of the individual lived history often overrides the bare facts of the event, however chilling they might be. This is the content that becomes entangled in social media with the often bald life events inscribed in the archive for most people. This is memory in all its many facets, which spans the harrowing, the mundane and the heroic. Memory institutions can never capture it all, as Derrida recognised in his canonical work Archive Fever (1998), but they need to find ways of replicating its interconnectedness—something that the digital has done so much to enable. It is not an entirely new world and certainly not a post-archival one, but one that is characterised by the four ‘Vs’ of big data, velocity (quicker than ever before), volume (more and more data is available in machine-readable form), variety (there has always been variety, but the web facilitates connectivity in ways that were unimaginable) and, finally, veracity (evidential value—an abiding premise of any archival collection in the public domain).

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Nancy Bell, Daniel German, Tim Gollins, Norman Gray, Graham McDonald, Craig Macdonald, Iadh Ounis, Andrew Prescott, Genevieve Silvanus, David Thomas, David Weinberger and David Wilcox for their help and advice.

References The websites listed below were all accessed in September 2016. ACE, ‘Evidence Review of the Economic Contribution of Libraries’, (2014), http://www. artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Evidence_review_economic_ contribution_libraries_2014.pdf. Agarwal, Apoorv, Adinoyi Omuya, Jingwei Zhang, Owen Rambow, ‘Enron Corporation: You’re the Boss if People Get Mentioned to You’, https://static.jiehan.org/pub/ socialcom-2014.pdf.

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Milligan, Ian, Scott Weingart and Shawn Graham, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (London: Imperial College Press, 2015). Moss, Michael, ‘The Hutton inquiry, the president of Nigeria and what the butler hoped to see’. English Historical Review (2005), 120(487), pp. 577–92. Moss, Michael, ‘Jonathan Oldbuck’s cat’ in N Bütikofer, J Hofman and S Ross (eds.) Managing and Archiving Records in the Digital Era: Changing Professional Orientations (Baden: Hier and Jetzt, 2006), pp. 115–26. Moss, Michael, ‘Choreographed Encounter—The Archive and Public History’, Archives (2007), 32(116), pp. 1–17. Moss, Michael, ‘Opening Pandora’s box—what is an archive in the digital environment?’ in Louise Craven (ed.) What are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: a reader (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2008). Moss, Michael, ‘800 years on can Magna Carta still disrupt the executive?’ Palgrave Communications 2 (2016) doi:10.1057/palcomms.2016.49 Moss, Michael, ‘Understanding Core Business Records’, in Alison Turton (ed.) The International Business Archives Handbook: Understanding and managing the historical records of business (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 89–114. Moss, Michael and Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, Is Digital Different? How information creation, capture, preservation and discovery are being transformed (London: Facet, 2015). Moss, Michael and David Thomas, ‘Overlapping temporalities—The Judge, the Historian and the Citizen’, forthcoming, Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association. NARA, ‘Department of State Emails and Records Management’ (Washington, DC: 2015b), https://www.archives.gov/foia/state-department-emails/#top. NARA, ‘Records Management Self-Assessment Report, An Assessment of Records Management Programs in the Federal Government’ (Washington, DC: NARA, 2015a), http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/self-assessment-2015.pdf. NARA, ‘White Paper on the Capatone Approach and Capstone GRS’ (Washington, DC: NARA, 2015), https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/email-management/capstonefinal-white-paper1.pdf. Nicholas, Dave, ‘The behaviour of the researcher of the future (the ‘Google generation’)’, Art Libraries Journal (2010) 35(1). Nicholas, Dave, ‘Dis-intermediated, decoupled and down: future of the library profession’, CILIP Update (2012) March. Nowotny, Helga, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994). OGIS, Office of Government Information Services, Assessment of the National Archives and Records Administration’s FOIA Program Phase II: Archival Records, Observations and Recommendations (College Park, MD: OGIS 2015). Paul Rock, ‘A Brief History of Record Management at the National Archives’. Legal Information Management, (2016) 16 (2), 60–64. Paul Rock, ‘The dreadful flood of documents’: the 1958 Public Record Act and its aftermath. Part 1: the genesis of the act’ Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, 51 (2017) (132/3). 48–69. Petersen, Trudy Huskamp, ‘The Probative Value of Archival Documents’, Essential (02) (Bern: Swiss Peace, 2014). Prescott, Andrew, Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Some Arts and Humanities Research Council Projects (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2015). Prescott, Andrew, ‘Tales of the Archives’, in Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth Tyler (eds.) The Cambridge History of Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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Public Records Act (PRA) 1958 chapter 51, 6 and 7 Eliz 2, http://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/Eliz2/6-7/51. Ramsay, Debra, ‘Tensions in the Interface: The Archive and the Digital’, in Andrew Hoskins (ed.) Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 279–301. Randell, Brian (ed.) The Origins of Digital Computers, Selected Papers, 3rd ed. (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1982). Reading, Anna, ‘The London bombings: Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time’, Memory Studies (2011), 4(3), pp. 298–311. RLUK and OCLC, Survey of Special Collections and Archives in the United Kingdom and Ireland (OCLC: Dublin, Ohio, 2013), http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/ library/2013/2013-01r.html. Robinson, Helena, ‘Digital Heritage, Remembering things differently, museums, libraries and archives as memory institutions, the implications for convergence’, Museums, Management and Curatorship (2012), 27(4), pp. 413–429. Rumsey, Sally and Neil Jefferies, ‘Challenges in Building an Institutional Research Data Catalogue’, The International Journal of Digital Curation (2013), 8(13), pp. 205–14. Salter, Andrea, Liz Stanley, Niamh Moore and Maria Tamboukou, The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2016). Schmidt, Laura, Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research, Society of American Archivists (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2011), http://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives. Schofield, Tom, Dave Kirk, Telmo Amaral, Guy Schofield and Thomas Ploetz (2015), ‘Archival Liveness: designing with collections before and during cataloguing and digitization’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, (2015) 9/3. Schultz, Kathryn, ‘What is distant reading?’ (New York: New York Times, 2011), 24 June, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-isdistant-reading.html?_r=0=. Scott, Walter, The Antiquary (Edinburgh: Constable, 1816) and electronic text available at: http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/STELLA/STARN/prose/WSCOTT/ANTIQUAR/ contents.htm. Scott-Baumann, Alison, Ricoeur and the Negation of Happiness (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Sebastiani, Fabrizio, Andrea Esuli, Giacomo Berardi, Craig Macdonald, Iadh Ounis. “SemiAutomated Text Classification for Sensitivity Identification”. (Proceedings of CIKM 2015, pp. 1711–1714). http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/108077/1/108077.pdf Sedley, Sir Stephen, Missing Evidence, an enquiry into the delayed publication of government commissioned research (London: Sense about Science, 2016). Sigmond, Peter J, ‘Form, Function and Archival Value’, Archivaria (1992) 33, pp. 141–7. Sinaimonastery, http://www.sinaimonastery.com/en/. Sluis, Katrina and D Rubinstein, ‘The Digital Image in Photographic Culture: The Algorithmic Image and the Crisis of Representation’ in Martin Lister (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Soares, Sunil, A Comprehensive Platform for Big Data Governance, Data Management and Analytics (Marlow, Buckinghamshire: SAS, 2016), http://www.sas.com/en_us/white papers/sas-comprehensive-platform-for-big-data-governance-data-managementanalytics-107968.html. Society of American Archivists (SAA), ‘What Are Archives and How Do They Differ from Libraries’ (Chicago: SAA, 2016), http://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives/ whatarearchives.

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Stainforth, Elizabeth, ‘From museum to memory institution: the politics of European culture online’, Museum & Society (2016), 14(2), pp. 323–37. Strodl, Stephen, Peter Petrov and Andreas Rauber, Digital Preservation within projects co-funded by the European Union in the ICT programme (Brussels: Cordis, 2011), http://cordis. europa.eu/fp7/ict/telearn-digicult/report-research-digital-preservation_en.pdf. Syme, Holger Schott, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Thomas, David, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson, The Silence of the Archive (Facet, London, 2017). Thomson, Paul, They voice of the past: oral history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). TNA, Digital services and archive audiences: Local Authority archives, A research study (London: TNA, 2014) December, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/ Digital_Services_and_Archive_Audiences_2014.pdf. Topinka, Robert, ‘Terrorism, governmentality and the simulated city: the Boston Marathon bombing and the search for suspect two’, Visual Communication (2016), 15(3), pp. 351–70. Urton, Gary, Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary coding in the Andean knotted–string records (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). US Government, Counter Insurgency Guide (Washington, DC: State Department, 2009), http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/119629.pdf. Valladas, Hélène, ‘Direct radiocarbon dating of prehistoric cave paintings by accelerator mass spectrometry’, Measurement Science and Technology, (2003), 14 (9), pp. 1487–92. Walpole, Rob, The National Archives Digital Records Infrastructure Catalogue: First Steps to Creating a Semantic Digital Archive (London: TNA, 2012), https://www.nationalarchives. gov.uk/documents/information-management/xml-london-tna-rw.pdf. Waugh, Andrew, ‘Email—a bell weather records system’, Recordkeeping Roundtable’, (Recordkeeping Roundtable, posted 30 June 2014), http://rkroundtable.org/2014/06/30/emaila-bellwether-records-system/. Weinberger, David, Too Big to Know (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Whiting, Sally, ‘Digital Archives & the Content Strategist’, Contents (2013) Issue 5, http:// contentsmagazine.com/articles/digital-archives-the-content-strategist/. Wilson, Duncan, Modern Public Records Selection and Access. Report of a Committee appointed by the Lord Chancellor (London: HMSO, 1981) cmnd. 8204. Wright, Anthony D, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).

