Detail of Photography in Abundance, by Erik Kessels (2011). He downloaded and printed every photograph posted on Flickr in a single day.
Faced with the media avalanche we produce daily on Facebook and similar social networks, how do we choose what to keep?
Networks have no time. A regime of permanent urgency prevails within them. The most recent post is supposedly more relevant than the previous one. What counts is now. And that now grows ever more intense. Try finding that important comment your friend posted on Facebook 30 days ago, that photo you “liked” on some distant day in 2012, or that memorable event where you shared a video back in 2008. Don’t even try. Unless you have the extraordinary patience of Job, supercharged with luck that would make Walt Disney’s Gladstone Gander envious, you won’t find it.
It has become commonplace to say that the internet never forgets. Electronic surveillance scandals confirm it. But that is far from meaning we have the right to remember what we want about ourselves, whenever we want. Facebook, today’s largest network, does not let us access our memory, despite paradoxically being the main place through which we channel much of our personal history, and where major recent events such as Brazil’s June protests, the Arab Spring and Obama’s election were strategically organized.
And don’t imagine its much-vaunted Graph Search will solve the riddle of “where is that thing I posted,” because that is not its purpose. Still in closed testing and available only in English (you have to register and join a waiting list), it aims to encourage contextual searches such as “what music are my friends listening to now,” “restaurants in London my friends have visited,” and “people who like cycling and live in my city.” In short, it is a semantic rather than a factual search. Its focus is the present and the relationships that can be inferred from your circle of friends, rather than retrospective archival research.
This does not mean traditional models of cataloging and retrieving data are better, or the only possible ones. They are historically constructed and respond to forms of power and political, social and cultural structures that define preservation criteria, ways of institutionalizing sites of memory, and what survives to be told as history. It is no coincidence that the protagonist of one of Jorge Luis Borges’s most brilliant stories—The Book of Sand—chooses the National Library to lose the book that tormented him. Placing it on any random shelf was like hiding a leaf in a forest. It could never be found again.
Documentary overdose
But this human scale, bounded by institutions, is now being shaken by an overdose of documentary production unprecedented in history. If there is any doubt about this claim, let us compare the volumes of data stored by the world’s largest library—the US Library of Congress—and the Wayback Machine, an Internet Archive service that archives the internet daily. The Wayback Machine, which is a small part of the Internet Archive, contains 3 petabytes of data (equivalent to roughly 700,000 full DVDs). If the Library of Congress digitized its entire book collection (32 million volumes), it would hold 32 terabytes, assuming 1 megabyte per scanned book. The Wayback Machine was created in 1996. The Library of Congress book collection dates to 1815. The Wayback Machine grows by 100 terabytes a month—almost three times, in bytes, the entire bibliographic collection the Library of Congress has accumulated over nearly 200 years.
Impressive though these figures are, they do not encompass the torrent of content posted on social networks. Between the moment you opened this page and read these few words, 100 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube. It is November 2013, and that is what happens in one minute on the internet. In that same interval, some 3,025 photos were posted on Flickr, while another 20 million images were viewed on the service and 3,600 images were shared on Instagram. Facebook, a “planet” of 1.15 billion people, records an average of 650 million assorted posts a day. Of these, 350 million are photos. Of Twitter’s 500 million users, nearly 300 million are active, posting an average of 400 million messages daily.
Most of these records concern fleeting events, and social marketing analysts unanimously show that posts with photos are the most popular. Several studies show that most shared content is about the person sharing it. Various psychological studies assert a direct relationship between narcissism, exhibitionist behavior and frequent use of social networks. For Paula Sibilia, of the Department of Cultural and Media Studies at Fluminense Federal University, the issue is more complex and ambivalent. In her book O Show do Eu: A Intimidade Como Espetáculo (2008), she asked:
“Are we experiencing an outbreak of tolerated and even encouraged megalomania? Or, on the contrary, has our planet been swept by a sudden wave of extreme humility, free of greater ambitions, a modest claim made by all of us and by ‘anyone’? What does this sudden recovery of the small and the ordinary, of everyday life and ‘common’ people, imply? It is not easy to understand where this strange situation is heading: through a permanent incitement to personal creativity, eccentricity and the constant pursuit of difference, it never stops producing disposable copies of the same thing.”
On the other hand, we cannot overlook the essential subversion inherent in these practices. In this process of cannibalizing the screen, which we discussed in another article, other aesthetics and new protagonists are undeniably emerging. Since their beginnings in the 16th century, personal collections in general, and images in particular, were directly related to class and gender and represented, above all, a scale of power. They were reserved first for kings, aristocrats, popes and sacred figures, and later for politicians and wealthy bourgeois citizens. Throughout the 20th century, mass communications greatly expanded the range of people who could become a published image, potentially even an archived one, multiplying the quantity and the social and cultural spectrum of visual records.
Yet until the end of the 20th century, budget constraints, “in their wisdom,” wrote Michel Melot, one of the world’s foremost authorities on archives and library science, kept institutions from literally overflowing. In an article suggestively entitled Archives Considered as a Hallucinogenic Substance (1986), he pondered what would happen if every citizen became a collector and conservator, and we could keep absolutely everything for future historians.
We would reach a paradox, he concludes in this text, published in the much-missed French journal Traverses, in an issue devoted entirely to archives (36): “History finally produced exclusively for historians and blocked by those same historians, as a surgeon immobilizes a patient in order to operate.” After all, thinking, as we learned from another Borges story (Funes the Memorious), means generalizing, not merely archiving and adding more and more data.
Every memory for itself
In a landmark essay—The Historiographical Operation—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) offered a concise history of historiography and summed up that operation in one sentence: “In history, everything begins with the gesture of setting apart, gathering, and transforming into ‘documents’ certain objects otherwise distributed.” This separation, however, always comes after the archivist’s work of selecting and organizing the documents to be kept at the expense of those to be discarded.
But faced with the media avalanche we produce daily on Facebook and similar social networks, how do we choose what to store? And how do we deal with the difficulty of handling our own memories, deposited there at a dizzying pace and added to the 55 million photos posted daily on Instagram (an image-based social network also owned by FB)? What if they are simply deleted because of a system error or a discontinued product?
Social networks will not last forever, and we may never celebrate Facebook’s 20th anniversary. Other platforms will come along. But in this age of corporate appropriation of memory, when the affective capital of our personal relationships—“friendships” would be an exaggeration, right?—flows through the channels of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, it seems urgent to ask: where did the sighs, sorrows and joys we left in Orkut communities (Google’s “old” all-powerful network) go? It is time to think about it—or every memory for itself.
Published in seLecT, vol. 3, no. 15, 2013.