The age of forgetfulness is now making its way through updating the memory of each single day. The time you walk into the subway in Beijing, you will see people there doing their busy work on Wechat, a popular social networking device or another version of Facebook which allows a person to do some digital recordkeeping on a daily basis. Personal archiving seems to have now incorporated itself into the unremarkable day-to-day existence. A person who leaves a blank space in the blog loses the way to keep up with the fashion of everyday archiving. Everywhere you go in the city you could easily find those, holding their mobile phones and doing some selfies (sometimes even with a selfie stick) with a well-designed facial expression. Just within seconds, the self-portrait photograph is posted online with a few words illustrating beneath the picture, as if sending a signal to everybody else, “hey, buddies, here I am!” I am not even fussing about the orders I could usually receive from my friends before starting a big meal—-“Wait a minute! I am just going to take a picture first.”

 

We, with much more access to a bunch of simplest ways to archiving than the generation before, are desperately grasping the slightest traces of our memory in the age of forgetfulness. It seems like a paradox, but it also acknowledges some truth of an era which aspires to claim every connection with the years before and those coming after. The way to “seize the moment” has undergone a tremendous change from our time before. Personal archiving has transformed its way from a private business to a public concern in a digitalized century. The target reader has evolved from the solitary self to a host of friends and even strangers who has never been intended for. The digitalized archiving open to the public becomes the place for showing off or acting out something which one deliberately reveals.

 

A second thought on the personal archiving on the social networking services, I develop some mixed feelings about it. It has no doubt advanced our way through recording life on a daily basis with its easy access to instantly updating personal archives at any time in any place. Exquisite pictures of bright colors, audio and video clips of various lengths can be attached to the blog posts as long as one wishes. But still there is something missing in the digitalized archives online. Hard to explain but easy to get. I could still remember the time when I rummaged through the shelves and suddenly discovered some notebooks of my father exactly recording the days when he was preparing for the entrance examination. Leafing though the pages, a little yellowed by the past years, I realized that I could travel through the passage of time with these diaries. It was like I was getting involved in a conversation with my father, a twenty-something much younger than his own age now. It was amazing that the traces of time could be detected with these pages of an old notebook. Call it miraculous as you may, this is the unexpected encounter with an immediate past in our daily life. But years after our present time, I am just thinking about what will the generation to follow respond to those digitalized archives on the social network (or they might never get a chance to look these things up). These things are at most images captured at a random thought with an obscure purpose.

 

What I am also thinking about is the way we are archiving on the social networking services. As people are swarming to “the most photographed barn in America” in White Noise, it is definitely perceived that no one actually even cares about the barn itself. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures”, as Murray argues. That is exactly what we are doing with our digital archives online. It is like we are all attending a ceremony. Posting one or two pictures and a few words online is exactly among the procedures of the ceremony which claims our membership of a society. Failure to obey the orders of the ceremony essentially disconnects one from the rest of a community. But the time we are busy archiving online, we sometimes lose the chance to live just for the sake of life itself. The time we take the pictures of the scenic spots, we miss the opportunity to appreciate the true beauty of the scenery itself. It seems that we are pushed to live a busy life with a busy archiving task weighing on our shoulders. The process of recording life itself should not deny the possibility of living a real life in the present.