MJ Cunniff will buy hoop food for anyone who comes to the hoop with a pair of dry pants for me to borrow. Seriously. I’m wearing the Amish dress right now.
–Feb. 25th, 2010

I’ve always been the person in my social groups who uses social media the most thoroughly – especially in recent years, when concerns about privacy and data mining have been on the rise, and the current tide of popular opinion has shifted to feeling anxious and unhappy about using Facebook and other social media sites. (I was glad to see a lifelogger claim what I’ve always said in these instances, that “knowing there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment” (Thompson 32), but I also ended up thinking mostly of that XKCD comic: “why the fuck do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset?”)

So I already had an archive of certain moments — almost eight years of my life, between 2006 and now, was covered in my Facebook profile, with a new status or link between every other day and twice-daily over the wide majority of that time. Of course, this was a conscious archive: I had already chosen what to tell a narrative about, which strengthens that version of the memory, and separates it already from the actual lived experience; I could use my Facebook wall to remember things I’d forgotten, then, but I doubt I’d find much use for it to correct false memories I’d created. And, because Facebook is structured the way it is, it isn’t searchable; instead, the most I could do was sort chronologically, by object type (and then chronologically – such as with photos or locations or notes), or by person (“view friendship,” assuming we remained FB friends and that we had reliably tagged each other in our mentions and photos.) I could not, for example, check to see if my feelings about French in 2008 during my last long slog though my alma mater’s language requirement were the same as mine in 2015 while beginning to prepare for my future PhD program’s language requirement…though I was reminded of a similar thought through random browsing:

MJ Cunniff No matter how often I think or say otherwise, the Latin infinitive for “to be” is never going to be “être.” Non est bonum.
–Feb. 17th, 2013

The thing that, as you can see, I’m doing in this post – going through and looking at the statuses happening around this time a few years ago – is of course similar to the concept of the FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo app (Thompson 38), which has been applied to Facebook as well with the Timehop app (which pulls from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and even your smartphone’s camera roll.) Given the thrilled and surprised customer reviews for these sorts of products (“Happy Time Traveler” is currently at the top of the iTunes app store, giving it five stars), I’m starting to believe it more that “left to our own devices, we’re unlikely to bother to check year-old digital detritus” (38); I must have the particular weird habit of it, then, because I do so regularly – and use AIM logs to look at moments from before Facebook, although it’s rarer that I do that as they mostly chronicle intense and since-dissolved relationships.

I’ve also analyzed my Facebook usage through Wolfram Alpha and found that I average 8.5 likes and 3.4 comments per post over the past 300 or so posts, that my photo of a feminist power sign carved in a jack-o-lantern has been my most popular of all time (crossposted from Instagram, see below), and that as is probably common for queer progressives in large Northeastern US cities, my most significant friend groups are too intertwined and complicated for Wolfram Alpha’s friend-cluster tool to graph them effectively. I’ve also run my profile through Five Labs where keyword analysis suggests I am, among other things, inventive and intellectually curious…which I attribute 100% to the words “poetry” and “apparently” correlating with these traits.

#mypumpkinwillbeintersectionaloritwillbebullshit #halloweek #badoween

A photo posted by @gashgoldvermillion on Oct 28, 2014 at 8:11pm PDT

I didn’t intend to talk about Facebook at much at all, but it was the most interesting source for data, and my inner technologist isn’t surprised: as we see in Thompson, the best personal data management right now exists when it’s entirely passive, when it’s a program given free run of a preexisting large mass of data, or when the user has some other reason to use whatever site or service is keeping records, some immediate benefit. I tried more focused lifelogging over the past week, having been looking for an excuse anyway: I downloaded Saga, a relatively completionist “automatic lifelogging app,” and found that incessantly checking in on and correcting the app’s glitchy GPS and non-Aristotelian sense of time (“no, I left at 10:30, I got home at 12:30, not 3:13…no, I wasn’t at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Charlestown, the T just stopped for a minute…what do you mean you have no data from 5AM last night, was I abducted from my bed last night”) might have helped my short-term memory, but it wasn’t nearly enough of a set-and-forget system to be worth using. Similarly, I tried a sleep app, designed to both track your sleep cycles – based on the way your body movements shake the bed and are registered on your smartphone’s accelerometer — and serve as a smart alarm, waking you within a certain time period when you’re already in light sleep. I couldn’t get enough interesting data from a week’s use to say anything; if I do continue using it, it’ll be because it serves the in-the-moment purpose of being a more soothing alarm clock.