13 TENSIONS IN THE INTERFACE The archive and the digital1 Debra Ramsay

Introduction: making the interface visible According to most dictionaries, the concept of an “interface” in its most simple form as a shared boundary between two objects, bodies, materials, or spaces dates back to the late 1800s. In the sciences, particularly in fluid dynamics, an interface is a thin layer that in itself has properties differing from the materials it separates— a common example being the surface tension found in the boundary between air and water. From the earliest conceptualisations then, the interface is not only a layer of material that might have its own characteristics, but also an area of interconnection linking things that might otherwise be separate. There is tension inherent in the very term as indicative of both boundary and convergence. It was not until the 1960s that interface came into common usage as a term associated particularly with computing, initially as a means of connection between two devices or systems, and later as software that facilitates the interaction between human user and computer (Johnson 1997, 14). A computer interface may be comprised not only of spatial elements, but also of “temporal, haptic, and cognitive” components designed to smooth over the interactions between one system and another, and/or between the user and various systems (Kirshenbaum 2004). In the context of computing, the interface is the way in which digital technologies represent themselves to the user, to paraphrase Steven Johnson (1997, 14). Yet it is also more than the “face” of products and technologies (Blair-Early and Zender 2008, 85). The interface is the first, and in many cases the only, point of interaction between the user and systems, products and technologies. As such, the interface is a highly significant area that effectively occludes the complicated workings of communication and information technologies, but which also converts that “teeming, invisible world of zeros and ones” into an

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understandable format (Johnson 1997, 14). The interface therefore functions as a system of symbolic representation and, like all such systems, it is shaped not only by the selected medium’s technological imperatives and constraints, but also by a spectrum of economic, political and cultural factors, which can themselves be understood as sets of interfaces governing “our expectations with regard to technology, representation, and access to information”, as Matthew Kirshenbaum points out (2004). Yet the interface is additionally a “filter”, not only of “all culture”, as Lev Manovich argues (1995, 64), but also of the ideologies associated with the context of its production. For Steven Johnson, therefore, the notion of the interface can be expanded beyond computing into a conceptual framework of the digital age. Writing in 1997, Johnson identified the interface, our interactions with it and expectations of it, as the potential source of the most “profound change” that would be ushered in by the burgeoning proliferation of digital technologies (213). Johnson locates these changes within “a broad cross section of everyday life, altering our storytelling, our sense of physical space, our taste in music, the design of our cities”, but he predicted that many would either pass unnoticed due to the invisibility of the interface, or be perceived as not related to the interface at all (1997, 213). Almost two decades later, in an environment now saturated with digital technologies, the notion of the interface as the source of profound change in the way we access and think about information, and therefore about the world around us, takes on a new urgency. Yet despite the significance of the interface as the layer of boundary and convergence between us and the digital environment, Johnson’s prediction that much of its influence would be unnoticed has proven true to a degree, as until fairly recently the interface remained a relatively under-researched aspect of digital culture, particularly in studies of archives, media and memory. While the impact of digital technology on archives and archival practices, particularly in relation to issues associated with accession and preservation, has been widely discussed, the significance of the interface to archives has been less so.2 Margaret Hedstrom’s examination of archival interfaces and memory is a notable exception to which I will return later in this chapter, but for now it is enough to note that Hedstrom predicts that “new generations of users, with fundamentally different perspectives on the past, [. . .] will approach archives through computer interfaces rather than visiting physical archives and interacting with tangible documents” (2002, 24). Hedstrom therefore calls for archivists to become actively involved in the creation of interfaces, and sees their development as an opportunity for revealing how archival practices shape and determine access to the past. Subsequent research on the interface in archives tends to address its significance in the context of the construction of digital collections and their relationship to the principles of archival cataloguing, or to analyse the aesthetic construction of the interface. Jerome McGann, for example, identifies the interface as “an especially crucial element” in database construction, in its capacity

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to enable the “free play” of data structures (2007, 1588), while Michael Whitelaw describes and analyses the implementation of “generous interfaces” in various cultural institutions (2015). This chapter, however, investigates exactly what processes are involved when archives construct digital interfaces and identifies the relational vectors, both within and outside of archival institutions, which are engaged and impacted by the interface. More specifically, I highlight the significance of the interface for one archival institution, The National Archives (TNA)—the official archive for the UK government. This research is drawn from an ethnographic study of organisational practices conducted at TNA over a period of six months (October 2014—March 2015) and particularly from observational sessions on a project involving a redesign of parts of the archive’s website. I attended seventeen of these meetings from November to March, until they were discontinued when the website went live. Observational notes from these meetings were shared with the project leaders and form the basis of this analysis. During the project meetings, the interface emerged as a complex arena for a series of relationships that go beyond that of archivists and user; one that complicates notions of the archive and power and control over the past. I therefore investigate the construction of the interface as a site of negotiation and struggle between technological, economic, cultural and institutional factors. The process and relationships involved in structuring the digital interface operate at the very centre of archival identity, and reveal the interplay between archive, history, evidence, narrative and, most pertinent in the context of this book, memory. The archival endeavour to collect and store the material traces of the past provides what appears to be an easy metaphor for memory itself. The apparent similarity between archives and memory is so compelling that memory has become one of the “most popular explanatory tools” in the literature of archives (Piggott 2005, 304). One staff member described TNA as holding the “nation’s memories”, illustrating the pervasiveness of a perceived unproblematic association between memory and archives. But the ease of such comparisons obscures the complexity of both archives and of memory. “Collective” and “social” memory features prominently in discussions of memory and archives. The work of Maurice Halbwachs constitutes a large part of the foundation of the theorisation of memory as collective and social. By arguing that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections”, Halbwachs created an enduring model of memory as a fixed set of narratives about the past that are held within stable social groups (1992 [1952], 43). Consequently, “collective” memory feeds smoothly into the notion that organisations, institutions and nations have “memory”. The idea that official records represent or contain the memory of such collectives can be traced (as Piggott does), all the way back to the foundations of archival theory in Hilary Jenkinson’s description of written records as “a convenient form of artificial memory” (1922, 23).

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In the post-structuralist and post-modern world, however, Jenkinson’s ideas of the archive as both impartial and neutral have yielded, in the words of Sue McKemmish, to “explorations of processes of remembering and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion, and the power relationships they embody” (2005, 19, emphasis added). Yet despite recent reconceptualisations of the archive as a site of political and cultural contestation, the idea of “collective” memory, with its overtones of dominant, stable narratives, persists in archival studies. Even in those discussions that venture a more qualified investigation of the relationship between archives and memory (Piggott 2005, for example), “collective” memory is unconditionally accepted. A more useful approach to memory, as McKemmish implies and as I have argued elsewhere, is to regard it as neither individual nor collective, but as a process that takes place within a complex system, or ecology.3 Ernst adopts a similar approach to archives in this volume, describing even the pre-digital, traditional archive as “not semantic memory or storage as technology, but rather an organizational form inbetween, a well-defined system” (2017, 145). This chapter considers the archive as “organisational form inbetween”—an organisational interface, in other words, which functions within a system of interfaces between memory, individuals, organisations and cultural, political and economic phenomena. The digital interface is one of the most crucial of these, and examining its construction is a way of examining the junctions and points of resistance throughout the network as a whole. The interface, as noted earlier, is a concept that both predates and exceeds computing, but given that this chapter concentrates on the redevelopment and redesign of a webpage for an archive, I begin with a brief examination of the concept of interface firstly in relation to computing and secondly with its significance to archival practice, before developing its application in this chapter. Some background information on TNA as an organisation provides a context for the discussion of the website redesign project and what it reveals about the relationship between the archive and the digital interface. The goal of investigating that relationship is to answer the following questions: What is the significance of “interface culture”, as Johnson refers to it, for archives? How does the digital interface intersect the interface between memory and archives? What are the strategies of representation involved in designing interfaces in archives, and how do they shape pathways to the material traces of the past?

Explorations of the interface The primary source of the “dominant vocabulary (graphical and conceptual)” associated with the interface is the engineering community (Drucker 2013, para 32). As a result, investigating at least in part how the interface is considered from the pragmatic perspective of engineering and design is crucial to understanding both its function and its form. Most interactions with digital technology involve an encounter with an interface of some kind and, more often than not,

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with multiple interfaces. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is perhaps the most common. The GUI is the interface that facilitates connections between computer systems, technologies and programmes, and our biological systems (brain, senses, body) that are as fluid and effortless as possible. The GUI allows us to interact with technology without requiring us to be aware of the underlying processes that makes it work—the codes, programming protocols and languages that make all of our digital systems function. Our engagement with the interface in computing is therefore the zone in which “human–computer interaction” (HCI) takes place. Interfaces proliferate within this territory, constantly compensating for differences between human and machine, and attempting to smooth over those differences. “User satisfaction” is a key concept in HCI and computer design as an index of the success or failure of technologies and programmes, and the interface is the primary domain where “satisfaction” is measured. Yet despite its centrality to “user satisfaction” and the fact that it is an indispensable component of most digital systems, the interface is also, as Kirshenbaum points out, frequently the end point of developmental designs, “too often put together as the final phase of a project under a tight deadline and an even tighter budget” (2004). The apparent contradiction inherent in the significance of the interface to digital technologies and to HCI, but its frequent delegation to what amounts to an afterthought in projects, can perhaps be explained by a history of development in computer engineering that paradoxically has as its ultimate goal the erasure of the interface (Pold 2005). From the perspective of the practice of interface design, and also from the academic discipline of HCI, the interface should ideally be so unobtrusive as to be almost invisible, with the eventual aim of making it disappear altogether, as in Virtual Reality where the interface “simultaneously disappear[s] and become[s] totalized” (Pold 2005). In computing, the development of the interface dates back to the 1960s and Douglas Engelbart’s oN-Line System (NLS), which introduced the mouse, hypertext and a basic windows system. The NLS formed the basis of subsequent developments of the GUI at Xerox PARC, which advanced the metaphor of the desktop to the interface, and which in turn was adapted by Steve Jobs for the Apple Mac. The complex and sometimes hotly contested historical development of the GUI falls outside of the scope of this chapter, but the central point is that, despite various iterations, creative successes and failed designs, the key principles from the early stages of interface development—the metaphor of the screen as a desktop, the use of icons, and windows, for example—are still crucial to interfaces today.4 Jeff Raskin, one of the originators of Apple and a consultant on interface design notes that “it is rare that a new paradigm can be introduced commercially” (1994, 17). User familiarity with interface design carries a substantial weight of its own, and is part of the reason for the persistence of paradigms established in the early years of computer design into today’s mediascape, where they are only starting to be challenged by the different requirements of

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mobile technologies such as smart phones and tablets. Radical changes to interface design risk destabilising that all-important Holy Grail in HCI of “user-satisfaction”. “Consistency” is therefore a term that crops up frequently in interface design, not only in terms of user expectations (Blair-Early and Zender 2008, 100) but also in relation to the interior logic of the interface itself, which in accordance with generally accepted design principles should adhere to a consistent pattern and additionally enable compatibility with various systems, both digital and otherwise (Shneiderman and Plaisant 2005, 14). One of the principle tensions in interface design, therefore, is that between “improvement and familiarity” (Blair-Early and Zender, referencing Raskin, 2008, 86). If the concept of the “user” is central to interface design, so too is the notion of “usability”, which involves an understanding of what users intend to do with, or in, the digital environments in which interfaces operate. To give some sense of the significance of usability, Shneiderman et al., devote the entire first chapter of their seminal textbook of interface design to the topic. They describe an effective interface as one that “almost disappears, enabling users to concentrate on their work, exploration, or pleasure” (Shneiderman et al. 2005, 12). A measure of usability, therefore, is how successfully the interface enables users to “interact with content to accomplish some goal” (Blair-Early and Zender 2008, 89). While effective usability involves a degree of invisibility, the relationship between interface and content is more complex than the former simply erasing itself in order to provide uninterrupted access to the latter. As Kirshenbaum notes, interface and content are frequently “computationally distinct” in terms of the different skill-sets and personnel involved in their development, and there has also been a tendency, particularly amongst humanists, to see the two as “conceptually distinct” (2004, emphasis in original). Yet the very notion of interface as a zone of both boundary and convergence indicates that such distinctions belie the intricate connections between interface and content. So although they also emphasise the invisibility of the interface, Blair-Early and Zender’s guidelines for interface design are based on the principle that the interface is “part of the content, not merely a means to access content” (2008, 102). As such, they outline an approach based on “Content Delivery Strategies”. From this perspective, the ideal interface reflects content, and is designed in such a way that functionality and aesthetics are inseparable. The notion of “transparency” in both theory and design is giving way to an acknowledgment of the significance of interface aesthetics, and an awareness that “the visual (and aural, or tactile and olfactory) elements on page or screen function as integral aspects of the information experience” (Kirshenbaum 2004). For instance, the work of Marian Dörk et al., moves away from the desktop metaphor to accommodate a more complex notion of web searches based on the idea of the “information flâneur” (Dörk et al. 2011, 2). The move toward developing a vocabulary to analyse the aesthetic composition of interfaces (in the work of, amongst others, Kirshenbaum 2004; Pold 2005; Blair-Early and Zender 2008; Whitelaw 2015)

