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ETHERIAL ARCHIVE. “The archive is no longer only collected, organized, managed, walled and kept in an array of institutional memory keepers, but is also diffused through a new ‘memory ecology’. 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.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

THE NEW SHADOW ARCHIVES. “Yet the medial gathering and splintering of the individual, social and cultural imaginaries, increasingly networked through portal and pervasive digital media and communication devices, attach shadow archives to much of everyday life, that also blend and complicate that which once was considered distinctly public and private.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

THE RULE OF THE MOB. “The memory of the multitude softens history, changing the parameters of the who, when, what and why of remembering. With digital searching, accessing, participating, there is little unseen, untouched or uncommented upon by the multitude. This has diminished the former gatekeepers of memory, as David Lowenthal observes: “No longer what elites and experts tell us what it was, the past becomes what Everyman chooses to accept as true.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

INFINITE NAKEDNESS. “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 suggests: “A ‘Facebook generation’ young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online has no way out for there is only one hive.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

THE TRAP. “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’: a digital and digitized gravitational pull that seems counter-intuitive to the pronouncements of the acceleration of life lived online.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

THE UGLY CITY. “Today, the Twitter fuel of instantaneity destroys the relative privacy of intimate sociality that once enabled the opportunity for second thoughts. Adam Gopnik, 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.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

THE AUTHENTIC VILLAGE. “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.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

LOSS OF MIDDLE GROUND. “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.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

MYTH OF EQUALITY. “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 openness 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.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn

ARCHIVES RUN RIOT. “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 puts it: “the content of the archive has suddenly and risibly expanded to encompass the totality of life itself.” https://lnkd.in/dWiV2eZ View in LinkedIn