At first I was intrigued by the “forgetting and remembering” theory by Tompson that memory plays better in getting the gist rather than in the specific details of what we try to remember. Though the every single detail seldom makes sense of anything that helps us understanding the world. “…but we lose everything else, in particular discarding the details that don’t fit our predetermined biases” (Tompson, 24). What happens to the details we have ignored? Are those details, as well as the gists, of the same importance in helping establish the universe we observe?

Once the details are well kept by technology as part of our memory for lifelong, the memories becomes active and digitalized instead of passive or insignificant. Lifeloggers provide us a glimpse into how to save and use detailed memory in a digital age. Think about this image: if you are in need of some details of a certain event happened in the past, you are able to extract whatever you want from the large amount of the data base created for recording. It seems like your memories never lapse, which sounds really cool to me. In fact the “lifelog” has influenced the world we live to some extent. Apart from the traditional way of writing diary, the website: http://lifelogger.com/ already make it available to record your everyday life by videos. All you need is a smartphone or a camera. On a basic level, the information age offering us various ways to achieve the goal of tracking every fragment in our daily lives has shaped the world we are exploring into.

These personal archiving activities, though seem to have a long way to go, can be perceived to reveal the uniqueness of one’s life. “Collecting was seen as part of a quest for personal meaning” (Cox, 5); “collecting may somehow extend from our desires to survive, connected to the hunting of other essential necessities for sustaining life” (Cox, 3).  In this sense, recording or collecting the details of everyday life does an important role in building up the self-identification. Collections have become firmly related to the memory of socioculture by which the individual impacts on archive reconstruct.

However, the quintessential dilemma is that, though the digital records, including website information, audio and videos, seem to be under the control of the lifeloggers, the fact that nobody can live with incessantly recording every trifle in our daily life is worthy of considering. There will always be sometime that is embarrassing and we are never willing to keep in mind in our lifetime. How can we deal with this kind of awkward situation? Furthermore, since the lifeloggers become a new trend in personal archive, how will privacy security during the data collecting be achieved? Are archive activities going to be a sort of professional expertise or the personal habit out of interest in the future?

Thompson’s discussion of hindsight bias in individuals is interesting from a public history perspective and thinking about how a society constructs and preserves its collective memory, and about accusations of historical revisionism. Thompson observed: “Even when we’re able to remember and event, it’s not clear we’re remembering it correctly. Memory isn’t passive, it’s active” (Thompson, 26.) Though Thompson was writing about individual memory revision, this is also a process reflected in groups when it comes time to memorialize a past event. “Official” memory is actively constructed in the present and influenced by social and political groups. I was reminded of the controversies surrounding the first attempts by some American museums/historic sites to incorporate narratives of slavery into exhibits and programs, as well as the challenges of memorializing events like the Oklahoma City bombing and September 11th attacks.

In the 1990s, the new U.S. History Standards for public schools outraged conservatives like Lynne Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. Historian Gary Nash helped to develop the new standards, and they accused historians like Nash of revising American history. They argued that any narrative that wasn’t pro-American was simply a distortion of true American history. Around the same time, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was developing an Enola Gay exhibit. As was the case with the history standards, the American public could not agree on one interpretation for the Enola Gay and its role in history. This symbol held different memories and different meaning for everyone. Some individuals and groups, particularly veterans groups, could not and refused to understand how anyone could possibly have negative memories associated with this plane: it brought a swift end to a long war and saved more soldiers’ lives by avoiding a U.S. invasion of Japan. They could not understand how anyone could have any bad memories associated with this plane. They accused the exhibit developers of engaging in historical revisionism, bent on discrediting the U.S. and destroying American history and demanded that this “liberal” angle not be included in the exhibit.