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is a significant one in that it draws attention to the constructed nature of the interface, and thereby exposes its inherent relationship to ideological systems and its influence in shaping paths through information. From the initial point of formation and design, the constraints and affordances of the technologies used in its development, as well as key concerns for designers, shape the interface. The interface is not a neutral tool for accessing content, and its perceived invisibility is a result of both design and of our “long familiarity” with its structures (Kirshenbaum 2004). Partially because of the inexorable weight of familiarity, but also because of the compartmentalisation of specialisms in different aspects of technology and design in workforces, the key concerns outlined here—the emphasis on the user, on user-satisfaction and usability with respect to tasks and goals, as well as a fundamental conservatism in introducing elements or approaches that are radical departures from familiar standards—pervade much of HCI and interface development despite recent moves towards more innovative designs. For Johanna Drucker, notions of technology and information as commodities and of the user as consumer underpin the user-focussed, goaloriented approach to interface design (Drucker 2013, para 32). Drucker therefore calls on the “digital humanities community” to become involved in developing interfaces more suited to experiences outside of the “user-as-consumer model” (Drucker 2013, para 32). Michael Whitelaw makes a similar appeal with specific reference to digital interfaces in archives, calling for “a humanistic model of interface and interaction that emphasises exploration and interpretation over task and information retrieval” (2015, para 7). Of course, not all interfaces in operation in archives are digital. At one level, the archival institution is itself an interface because it provides the means for individuals to interact with material traces of the past. That interaction plays out through a complex variety of interfaces within the archive, constructed through “choices about what to keep, how to represent archival documents and collections, how to design systems for access, and who to admit or exclude from interactions with archives” (Hedstrom 2002, 26). Of these, three are particularly relevant to the analysis of TNA’s website redesign. The first is the process of archival description, which provides archives with ways not only of ordering and authenticating their records, but also of maintaining “greater intellectual control” over them (TNA “Cataloguing and Archives Networks”). Archival description forms an intricate and sometimes dense interface between archivists, researchers and users, and records. It is based on two key principles—the concepts of “provenance” and of “original order”. Provenance provides a history of ownership, either of individuals or of organisations, and is the source of contextual information about records and the relationships between them. Maintaining the original order of how records were created, used and stored in turn provides a linear and supposedly evidentiary narrative regarding the record. The meaning of archival records from the perspective of the archivist thus lies primarily in their interrelationships with other records and with the individuals or organisations that initiated them (TNA 2011, 8), rather

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than in the content of individual records. Both principles are foundational to archival theory and practice. They are the basis of archival catalogues, and allow archives to authenticate their records through unbroken chains of custody.5 Archival records are thus organised through functional relationships rather than by subject; an arrangement that does not necessarily suit all researchers or users. Consequently, to support multiple points of entry to records, archives also produce various finding aids, of which the “repository guide” is most common (Pugh 1982, 35). Guides are the second interface between archivist, user and records of relevance to this discussion. Guides explain the relationships between records, and provide a much-needed subject approach through their indices (Pugh 1982, 35). Some archives (such as TNA) additionally prepare guides for specialised subjects, depending on the nature and extent of their holdings. The highly specialised nature of archival methodology, sketched out very briefly here, demands a different level of knowledge in those who wish to access archival records than that required of visitors to other heritage organisations such as libraries or museums. The third and final relationship of importance here therefore takes the form of human interaction, with archivists themselves acting as an interface between researchers, finding aids, and holdings. Archivists perform the essential function of assisting users and researchers in navigating archival description and finding aids and in guiding them to the records they require, and therefore act as interfaces between such material and the user. The process of accessing and using archival records has traditionally been “highly human-mediated” (Hedstrom 2002, 40), based on the principle outlined in one of the key founding texts on archive practice that no finding aid can “impart all the knowledge that is in the head of a well-informed archivist” (Schellenberg 1965, 109). There is therefore a distinction in the profession between “searchroom” or “reference” archivists and “custodial” archivists, although in some organisations (TNA being one) archivists and other members of staff perform both roles. Hedstrom’s observation that the concept of the interface was particularly significant for archives at a time when “interfaces comprised of physical structures and human actors are being supplemented and, in some cases, supplanted by the interface of the computer screen” (2002, 22) is even more relevant over a decade later, with 89 percent of archives and record offices surveyed across Europe holding a digital collection of some kind in 2015 (Enumerate 2015, fig. 3.2, 12). 39 percent also have descriptive metadata such as catalogues online for general use (Enumerate 2015, fig. 4.1, 20). For Wolfgang Ernst, the transition of archival material and metadata to the digital realm activates “a different economy of the archive as a dynamic agency online” (Ernst 2013, 98); one which challenges many of the traditional approaches taken by archives. Digital interfaces increasingly bear the weight of all the functionality associated with archival description, guides and reference archivists, while these archival interfaces are in turn recalibrated through the affordances and limitations of the digital sphere.

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As Whitelaw points out, “the stakes here are high, because the interface plays an inescapable role in mediating digital heritage” (2015, para 6). Before moving on to investigating the implications involved in the convergence between digital interfaces with their associated principles and ideologies, and archival interfaces in TNA’s redesign project, I will clarify how the term “interface” is understood and applied in this chapter. Earlier, I touched on Johnson’s idea of the interface as an organising conceptual framework, but I have also discussed the interface as an object (designed and developed by computer engineers), or an entity (an archive, archival catalogues and archivists, for example), and considered very briefly some aspects of its history as specifically related to computing and archives. I also referred to recent shifts in both design and theory toward developing approaches to the interface that challenge existing paradigms. However, the interface is more than an object or entity, more than a “text” (Drucker 2013, para 33) or “cultural artefact” (Dörk et al. 2011, 2) that can be “read” or analysed in terms of its aesthetics, and also it is more than its technological history (Hookway 2014, 4). Rather, the interface is best approached and understood, as Branden Hookway proposes, not as an end-state, but through the “qualities of the relationships it engenders and is engendered by” (2014, 4). Like Hookway, Drucker and Alexander Galloway (2012), I view the interface as a protean, dynamic and liminal condition that activates, and is activated by, a series of relationships. However, while these three theorists focus primarily on the interface as operating in human/computer interactions, I extend the notion to explore other relational vectors that operate within, and are also activated by, interfaces in operation within the archive, including relationships between different interfaces, groups of individuals, the archive as an organisation, and its holdings. In doing so, I employ the concept of the interface as a “form of relation” (Hookway 2014, 4, emphasis in original). This chapter is thus a response to calls for approaches to the interface that “[describe] the relations and events through which a system is produced and by which it operates” (Hookway 2014, 139) and that pay “more attention to acts of producing and less emphasis on product” (Drucker 2013, para 42). In other words, I investigate the process, rather than the end-product, involved in the redesign of a particular interface within TNA’s website, as a fluid and contested state within the archive in which a range of relationships, of which human/computer is only one, play out. The interface is a critical condition where the archive meets the digital, and the nature of the archive, with its focus on intellectual control and linear structures, is undergoing a process of transformation within its dynamic flux.

The archive: The National Archives In order to interrogate the function and significance of the interface, it is necessary to know a little about the archive in which it operates—The National Archives (TNA). TNA is the result of a merger of four government bodies—the

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Public Records Office, the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office and the Office of Public Sector Information—which combined between 2003 and 2006. The organisation holds over 1,000 years of “iconic national documents” that reflect a range of government processes (TNA “Our Role”). In addition to being the UK Government’s archive, TNA’s official remit includes taking a leadership role in the archives sector in England. The organisation is based at Kew and describes itself as “one of the largest and most successful archives in the world” with a collection that is available “around the world”, largely via its website (TNA 2015, 9). TNA’s presence on the web dates back to 1995 when information was made available on the government website of the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. Two years later, the Public Records Office had its own website and a separate domain from 1998. TNA’s current website, however, dates back to 2003 (TNA “FAQs”). From 2014 to 2015, the organisation provided over 640,000 physical records to visitors in Kew’s reading rooms (TNA 2015, 11). The same report indicates that in that period, records were downloaded from TNA’s website close to 200 million times. While some of these downloads may well have occurred onsite at Kew, the considerable difference in the numbers of digital and physical interactions with records vividly illustrates the fundamental impact of digital technologies on archival processes. The increasing interaction with digital rather than material records is also suggestive that a broader shift from understanding culture as dependent on “material storage” to transmitted via “processual data flows” (Ernst 2017, 151) has already effectively taken place. With parts of its institutional heritage dating back to the 1700s (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office was founded in 1786), the organisation has weathered a great deal of change. However, the impact of digital technologies has done much more than bring about a recalibration of “interactions between the users of archives and the archival institutions and their staff ” (Hedstrom 2002, 41). Indeed, for TNA, “digital technology has changed forever what it means to be an archive” (TNA 2016, 7). Of course, these transformations are not only about establishing a website, making metadata and records available online and providing worldwide user access, but also incorporate the complexities of acquiring and preserving hybrid collections, government websites and web pages, and the first born-digital collections. While the challenges posed by the scope and scale of digital records as well as the issues associated with the tendency digital programmes and platforms to redundancy are of major significance to TNA, the organisation lists the ability to “meet changing customer expectations in a digital world” as part of its plan to become “a digital archive by design” in its strategic priorities for 2015–2019 (TNA 2016, 7). The digital interface is therefore of critical importance to TNA, as it is the primary zone in the “digital world” in which TNA’s “customers”, either have their expectations met, or challenged.

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The digital interface TNA’s website is not the only interface, digital or otherwise, operating within the organisation. Drawing on Hookway’s conceptualisation of the interface as a threshold condition, rather than simply a threshold, allows us to see how the website activates relationships with other interfaces, leading to and creating different threshold conditions for exploration and use. Of these, one of the most crucial relationships is with “Discovery”, which TNA describes as the “first ever comprehensive national online catalogue” (TNA 2016, 7). Discovery officially replaced TNA’s old catalogue in 2013. Both Discovery and TNA’s website open up to other interfaces in the form of databases and datasets from organisations such as ARCHON, the archive directory, and the metadata of over 2,500 other archives around the UK (TNA “What is Discovery?”). In addition to metadata, however, TNA’s website also provides access to digital records in the form of archived government websites, as well as digitised and born-digital records. To complicate matters, the website links to the interfaces of TNA’s commercial partners, such as Ancestry.com. To assist users in navigating this complicated network, the interface additionally provides access to TNA’s comprehensive guides, which are also available online. For Ernst, the role of the “new archive” in the digital economy is to “meaningfully link up different information nodes” within records (2013, 83), but TNA’s website goes far beyond even that, providing operational and procedural connections between various organisations, records and finding aids. What is more, the website performs a marketing function, indicating the kinds of services the archive can provide in terms of information management for other institutions and commercial businesses and also acting as the “face” of the organisation for the majority of users of the archive, most of whom will never visit TNA in person. Like all interfaces, TNA’s website is not a stable, fixed entity but a constantly evolving liminal zone. Snapshots of the website’s evolution from its first incarnation in the pages of the Public Record Office through to its current formation can be seen on a Pinterest page created by TNA (https://uk.pinterest.com/ uknatarchives/the-national-archives-online-the-story-so-far/), and the organisation also archives its own webpages as part of its remit to preserve government records (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/*/http://www.nationalarchives. gov.uk/). Part of the website’s ongoing development included the introduction of a “mega-menu” in 2013, in response to the increased number of mobile devices (around 80 different devices in a “typical month”) used to access the site (Allen 2013). By 2014, however, over a third of users accessing the website were doing so via mobile devices (TNA 2015, 11), providing the impetus, at least in part, for another reconfiguration, this time specifically focussed on those pages concerned with providing “help with your research”, which are located on the main landing page of the organisation’s website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk).

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The ongoing work on the website, while significant enough to be mentioned in TNA’s annual report for 2014–2015 (11), had no allocated budget and initially developed on an ad hoc basis before eventually gaining formal recognition in TNA; an illustration of the tension that Kirshenbaum identifies in the interface being critical to organisations, but at times, “little loved” by them (2004). The project to redevelop the “help with your research” area of the website was by necessity a collaborative effort between various teams and departments in TNA. It was led by members of the User Experience Team and involved the close cooperation primarily of two other teams—the Web Team and members of the Advice and Records Knowledge (ARK) department. ARK is a publicfacing department responsible for the development of TNA’s guides, for providing historical expertise and for dealing with activities related to public enquiries, including manning enquiry desks onsite and fielding queries via e-mail and telephone. The function of the ARK team is thus very much aligned with the responsibilities performed by reference archivists. Given the focus on users and visitors to TNA in two of the core teams, it is unsurprising that another driver for the project was feedback from the public on the website. TNA runs online user satisfaction surveys biannually, and results indicated significant levels of dissatisfaction with the interface’s search functionality. More specifically, as was mentioned in the meetings on a number of occasions, a key issue was that the structure and nature of the interface created confusion as to where links would lead, with many users anticipating landing on the records themselves, rather than on the guides, or on Discovery. Consequently, in addition to ensuring that the website was suitable for all kinds of mobile devices, the project’s other goal was to streamline and simplify navigation of the interface. TNA makes every effort to be as transparent as possible about their processes, including the design of their interfaces.6 On one level, the organisation’s approach to interface design very much reflects the central principles of interface design as outlined earlier. It is primarily user-centric (in accordance with the UK Government’s design principles for its websites) and task-oriented, with much focus on “information seeking behaviour” and a keen awareness of how such behaviour is driven by familiarity with other interfaces, especially Google (Phillips 2012). The application of commercial design principles in an organisation committed to managing and preserving the “nation’s memory”, and to providing “one of the world’s most valuable resources for academic research” (TNA 2016, 6) could be read (following Drucker) as the penetration of capitalist ideology in the archival interface, creating an arena that positions users as consumers and turns the past into a commodity. In reality, TNA’s negotiation of the digital world, together with the various stresses and strains placed on the organisation by economic, political and cultural factors, and the nature of the interfaces it constructs, are all more complex than such a reading allows, which can only be fully understood by investigating the process of development. The project was kept on track by regular weekly meetings,

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mostly attended by members of the three core teams, but also, on a monthly basis, attended by a much broader range of staff from across the organisation, including web developers, subject specialists, historians and archivists. In a heritage organisation like TNA, which employs over 600 members of staff (TNA 2015, 42), and has an organisational structure arranged around different areas of expertise, involving archivists in the development of digital interfaces as Hedstrom suggests, is not a simple matter and requires conscious and deliberate effort to overcome internal divisions of labour. A series of relational vectors between public-facing teams, archivists, historians and web developers was thus activated through the interface. The meetings I observed involved extensive deliberation and negotiation around terminology, user testing, roles and responsibilities, and the aesthetics of the interface itself. For the sake of clarity, I have divided the analysis of these discussions into two primary areas of contestation that play out in the interface, each with its own set of concerns, but it will be evident that these overlap in significant ways. The first involves the tension between interface culture and archival principles and practices, and how this intersects with the interface between archives and memory. The second concerns the strategies adopted by TNA in response to the challenges and affordances of the essential fluidity of the interface, and what these reveal about the nature and identity of the archive in the digital world. By “interface culture”, I mean the ways in which the most powerful prevailing interfaces, which tend to be commercial, shape expectations not only of how information should be accessed, but also of what information about the past is available. The design process reveals the penetration of interface culture with its overtones of capitalist ideology into archives, but also a constant push-and-pull between the influence of interface culture and the identity of the archive. The phrase, “Listen, it’s not Google, all right!”, while not intended as a serious interjection when it was uttered by a member of staff in one of the meetings, nevertheless encapsulates the tension between interface culture and archival identity, which played out at both the aesthetic and functional level of the interface. In terms of aesthetics, while one of the key goals of the project was to streamline the interface’s search functionality, there was a concern regarding making the page’s design “too friendly”, as one staff member put it. The myth that everything is accessible and available in the digital sphere is pervasive in interface culture, fostered by the functional aesthetics of search engines such as Google, and it poses a challenge to archival interfaces. TNA may be one of the largest government archives, but it is by no means infinite, and not all records make it to the archive. Too much streamlining, or making the interface “too friendly” through aesthetic similarities to websites like Google, or to Microsoft’s “help” functions, risks smoothing over the difficulties inherent in conducting archival research, generating false expectations regarding the kind of help offered by the archive,

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and invoking the myth of easy accessibility to infinite information. The support offered by the archive via the staff and through finding aids and the website is intended to guide visitors and users through the labyrinthine structures of archival description to enable research, and is not intended to conduct research on the user’s behalf. Thwarting expectations of help and of infinite accessibility potentially jeopardises good user satisfaction scores. Discussions of the tension created by user expectations of “friendly” interfaces were often laced with humour, as in the phrase “listen, it’s not Google”, but also in the ironic suggestion that perhaps the Design Team should develop an equivalent to “Clippy”, one of Microsoft’s most unpopular interfaces designed to provide “help”, and call it “Archie the Archival Aardvark”. Underlying the humour, however, is a wry awareness of the pressures on archival interfaces generated by the weight of expectations created by interface culture. As a member of the User Experience Team expressed it, “expectation is constantly rising” in terms of what other interfaces look like and how they operate, and managing user expectations of the interface is an ongoing concern for TNA. Just as the project team was mindful of the pressure of expectations generated by interface culture, they also demonstrated a self-reflexive awareness of TNA’s own expectations regarding what records should be regarded as significant and of how the interface functions. For example, exhaustive debates in both the core teams and in the larger monthly meetings with subject matter experts around the design of keyword A–Z search functionality with its categories and tags, demonstrates the complications of “user-centric” design when the interface is also essential for members of the organisation. The A–Z search requires some initial knowledge of the records, and is used extensively by the ARK team in their responses to queries from the public, and also by more expert researchers both within and outside of TNA. Staff familiarity with this facet of the interface, as well as the need for subject matter experts to represent their respective fields appropriately, created a different kind of pressure on the redesign and at times inhibited new configurations. Members of the design team, who do not use the interface in the same way as ARK or as the subject matter experts, were often the ones to point out that familiarity with current usage was hindering alternative design possibilities, but the project team overall displayed an awareness of the difference between their own expectations of the interface and that of the public, as illustrated by the team’s efforts in sorting out what TNA considered “important” in terms of subjects, and what was popular in terms of use by the public for the categories and tags in the A–Z. At the level of functionality, the interface thus emerges even more clearly as a zone of contestation between interface culture and archival identity. Writing on the digital archive, Ernst asks “[d]oes the power of archives lie primarily in their securing the materiality of their documents [. . .], or is it chiefly a matter of their storing information to make it available for present use?” (2013, 88). Although Ernst was debating the nature of the material record in the digital

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sphere, the question is relevant here, as the debates concerning the A–Z search function are in essence about the need to secure and reconcile the historical and archival principles of the record with the conventions of the interface and the expectations it generates in users within the organisation and members of the public. A member of ARK distilled the issue and unintentionally echoed Ernst by asking whether the primary function of the interface (in the form of the webpages under redevelopment) was resource focused, or task focused. The difficulties the project team faced in navigating between these two orientations indicates that the nature of the archive, with curatorial and historical responsibilities for its holdings, exerts its own pressure on the commercial principles of user-centric, task-focused design. But the process of structuring the interface additionally reveals that in practice, the archive goes far beyond the responsibilities of securing the materiality of the record and/or of making it available. Crafting pathways through the interface is also a process of crafting meaning and constructing memory, as demonstrated particularly in the case of records relating to LGBT historical issues and rights in the UK. According to the principles of archival description, and because of the historical criminalisation and persecution of the LGBT community, most of the records relating to this community are found in categories relating to courts and criminals. However, as one staff member pointed out, creating a pathway to the guides dealing with Gay and Lesbian history through the “Criminals, courts and prisons” subject category on the website’s interface would be profoundly inappropriate today, and open to misunderstanding. After some discussion, the guides to Gay and Lesbian history were instead located within the “Social and cultural history” subject category. Furthermore, the guide to the records pertaining to Gay and Lesbian History explains that the terms used in these records—such as “deviant”, “queer”, “immoral”—are indicative of “the attitudes of the time rather than those of today” (TNA, “Gay and Lesbian History”). In the case of this particular set of records, the digital interface and finding aid combine to provide a contemporary perspective on the structures of a third interface, in the form of archival description. Far from being neutral constructs, all three interfaces are crucial to generating meaning. The process of constructing the aesthetic and functional relationships between these three interfaces, as well as all subsequent acts of navigation through them, demonstrate that TNA does not simply “hold” the “nation’s memory”, it interprets and re-inscribes the material traces of the past via the digital interface. The construction of pathways through the interface, the organisation of subject categories and their contents, as well as the description of records in finding aids all combine in what Ernst describes as a “performative form of memory as communication” (2013, 99) in the digital sphere that quite simply overturns the notion of archival records as a stable bank of records encapsulating the memory of an undefined “collective”. The various interfaces engaged within the threshold state of the digital interface work in conjunction to create a narrative about the

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past, folding history and memory together in an ongoing process of evaluation and re-evaluation in which the role of the archive as an organisation “in-between” becomes clear, as it mediates between users, archival principles, and ever-shifting cultural, social and political contexts. The push-and-pull between archival principles and interface culture goes to the heart of what it means to be an archive in the digital world. Nowhere was this more evident than in the comprehensive deliberations around the language and terms to be used in the interface. Superficially, the discussion of terminology was part of the project team’s efforts at managing user expectations, many of them generated by interface culture, of the services offered by TNA and the website. Terms such as “guidance”, “advice”, “how to” and “help”, were carefully considered in relation to what users might expect from each of them as opposed to the reality of what is on offer from TNA, as were “access” and “view”, “research” and “search” and even “records”. Examining these terms more closely reveals the fundamental issues brought into play in the zone where the archive meets the digital interface—the traditional notions of “records” that are “viewed” as part of a “research” process, with archivists providing “guidance” on that process are all open to interrogation and re-evaluation. The project team questioned the understanding of “research”, for example, as particularly associated with academic endeavour and therefore possibly not considered by many users as applicable to their own activities in the archives. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the question of what constitutes a “record” in the digital age and how the term is understood by users with no experience of archives at all, surfaced during the redesign process. These discussions indicate that what is at stake at the point of convergence and boundary between the interface and the archive is the very notion of what an archive is, and what it does. The challenge issued by interface culture to archival identity is evident in one staff member’s observation that TNA should “draw a line somewhere” and retain the language that archives use in the interface. But “drawing a line” in the shifting, indeterminate zone of the interface is in many respects like trying to write on water. Hookway draws on the theorisations of the interface in fluid dynamics to posit a deep “conceptual affinity” between every level of the interface and the notion of fluidity (Hookway 2014, 59). Fluidity refers not only to the protean state of the interface, but also to its ability to flow across and into other zones, connecting them but in some instances smoothing over their differences. Although one of the key purposes of finding aids in archives is to support multiple points of entry into the records (to balance the linear and hierarchical structure of archival description), access points have a tendency to multiply within the digital interface. The notion that the “nation’s memory” is somehow contained in TNA’s material records simply dissolves in the digital proliferation of material, organisations and access points. Instead, the interface between memory and archives is comprised of a series of organisational intersections and boundaries, informational nodes and connections between them, and in the pathways

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constructed through these networks. On one level, the entire redesign project was an attempt to channel these pathways into clearly defined conduits—to create boundaries, in other words, and to reduce the number of access points between Discovery and the guides, between different kinds of records, and between TNA and other organisations. For TNA, however, the ease of access created via interface flows to other organisations, and indeed to different kinds of records, as well as the tendency of the interface toward invisibility, creates problems. For instance, members of ARK have had enquiries from users who were unaware that they had navigated through TNA’s interface to another organisation’s website. And some websites require a subscription for access to digitised records that are catalogued in Discovery and owned by TNA, which creates confusion as to what records are available online and from what source. In terms of different kinds of records, a large portion of the project team’s time was devoted to determining the best way to indicate via the interface the various ways in which users can access TNA’s records, most especially which records are online and which are not—not an easy task given the accelerating accession of born-digital records, as well as various ongoing digitisation projects in TNA. The difficulties of signposting exit points and the conditions of access both in TNA and to the websites of other organisations are all symptomatic of a larger struggle faced by archives in the digital sphere—responding to the voracious capacity of the digital for endless reconfiguration and the rapid dissemination of content. But there is another issue here, one that is rarely considered in discussions of digital archives, and that is the ability of the interface to blur the lines between organisations and also between different kinds of content. TNA are aware that their users are increasingly unconcerned with what Michael Moss refers to in this volume as “the niceties of the distinction between primary and secondary sources” (2017, 261). The general consensus in the project team was that users are “not that bothered about where stuff is” as one staff member put it, but are more concerned with the content of the record and how they can access it. The “siege” that Moss indicates has long broken through the TNA’s archival boundaries, resulting not only in a flood of material into the digital sphere, but also in a blurring of organizational identity (2017, 261). The interface’s ability to smooth over distinctions between TNA and other organisations runs counter to the Archive’s ongoing efforts to establish and maintain a distinct brand in an increasingly challenging economic environment. The interface’s seamless interlinking of different kinds of records from different sources in turn undermines the structures of archival description and, by doing so, threatens the foundational principles of the archive itself. From one perspective, then, the fluidity of the interface bypasses archival description, and also allows users to interact with records without what Hedstrom refers to as the “benefit of human mediation” (2002, 40). However, the painstaking process of the redesign project is as much a vivid demonstration of human intervention

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as it is of the capabilities of digital technologies, and the two are not as easily separated within the interface as Hedstrom implies. Of course, Hedstrom refers particularly to the traditional relationship between “researcher” and the “archivist” that characterised the experience of the archive for much of its history, but as we have already seen, both of those terms are open to re-evaluation. The active and intensive involvement of the ARK team in constructing the interface, while simultaneously continuing to manage human interactions, provides a vivid illustration of the transitional nature of archival roles in the current digital sphere. With the majority of users of TNA accessing the archives online, rather than onsite, the reference archivist is no longer the “sole link between users and records” (Duff and Fox 2006, 130), and the interface is designed to perform similar functions—it directs the user to finding aids, to the catalogue and to records, for example. The web interface not only substitutes for the reference archivist, it also functions as a highly flexible state of interaction between TNA staff and users. Both Hedstrom and Duff and Fox suggest ways in which the archivist can use the interface to “make themselves accessible to users for rich verbal and visual interaction” (Hedstrom 2002, 41), and while the fluidity of the interface supports the possibility of such interactions, it also complicates them. The exhaustive discussions around the use of the word “help” reflect the pressure of interface culture, but additionally indicate a broader issue related to what “help” means in an archive, and how it is managed via the interface. TNA conducts research on request, but this is a chargeable service. The organisation devotes a considerable amount of resourcing in the form of members of ARK and other subject specialists to provide users with assistance in navigating its extensive holdings, but the parameters of operating with the public are not always clear, not least because a large number of users are unfamiliar with the ways in which archives function and have expectations of expert knowledge and assistance. The issue of inflated and unrealistic expectations of archives is not endemic to the digital (see Pugh 1982, and Duff and Fox 2006, for example), but they are sharply exacerbated by interface culture and the enhanced scale afforded by the digital realm. The ability of the interface to open channels of communication between users and staff members, via live chat options for instance, creates the expectation of immediate and expert support. Instant messaging options have the potential to attract a much larger set of users from around the world than any other form of contact with TNA. The project team consequently took great care in considering the arrangement of contact options within the interface in order to ensure that the ARK team could reasonably manage requests. In an example of the mutually transformative nature of relationships within the interface, ARK made adjustments to its resourcing in order to accommodate potential impact on public requests as a result of changes made to these options in the interface. While much of the project concerned channelling and managing the fluidity of the interface, there was also the challenge of building in enough flexibility

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within the interface to accommodate the needs of vastly different user groups. The academic “researcher” is now by far in the minority of users of archives. While family historians have always been significant to TNA, television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC 2004–), which was specifically intended to foster new interest in archives, have contributed to a burgeoning growth in the field. TNA’s first-time visitors to its website increased by 18 percent following the first series of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2004 (Holdsworth 2011, 95). According to the User Experience Team, ten years later, 75 percent of users of the website are family historians, and the most popular downloads from the site are genealogical. Family historians are thus an extremely significant user group for TNA, particularly in a climate of budget cuts and austerity. Some family historians are experienced researchers (members of ARK, for example, have researched their own family trees), but many have no previous experience of archives. The needs of this user group have to be balanced very carefully against the needs of academics and other experienced researchers. The interface thus has to be flexible enough to accommodate the first-time, totally inexperienced user, as well as the highly-experienced professional researcher or academic. The latter group is far more likely to be resistant to change.7 Familiarity with more complex interfaces pushes back on the expectations generated by interface culture, and the project team had to take both influences into account in the redesign. In many respects, despite its focus on users and tasks, TNA’s website exceeds Whitelaw’s notion of a “generous interface” in that it goes beyond “revealing relationships and structures within a collection” (2015, para 3), but also opens up thresholds to finding aids, other organisations and their collections. The process of constructing the digital interface, as well as all subsequent acts of navigation through it by individual users both inside and outside of the archive, are dynamic instances of the interplay between archives and memory. More than that, the digital interface is a critical boundary state where interface culture meets archival identity and responsibility, and it both defines and challenges the notion of the archive.

Conclusion: It’s Not Google A beta version of the website released in March 2015 has since gone live and currently forms the design of TNA’s landing and help pages (on http://www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/). TNA’s website, like all interfaces, is not a completed object, text or end-state that can be understood solely through analysing its constituent parts or its history. Throughout the design process, the project team was acutely aware that the results of its decisions were not “set in stone”, as one member of the web design team put it. However, the potential of the digital interface for almost infinite malleability must be measured against the timeconsuming, painstaking process of design, described by Whitelaw as “not a neat

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implementation but a productive wrangling of digital materials, formal abstractions and conceptual concerns” (2015, para 19). Investigating the complex process of “productive wrangling” required to reconstruct an interface within a large government archive reveals not only how a series of relationships and an intricate sequence of negotiations and debates are activated by the interface, but also how these elements ultimately come to circumscribe the interface itself. User expectations generated by familiarity with commercial websites such as Google exert a definite and tangible pressure on the process of interface design in archives, and are increasingly inflecting perceptions of what is accessible from the past and how it can be accessed. But the design process demonstrates that commercial design principles are not simply or blindly implemented within heritage organisations like TNA, because the archive itself pushes back against them by asserting and upholding archival responsibilities and identity through a series of representational strategies. The process of constructing the digital interface, as well as subsequently navigating through it in its completed form, intersects the interface between the archive and memory. TNA does more than “hold” the nation’s memory, it is part of a process in which the material traces of the past are constantly re-evaluated and re-inscribed within ever-changing cultural, political and social contexts. In response to the fluidity of the interface, TNA opens and delimits pathways to records and finding aids, and engages in an ongoing struggle to preserve archival terminology and principles and to organise content in ways that are both historically accurate but also appropriate for the contemporary world. Simultaneously, the organisation utilises the flexibility of the interface in order to perform an almost impossible balancing act between providing access to finding aids, catalogues and different kinds of records (not all of them held by TNA) and meeting the needs of an extremely diverse set of users. These strategies demonstrate that TNA, like all archives, is not a neutral repository of records, but actively determines pathways to the past. But the interface, as a threshold state that defines and delimits the identity of the organisation, complicates notions of archives exerting power and control over access to the past. A series of mutually transformative relationships are activated within the interface. Changes in technological affordances and the needs of users create shifts in the interface, which in turn result in adjustments to operational procedures within the archive, which can be as simple as bringing individuals with different skill-sets together, or as complex as rearranging work schedules to accommodate increased points of contact with the public. Facilitated by the digital interface, such relational vectors illustrate key shifts in archives in the digital era, most notably the transformation from the archive as a “final destination” into a “frequently accessed site” (Ernst 2013, 99). The vast majority of users will never know TNA as a physical place, located in an imposing building in Kew. Instead, they know TNA through the infinite, shifting space of the interface. We are only beginning to consider the implications of such a profound change in the relationship between archives, memory, records and users.

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We need to do far more to make visible the power of the interface, and to interrogate the processes and relationships that shape it, and that it in turn engenders. The archival interface is far more than a search engine (and those, too, have their complications). The archival interface is a liminal state that extends and delimits our pathways to the past; one that plays a pivotal role in the process of memory making, and its relationship to individual, organisation, and state.

Notes 1 This article is developed from work funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a Research Fellowship held by Professor Andrew Hoskins entitled “Technologies of Memory and Archival Regimes: War Diaries after the Connective Turn” (ref. AH/L004232/1). My thanks go to the National Archives, especially to the User Experience team and to the Advice and Records Knowledge team for their generosity and willingness in making this research possible. 2 See for example, Cook 1991, Ernst 2013; Conway 2010, Bailey 2007, Garaba 2015, Barata 2004. 3 For a more detailed explanation of a systems approach to memory, see Ramsay 2012, 19–27. 4 Steven Johnson provides both a history of the interface and a useful historically contemporary perspective on how it was viewed at a time when computing was becoming ubiquitous in the home and workplace. 5 For a detailed explanation of the development and rationale of archival description, see Gilliland-Swetland 2000. 6 For example, a series of blogs specifically dealing with ‘website redesign’ can be found here: http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/tag/website-re-design/. 7 See user comments on various aspects on the website redesign for examples of complaints regarding changes. http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/tag/website-re-design/.

References Allen, Emma. 2013. “Our Website: a Design Journey.” The National Archives Blog, 16 September. http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/?s=our+website+a+design+journey. Bailey, Steve. 2007. “Taking the Road Less Travelled By: The Future of the Archive and Records Management Profession in the Digital Age.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28(2): 117–124. Accessed 22 January 2015. DOI: 10.1080/00379810701607777. Barata, Kimberly. 2004. “Archives in the Digital Age.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 25(1): 63–70. Accessed 12 December 2014. DOI: 10.1080/0037981042000199151. Blair-Early, Adream. and Mike Zender. 2008. “User Interface Design Principles for Interaction Design.” Design Issues 24(3) Winter: 85–107. Accessed 3 May 2016.http:// www.jstor.org/stable/25224185. Conway, Paul. 2010. “Preservation in the Age of Google: Digitization, Digital Preservation, and Dilemmas.” Library Quarterly, 80(1): 61–79. Accessed 3 May 2016. http://hdl. handle.net/2027.42/85223. Cook, Terry. 1991. “Easy to Byte, Harder to Chew: The Second Generation of Electronic Records Archives.” Archivaria, January 1991. Accessed 6 June 2016. http://journals. sfu.ca/archivar/index.php/archivaria/article/view/11812/12763.

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INDEX

diag refers to a diagram, ill to an illustration, n to a note, t to a table 7/7 (July 7th 2015) 182, 263–4 9/11 (September 11th 2001) 100, 182 video games 112 Abad, Antoni 227, 231n3 Acton, Lord 260 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 203–4, 210n17 Adorno, Theodor W. 43 Advice and Records Knowledge (ARK) 290, 295, 296 afterdeath communication 59, 60 re-enchantment 74 afterlife actants 64, 74 afterlife agencies and managers 20, 51, 56, 58–63, 59t, 64–5, 73–4, 78n30 affective modes and agencies 73diag avatars 60–1 Dead Man’s Switch 64 online memorials 69, 73 Agger, Ben 91–2 Ahmed, Sara, ‘the sticky whatever’ 30, 31 Alaimo, Stacey 240 Alberti, Leon Battista 149 Allen, Matthew 10, 222 Alzheimer’s disease 200 Ancestry (genealogical archive) 261, 271, 289 Anthropocene 55, 158, 217, 240, 244–5

Anti-Defamation League 111, 132n3 Appadurai, Arjun 97 Apple ID 65 Apple Mac 283 archives and archiving 3, 15, 57, 87–8, 145, 147, 150, 153–4, 253–65, 281–2 appraisal of 258–9, 266 born-digital records 256, 263, 265, 267–8 coding 152 costs of 271–2 digitization of 152, 261–5, 292, 294–6, 297 fixed-term restriction of access to 258, 267 functions of 174 micro-archiving 28, 29, 44, 44n2 provenance of 285 shadow archives 87, 88, 92, 93, 100, 101, 105, 106 and television 176 and war 4, 16, 261 see also catalogues and cataloguing; interface Archives Libraries Museums Alliance (UK) 272 ARCHON directory 289 Ariès, Philippe 53 Arts Council England 272

304

Index

Assmann, Aleida 96 Assmann, Jan 106n, 218, 220 attention 39, 100–2, 104–5 ‘continuous partial attention’ 103 ‘three-minute culture’ 104 audiovisual exoskeletons 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 54, 40 audiovisuals 29, 30, 31, 34, 37 Auschwitz Camp (video game) 110 Auschwitz concentration camp selfies taken at 115–6 video games 110, 131 austerity 34, 44n Australian Aborigines: rock art 245–6 Automata (film) 56 Badovinac, Zdenka 41 Bain, Alexander 177 Baird, John Logie 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186 Bales, Kevin Blood and Earth 242–3 Barad, Karen 192, 201, 209n14 Baran, Paul 162, 165–6 Barker, Timothy 17, 38, 44n5 Television In and Out of Time 157 Barthes, Roland 52 on photography 52 and punctum 144 Bartlett, Frederic 9, 198 Baudrillard, Jean 55 Bauman, Scott 255 Beim, Aaron 99 Beirut 239 Bell Technical Journal (1927) 180 Benjamin, Walter on ‘aura’ 144 Bennett, Jane 240 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 37, 159 Bergen-Belsen Museum 124 Bergson, Henri 170n4 Matière et Mémoire 148 Berlant, Laurent 31–2, 33, 35 Bernanke, Ben 271–2 Bernard, Luc Imagination is the Only Escape 111 Bethesda Softworks 112 Biccionhi, Luiz 227, 228 Big Data 3, 255, 259, 266, 269–70, 273 Big Media 15, 104 Bild Telegraph 180 black boxes, data retrived from Air France plane crash 151 Black Mirror (tv series) 68–9

Blair-Early, Adneam and Mike Zender 284 Bolter, Jay David 12 books 254–5, 256, 259 Borgmann, Albert 104–5 Bourdieu, Pierre 236, 243–5 Boym, Svetlana 30, 38, 40 on edginess 38–9 Brasher, Brenda 57 Bratton, Benjamin 168, 169 Brazil 218, 220–1, 223–5 creative memory industries 221 ‘Itatiaia Circle’ 225 Sao Paulo ‘City of Knowledge’ 219, 225–6, 227, 228, 230 Saõ Paulo motorboys and motorgirls 227, 229 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 177 British Library 256, 261 broadcasting and broadcast media 14, 16, 85, 91, 100 see also television Broder, Henryk 124 Brown, Steven 195, 198, 204 Brown, Steven and Andrew Hoskins 8, 9, 87, 219, 222 Brown, Steven and Paula Reavey 190–1, 202, 214, 217 on homeomorphism 202, 206, 207, 208 Buchenwald Museum 117–8, 129 Buden, Boris 31, 37, 41, 42 Burton, Antoinette Archive Stories 255 Callon, Michael 204 Campbell-Kelly, Martin 257 Canadian Council of Academics 263 Canal Motorboy art project 227 Cann, Candi K. 78n27 CAPSTONE data system 266 Carr, Nicholas The Shallows 103–4 Carroll, Evan Your Digital Afterlife 78n29 Caselli, Giovani 180 Castells, Manuel 159, 226 catalogues and cataloguing 255, 256 automation of 257, 260, 262 cave art 12, 245–6, 253 Challenger space shuttle 17, 100 Chappie (film) 56 Cheshire, James 268–9 ‘Chippy’ Microsoft interface 292 chromatin: medical technology 200, 201, 204 chronosickness 33, 38

Index

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 67, 78n19, 158, 169 Churchill, Elizabeth and Nancy Van House 87 cinema 178, 188 Clark, Timothy 240 Clinton, Hillary 267 closure 50–1, 58, 63–4, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75 cloud computing 241 co-historicity 29, 31, 38, 40–1, 44n5 CNN 16 Coke, Attorney General Sir Edward 260 collective memory 7, 11, 14, 17, 18, 85–6, 89–92, 95–8, 174, 178, 197, 217, 219, 226, 281, 282 and collected memory 94–100 and mass media 98–100 Columbia University History Lab 269 Commodore 64 computer 27, 30, 146 communication systems real-time 161 switching systems 161–3 time management of 165 Communist bloc: television reporting of fall of 16 computers magnetic core matrix 152 mediation of 164–5 Congo, coltan mining 242 connective turn 1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 17, 86, 103, 106, 192 connectivity 8, 28, 31, 43, 49, 66, 97, 104 diachronic 28, 29 digital 18 interpersonal 39, 43 Connor, Steven 67 consumerism 36–7, 42 desire for new!-now! novelty 30, 38 Cooper, Dennis, DC blog of 111 Cotton, Sir Robert 256 counter-insurgency operations 266 Crary, Jonathan 2, 7, 93 critical code studies 145 crowd, the 93, 94 Cubitt, Sean 177 The Practice of Light 173 cultural capital 243 cultural policies 222 curators and curating 256, 257–8, 270 Dacre Report (2009) 258 data analysis of 269–71

305

processing of 152 visualisation of 268 data packets 150, 161, 166 storage of 163 switching of 162–3, 166, 167 databases 55, 94–5 Davies, Donald and Derek Barber 163 ‘Communication Networks for Computers’ 161–2 message-space of humans and machines 164ill Davies, Natalie 260 Davis, Sir John 208 Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz 16–17 de Waal, Martijn 10 Dead Social (afterlife agency) 78–9n30 death apps 60 and loss 67, 70–1, 72 in media studies 52–4, 56 necromedia 79n42 and social media 53, 67 suicide 65 see also life and death Death Online Research Symposium (2015) 75n1 De Landa, M. 201, 202, 209n10 Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 194 Delfin, Mauricio 94 Denkverbot 36, 44–5n8 Derrida, Jacques 210n17, 264 Archive Fever 273 ‘visor effect’ 190, 209n1 Descartes, René 115 Design Museum, London 207 Diana, Princess, death of 17, 100 Dieckmann, Max 180, 181 digital afterlife agencies see afterlife agencies digital eternity 51, 56, 57–8, 66 digital inheritance 51, 56, 59 digital media 5, 42, 179, 206 charged-coupled device 144 dangers of 5 dependency on 8, 93, 101, 102, 105 entrapment by 48–9 existential terrain of 49–50 immersion in 92, 93 inequality in access to 237–8, 244 memory in 43, 44n4 obsolesence of 55 participation in 114 see also social media

306

Index

Digital Media Management for Local Development Programme 227 digital memory 3, 7, 103, 179, 217, 222, 235 bifurcation of 113 economics of 239–40 life-logging devices 102 storage of 146, 149, 158 digital memory studies 50, 66, 113–5, 122, 190–1, 197, 217, 222, 235, 240, 242, 245 digital ‘thrownness’ 50, 65 Doane, Mary Anne 176 Donald, Merlin ‘extended memory field’ 18–19 A Mind So Rare 11 Permanent External Symbolic Storage 18–19diag, 20 Dörk, Marian 284 Drucker, Johanna 285 Durkheim, Emile 89–90, 93 Echard, Siân and Andrew Prescott Charming the Snake 264 ecological memory capital 244–5, 247 edginess 38–9 Efterhjälpen (Afterhelp) 65, 66, 74, 75 Eire, Carlos A Very Brief History of Eternity 77n electricity, access to 236–7, 238 electrowetting 193, 194–5, 197, 199, 206, 209n email 261, 266, 267, 268 Engelbart, Douglas oN-Line System 283 Enron Corporation 261 environment ‘deep time’ 241, 242 impact of media technologies on 240–3, 244–5, 246 Erll, Astrid 115, 193, 219, 222 Ernst, Wolfgang 28, 29, 87, 167, 190, 263, 266, 282, 288 on archives/archiving 6, 57, 74, 87, 114, 174, 179, 257, 258, 282, 286, 289, 292–3, 298 on Eigenzeit 170n8 on experimentation 178 on Kulturwissenschaft 170n2 on media archaeology 170n2 on temporality 114, 158, 159, 162, 165, 169, 180 Eternime (digital afterlife agency) 60

eternity, Christian concept of 77n18 European Commission Right to be Forgotten 79n36 Everest app 60 Ex Machina (film) 56 exaptations 40, 45n12 ‘extended mind’ 9 external memory field 12, 18–20, 21 hyperconnectivity of 20 Facebook 40, 48–9, 59–60, 65, 66, 69, 70, 88, 253 ‘ghosts’ 33–4, 73 and Holocaust 116, 126 family histories 297 Farahzad, F. 203 Favareau, Donald 205 Fear of Missing Out (FoMo) 103 Featherstone, Mike 272 Federal Communications Commission 160 Federal Reserve (USA) 271–2 financial crisis (2008) 271–2 FindmyPast (genealogical archive) 261, 271 Fiske, John 176 ‘flashbulb memories’ (FBM) 17, 18, 100, 101 Fliess, W. 152 Flood, Jacqueline 246 Floridi, Luciano 3 Flusser, Vilem 91, 173, 181–2, 186 forgetting see remembering and forgetting Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies 16 Foucault, Michel 148, 149, 200, 264, 272 Free Yezidi Foundation 125 Freedom of Information Act (2000) 258, 266, 271 Freud, Sigmund 152 Fromm, Erich 36 Frosh, Paul 34 Fuller, Matthew 10, 49, 191 Fuller, Matthew and Andrew Goffey 99, 148 Fundación Telefónica 226 future construction of via digital media 38 dispotentiated 29, 43, 44n3 belief in 32, 33, 34, 37 loss of optimism in 35, 41–2, 44n1 futurism 36 Gaddafi, Muammar, images of death of 183, 184, 185, 187

Index

Garde-Hansen, Joanne 10, 113, 114, 115, 192 Gauthier, Alexandre 103 Gautier, Amina The Loss of all Lost Things 70–1 genealogy 261, 272, 297 genetics and epigenetics 200, 203 genocide 119, 125 video games 132 prevention of 127–8, 130 Gibson, William 5 Golden Temple of Amritsar, file on massacre at 267 ‘good-life’ era 35 Goody, Jack 167 Google 56, 59, 64–5, 110–1, 238, 291 Gopnik, Adam 88 Graeber, David 35, 36, 44n1 Gray, Frank, J. W. Horton and R. C. Mathes The Production and Utilization of Television Signals 173 Greenfield, Susan 255 grief and bereavement 58, 69 Grigg Report (1954) 258, 266 Groys, Boris, 185, 259, 264 Gulf War, reporting of 16 Gutenberg Parenthesis, The (Pettitt) 12–14, 13diag, 21, 97 H&M (clothing retailer) 156, 157ill Hagen, Wolfgang 148–9 Hajj pilgrimage 116 Halbwachs, Maurice 7, 100, 105, 144, 194, 219, 281 The Collective Memory 7, 89–90 Hand, M. 192 Haraway, Donna 192, 193, 197, 209n, 241–2 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 92 Hassan, Robert 156 Hatherley, Owen, 44n7 Hayles, Katherine N. 11, 63 Hayton, Jeff 112 Heath, Stephen 176 Hedstrom, Margaret 280, 286, 295, 296 Hegel, G. W. F. 149 Heidegger, Martin, 44n5, 50, 53–4, 76n9, 150, 183 Heise, Ursula K. 32 Hepp, Andreas 8 heritage industry 220 Hillsborough disaster 263, 266 Hirst, Willliam and David Manier 11

307

Hirst, William and Robert Meksin 17 Historical Branch Army (UK) viii, x history revision of 35, 40–1, 42–3 presentation by media 6 history museums 118–9 Holdsworth, Amy 17, 174, 297 Holocaust (tv series) 7 Holocaust, The 7, 15–16, 116–7, 129–30 denial of 129–30 depolitization of 121–2, 126–7 education on 119–23 prohibition on video games 111–2, 130–2 Holocaust institutions 126, 133 Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, UK 120, 133n5 Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington 118, 123–7, 129 Center for the Prevention of Genocide 127–8 and Facebook feed 126 Geographies of the Holocaust 128 Holocaust studies 128–9 homeomorphism 202, 206, 207, 208 Hookway, Branden 287, 289, 294 Hoskins, Andrew 28, 29, 31, 34, 50, 55, 113, 114, 116, 145, 150, 191, 192, 193–4, 217, 244 see also connective turn, memory, memory ecology, shadow archives, ‘sharing without sharing’ Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin 1, 4, 11, 54 Hoskins, Andrew and John Tulloch 2, 5, 21n9, 29, 34, 87 Hunter, Dr. William 256 Hutton, James 242 hyperconnectivity 5, 8, 88, 90, 94, 97, 103 dependency on 101 tyranny of 104–5 I Am Legend (film) 56 I Robot (film) 56 iconomics 219, 223 icons, creation of 225–6 Ignatieff, Michael 104 immortality, search for 61, 62, 76n, 77n impasse 33 Imperial War Museum, London 118, 119, 261 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse 4, 21n

308

Index

India: women and mobile phones 238 individual, the 40, 89–90, 92–3, 94, 194 infinite, the 62, 78n19 information access to 20 miscellanizating of 87 Inglourious Basterds (film) 111, 132n3 Innes, Harold 184, 208 insecurity see uncertainty and insecurity interface 279–80, 287, 291 and archives 280–2, 285–6 design of 283, 284–5, 291, 292, 297 digital 289 Graphical User Interface 282 terminology 294, 296 usability 283, 284, 291–2, 298–9 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 129–30 Internet 3, 55, 56, 57, 72, 104, 254, 262 temporality 144–5, 157, 159, 169n1 interscalarity 194, 197, 199, 201 Interstellar (film) 72 Islamic State: genocide of Yezidi people 125 Ives, Harold 177 Jaguaribe, Helio 225 Jameson, Fredric 36 Japan: television engineering 177 Jaspers, Karl 70 Jay, Alexis 4 Jenkins, Henry 95 Jenkinson, Sir Hilary 254, 281–2 Jobs, Steve 283 Johnson, Steven 279–80 Judt, Tony 32–3 Kahle, Brewster 262 Kansteiner, Wulf 4, 99 Kant, Immanuel 148 Kaplan, Michael 219 Karppi, Tero 49, 53 Kazansky, Peter 57 Kearl, Michael C. 67 Kelly, Kevin 3 Kennedy, John F., assassination of 17, 100 Ketelaar, Eric 264 Kierkegaard, Søren 50, 53, 70, 71–2 kinesthetic sociability 34 Kirshenbaum, Michael 279, 280, 284, 290 Kittler, Friedrich 174, 175, 180, 242 on photography 195 Kleinrock, Leonard 170n Kline, Maurice 196

Kluitenberg, Eric 76n6 Kristeva, Julia 203 Kroker, Arthur 88 Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity is Near 61 KZ Manager computer game 113 Lacan, Jacques 209n8, 210n18 Lagerkvist, Amanda 3, 20, 29, 49, 92, 114 Langlois, Ganaele 74 Lanier, Jaron 88 Lasch, Christopher 76n4 Latour, Bruno 149, 192 Lazzaratto, Maurizio 170n4 Le Blanc, Maurice 179, 181 Libeskind, Daniel 117 libraries 253–9 appraisal of collections 258–9 audio/visual collections 259, 261–2 costs of 272 fixed-term restriction of access to 259 impact of digitization 261–5 manuscript collections 256–7, 258, 259, 260, 264 see also catalogues and cataloguing Lievrouw, Leah A. 55, 72 life and death 76n4 digitization of personal information 65–6 situational limits of 51, 70, 71 Lifenaut project 61 Lippmann, Gabriel 194–5, 209n4, 206, 208 Lipsitz, George 98 literate cultures 11 LivesOn app 63 London, mapping of 268–9 Lorey, Isabell 39, 43 Lowenthal, David 89 Lumière Electrique, La 179 McCarthy, Tom 57 McCullough, Malcolm 101 McGann, Jerome 280–1 McKemmish, Sue 282 McLuhan, Marshall 5, 10, 98, 115, 175, 177, 180, 184, 186, 254 Understanding Media 179, 206 McPherson, Tara 100–1 Manovich, Lev 94, 280 Matrix, The (film) 55–6 Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller Greening the Media 240–1 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor 51, 76n10 Mazzarella, William 93

Index

media 8, 15, 54, 76n electronic 12, 54, 147 grey media 91, 101, 102, 209n12 mass media 98 participatory 85, 94 predictions of end of 54–6 traditional 54 see also social media media archaeology 28, 29, 44, 145–6, 170n2 levels of 147–8 media consciousness 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 101 media ecology 3, 10, 11, 191 media end 48–9, 51, 55, 56 media events 16, 17, 28, 93, 100 media studies 10, 17, 52–3, 240–1 cognitive psychology in 17 intermediality 193–4 media technology: impact on environment 240–3 mediatization 8, 31, 91 medical technology 193–4, 195, 207 biomedia 191–2 biowaste 199, 202 blood screening 196, 197, 199, 201–2 infection 196, 198–9, 200, 207 Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe 133n4 memorialization 7, 17, 21n4 memory 20, 190–1, 197–8, 235–6 cellular 199–200, 209n13 communicative 126, 218–9, 220, 222, 223, 226, 228, 230 communicative versus cultural 106n5, 218, 220, 226 cultural 91, 121, 127, 153, 200, 208, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 229 economic aspects 239–40 evolution of 148–9 grassroots 33 iconomic science of 223, 230 magnetic core device 152, 153ill multidirectional 90, 121 of the multitude 94–5 new memory 2, 9, 113 in oral cultures 11–12 printing as containment of 14 remediation of 198 shaping of by media 6, 17 and technoscience 193 ‘total memory’ 102 traditional 86 see also collective memory, digital memory, remembering and forgetting

309

memory booms 7, 20, 21, 36; 1st 21n4; 2nd 3, 14–15, 16, 18, 21n4; 3rd 4, 86 memory capital 243–5, 245diag, 247 memory ecology 3, 7, 8, 9, 11 new memory ecology 8–9, 11, 20, 87 memory institutions 3–4, 261, 262–3, 265 memory studies 8, 10, 90, 99, 198, 219 role of economy 239, 240 Sattelzeit 115 see also digital memory studies Memory Studies (journal) 9 Merlin, Donald A Mind So Rare 11 On the Conscious Mind 18, 20 Postliterate Conscious Mind 19diag Preliterate Conscious Mind 18diag Merrin, William 10, 14, 16, 85, 91, 92–3, 191, 194, 262 microfluidics 195 Middle Ages, beliefs 37 Milligan, Ian Exploring Big Historical Data 269–70 mindclones 61–2, 68 Misztal, Barbara 98 Mitchell, Breanna 115 mnemology 239 mobile phones 184, 236, 237, 238 modernity and modernities 38–9, 45n11 off-modern 39 Moon landing, reporting of 28 Moore, Niamh 255 Morretti, Francis 269 Mosco, Vincent To the Cloud 241 Moss, Michael 4, 295 ‘Motoangels’ project 226, 228 motorboys and motorgirls 227, 229, 231n1 Mugele, F. and J.-C. Baret 195 multitude, the 85–94, 106 memory of 94–5 vulnerability of 105 Munster, Anna 49, 64, 75–6n3 museums 118–9 nanotechnology 195 narrative 94–5, 102 National Archives, UK (TNA) 4, 200, 281, 285, 286, 287–8, 291–3, 297, 298 ‘Discovery’ online catalogue 289, 295 impact of digital technology on 288–90 LGBT related records 293 terminology for users 294 User Experience Team 290, 292, 297 National Archives and Records Administration (USA) 267, 269, 270

310

Index

National Physical Laboratory (UK) 161, 162, 166 National Records and Archives (UK) 258 National Security Agency (USA) 167 neoliberalism 34, 38, 42, 54 network switching 162 networking computing 92–3, 160 networks, design of 165 Newcastle University Culture Lab 260 news, television 16, 17, 18, 144–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29 Nipkow, Paul 177 Nipkow disk 179, 180, 181 Niven, Bill 96 Nora, Pierre 15 nostalgia 34, 36 Notley, Tanya 10, 114, 217–8 Novick, Peter 96–7 Nowotny, Helga 29, 39–40, 44, 264 Noys, Benjamin 34, 43 O2 advertisement ‘Data on Tap’ 169ill Obama, Barack 184 objects association with memory 27, 30 deterioration of 30 digitization of 30–1, 33 mediatization of 30 retrofitting 27, 30 virtual 149 Oculus Rift headset 157 Olick, Jeffrey 94, 96 Olympic Games : Berlin (1936); Rio de Janeiro (2016) 125 Ong, Walter 91 Orality and Literacy 12 Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) 272 Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton 57 oral cultures 11–12, 14 Papadopoulos, D. 200 Parikka, Jussi 3, 28, 77, 114, 191, 193 The Anthrobscene; A Geology of Media 241–2 Parks, Lisa 238 past, the 5, 29, 42–3, 45 culture of 31, 32, 34, 37 imaginaries of 32 re-presencing of 29, 30, 33, 36 rewriting of 35–6 shaping by technology 6 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 260

permanent data transfer 57, 87, 150, 151 personhood 58, 62–3 Peters, John D. 52, 72, 76n7, 243 The Marvelous Clouds 237 Pettitt, Thomas Gutenberg Parenthesis, The 12–14, 21, 97 photography and photographs 52, 175 colour 194–5 see also selfies Pickering, Michael and Emily Keightley 194, 197, 199, 201 Pogačar, Martin 2, 5, 14, 54, 78n27, 114, 143, 159, 176, 180, 191 Culture of the Past 157 Popular Science (1932) 181 post-scarcity era 3, 21, 34, 55, 104 post-socialist era 29, 34, 35, 41–3 infantilization in 41–2 postal systems 165, 166, 168; British 167 Postman, Neil 10, 37 precarization, of present 39, 43 Prescott, Andrew 260 present digital ‘ghosts’ 33, 34 extended present 29, 32, 264 perception of 31–2, 38 seen through culture of past 31, 33 printing 14, 253, 254 Proust, Marcel: memory of madeleines 207 public data networks 161, 162 Public Records Act (1958) 258 Public Records Office UK 288 Quinkan Australian Aboriginal rock art 245–6 Rafael, Vincente 87 Ramsay, Debra 4, 254, 257, 258, 261, 262–3, 272 Rapson, Jessica 239 Raskin, Jeff 283 Reading, Anna 10, 28, 50, 114, 192, 217–8, 219, 263–4 record-keeping 253–4 automation of 257 born-digital records 256, 263, 265, 267–8 costs of 268, 271–2 of government records 266–8 impact of digitization 261, 266 particular instance papers (PIP) 266, 267 restrictions on 267–8 recording, of events and media 101–3 Redmond, Charles 178

Index

remembering and forgetting 9, 10, 20, 51, 70, 71, 76n, 86, 101, 105, 223 nostalgia 34, 36 representation 98–9, 100 Republicca, La 110 research and development development in 45n10 effect of market economy on 36 Resource Description Framework 271 Research Libraries UK 272 Ricoeur, Paul 255, 256 Rigney, Ann 94, 115 rituals and sacrifices 183 Roberts, Larry 166 Roch, Axel 147 rock art 245–6 Romero, Brenda 113 Rose, Steven 11, 12 Rothberg, Michael 90, 121 Rothblatt, Martine 62–3 ruins and ruinophilia 30, 39 SafeBeyond (digital afterlife service) 60, 67 St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai 253 Samson, Audrey 76–7n10, 78n20 Sandberg, Anders 61 Sasseen, Rhian 33–4 Sauerberg, Lars Ole 12, 97 Scannell, Paddy 176 Schacter, Daniel and Michael Welker 9–10 Schindler’s List (film) 129 Schofield, Tom et al 255, 260 Schwartz, Barry 98, 99 Schwartz, Gilson 10, 114, 115, 219 Schwartz, O. 191 science development in 45n effect of market economy on 36 feminist viewpoints on 192–3 science fiction films 55–6, 68 Scott, Laurence 5 Scott, Sir Walter The Antiquary 264–5 Scottish Film Archive 261–2 Sedley, Sir Stephen 258 self, the 63, 67, 71 selfies 115–6 Selfridge, Harry Gordon 186 Senelcq, Constantin 178 Serres, Michel 187 shadow archives 87, 88, 92, 93, 100, 101, 105, 106 Shannon, Claude 143–4, 149–50, 179 Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver 161–2

311

‘sharing without sharing’ 2, 21, 86, 106 Siegert, Bernhard 167, 168 Sigmond, Peter 258 silicon chips 197 ‘lab-on-a-chip’ (LOC) 195, 196–7, 199, 202, 207 organs-on-a-chip 207–8 Sinclair ZX81 Flight Simulation Datasette 146 slavery, economics of 239 smartphones 21, 192 Smith, Terry 185 social groups 89–90 social media 53, 116, 236, 263 abstention from 2 dependency on 93, 105 disconnection from 48, 50, 53, 65, 76n10 interpassive use of 74 voluntary participation in 2, 93 social networks and networking 49, 88, 95 screening and cleansing of 132n1 Sontag, Susan on photography 52 Sparrow, B, J. Liu and D. Wegner 20 spatial analysis 268–9 spectatorship 100 Sperber, Dan 11 Spivak, Gayatari 203 spreadability 31, 95 Sprenger, Florian 160, 163, 165, 166, 167 Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams 36 stability, yearning for 38 standardization 162, 167 Stanford University Literary Lab 269 Star, S. L. and J. R. Griesemer 204 Starosielski, Nicole and Janet Walker Sustainable Media 242–3 Stearns, Peter N. 98 Stengers, Isabel 192 Stiegler, Bernard 32, 33, 173, 240 Dans la Disruption 218 Stochastic Technologies 64 Stoller, H. M. and E. R. Morton 180 Stone, Linda 103 storage technology 57, 143, 161, 163, 235–6 analogue 143, 149 capacity of 149–50 coding 153 Datasette storage device 146 hard disks 147 levels of 147 of sound recordings 151

312

Index

storytelling 43 Suchman, L. 203 Sulawesi cave art 12 Superman memory crystal 57 surfaces 194, 196, 201, 209n2 surfactants 208–9 wettability of 194, 208 Surowiecke, James 94 surveillance 160 Sutton, John 9 Swedish Funeral Directors Association 65, 66 switching systems 162 analogous to postal service 163, 165–7 Interrupt system 164 Syme, Holger Schott 260 Syria 125–6, 131 Takayanagi, Kenjiro 177 Tarraf, Zeina 239 Taylor, Charles 52 technology development of 36 effects on society 7 technoscience feminist viewpoints on 192–3 miniaturization 195–7 telephone systems 161–2, 166, 170n5 television 100, 101, 104, 173–5 188 24-hour news 16, 144–5 archiving of 176 and collective memory 178 connectivity of 17–18 delay and synchronisation 180–1, 185 digital 183, 186–7 engineering problems of 177 global audiences 16, 17 news broadcasting 16, 17, 28 programming 186 radical cutting 17, 174, 175, 188 transmission of 174, 178, 179–80 viewing habits 176, 178 temporality/ies 144, 157 asynchronicity 156–7 management of 168 microtemporalities 168–9 of networks 157, 159 and television 175, 176–7, 178, 183–4 Terasem Movement 61, 62, 66 Terminator (film) 55–6 Thacker, E. 191–2 That War of Mine (video game) 131–2 Theremin, Léon 177

time 144, 158, 176 clock time 159–60 real time 161 segmentation of 185–6 Time to Live, A (data packets) 150 time-and-motion studies 186 Tomasello, Michael 30 Topinka, Robert 264 topology 195 Transcendence (film) 56 transhumanism 61–3, 71, 114 translation 203–7 biosemiotics 205 intertextuality 203 Trinit School, Zaragoza 110 Tsunami (2004) 182 Turing, Alan and Universal Machines 166 Turkle, Sherry 30 Turner, Adair 221 Twitter 59, 63, 65, 88, 95 Uexküll, Thure von 205 uncertainty and insecurity 36, 39–40, 41, 43–4 UNESCO Creative Economy Report (2013) 221 United States data centres 238 Middle East foreign policy 125 women and mobile phones 238–9 University of Oxford Online Research Data Service 271 University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona 124 Urry, John Mobilities 222 USC Shoah Foundation 122, 129 IWitness 121–2 Utopia and Utopianism 36, 37, 44n9 dispotentiation of 36 van Dijck, J. 192 Vashem, Yad 120–1, 133n6 video games and gaming 110, 112–3, 130–2 censorship of 111–3 use in training 112 on war themes 131–2 videorecorders 150–1 Virilio, Paul 88, 158, 159, 173 Virno, Paulo 86, 92 Wall Street crash (1929) 271 Walter, Tony ‘Sociologists Never Die’ 52

Index

Washington Post 115 Watson, Sheila 98 Web 2.0 Suicide Machine 48–9, 50, 66, 75, 75–6n Weber, Samuel 54, 70 Weibel, Peter 3, 157 Weinberger, David Too Big to Know 87, 271 Weiser, Herwig 146–7 Whalen, Thomas 11 Whelan, Rosy 246 Whirlwind system 164 White, Mimi 176 Whitehead, Alfred North 173, 209n Whitelaw, Michael 281, 285, 287, 297–8 Who Do You Think You Are? (tv series) 297 Wieseltier, Leon 7 Wiesenthal Center Wikileaks 261 Wilde, Oscar 44n Williams, Alex 33 Williams, Raymond 176 structure of feeling 34 Winter, Jay 15–16, 21n, 96 Wolfenstein 3D (computer game) 111 Wolfenstein: The New Order (computer game) 112

313

women: and mobile phones 238–9 World Bank Report on Sustainable Energy for All 237, 238 World Postal Union 168 World Wide Web 154 Wright, Frank Lloyd 173 writing: and fixing of memory 12, 253 Wyss Institute, Harvard University 207 Xerox PARC 283 Yeah Yeah Yeahs (rock band) 102 Yezidi people, genocide of 125 ‘Youth Portal’ project 226, 228–30 YouTube 31, 40, 95, 128, 174, 179, 186 images of death of Muammar Gaddafi 183, 184, 185, 187 Zambia 238 Zelizer, Barbie 52 Zgodlocator 146–7 Zielinski, Siegfried 15, 158–9, 178, 182, 187 Audiovisions 176 Ž ižek, Slavoj 44–5n8 Zworykin, Boris 177, 186