Others could not understand how or why these individuals refused to acknowledge that this plane did indeed cause a lot of harm when it dropped the nuclear bomb. Ultimately the entire planned exhibition was stripped bare and the plane was displayed with little interpretation. The negative memories associated with the plane were forced out of the museum’s planned interpretation of the object. It has been debated if the public lost out as a result of this, and I think that something was lost when all of the individual meanings associated with the plane were not able to be publicly acknowledged and explored. (History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past by Edward Linenthal provides a great discussion of these types of controversies in public memory.) The “malleability of memory” (Thompson, 27) is certainly seen in the development of museum exhibitions and programs, especially when attempting to memorialize a traumatic or tragic event and sometimes things are deliberately left out to create a new official memory.

Shifting gears – I found Cox’s argument that archivists need to do more outreach to the general public appealing. For many decades, archival and museum collections focused on documents and objects connected to the elite or more prominent members of society. This has certainly changed, as objects and documents concerning other groups and individuals that were not considered important before are being granted more consideration. Archivists could teach the general public a great deal about properly preserving and interpreting their own personal collections. With individuals taking the basic preservation of personal archives into their own hands in their homes, future archivists and historians would ultimately benefit.

Personal archives in digital format are important to the general public today, and there should be no reason why archivists should not take these types of personal archives seriously because they are, as Thompson says, significant and meaningful to the individual “even if it sometimes happens to be wrong” (Thompson, 24.) Individuals obviously have an interest in preserving materials deemed important to them, as is evidenced by the deluge of social media platforms. There are always new apps encouraging individuals to publicly record quite literally every part of their daily lives. Individuals now effortlessly live blog what would have previously been rather personal information. These “corps of citizen archivists” (Cox, 64) almost cannot resist the impulse to publicly archive every part of their day and share all information about their lives with both friends and total strangers. This epitomizes how the private has become very public by means of these types of digital personal archives, and raises a lot of questions about privacy now and in the near future.

“[Historical archiving organizations] are ‘not dispassionate and impartial venues, but rather institutions that carry out, however subtly, ideological, cultural, and politically informed agendas’” (Cox 12).

In the above quote, Cox discusses archival institutions as shapers, not mere handlers, of history through their respective agendas. The archivists and collectors of these institutions hold within their use and preservation (or lack thereof) of documents the power to create an accurate or fictitious narrative with the collections and to determine what’s worth keeping. When considering the personal, digital archive, then, we should likewise contemplate the power being held and how it can be used.

While Cox notes the risk of digital archives in their vulnerable delete-ability (6), if handled carefully, they can also prove essentially immortal as long as the world continues forth in its increasingly technological way. This leaves those in charge of the personal archive to create a possibly immortal personal history, which would far exceed the life of paper documents. If we consider this in terms of social media, for example, we can see the author of each of his/her posts as the archivist with archival power to determine his/her historical narrative. One can choose to write a fictitious memoir on Facebook, of which they will be reminded each day on their Time Hop. In this maneuver, through what Thompson describes as, “The real power of digital memories [to] trigger our human ones” (39) archivists can use their documenting power to pen a fictitious memoir on Facebook, then in reviewing it a year later via Time Hop, can refresh the falsified memory and affirm through his/her personal digital archive a false historical narrative.

It is in this falsification capability of digital archives that the storage of memories (both personal and cultural) becomes endangered. A similar example can be found in Thompson’s “We, the Memorious.” Thompson accounts how he sat with Gordon Bell and listened to the story of Bell attending a jazz concert in Australia. In his notes, he penned that Bell had seen the show with his daughter. The next day, however, Bell pulled up the audio clip of the conversation, wherein he tells Thompson that he attended the concert with his wife. To this, Thompson writes, “Bell’s artificial memory was correcting my memory” (30). But, was it correcting it, or changing the reality of the conversation? Since the discrepancy was in a story told by Bell, the presenter of the audio clip, couldn’t he have easily returned home, done some savvy work with audio software (being the techy genius that he is) and replaced “daughter” with “wife”? While likely not what happened, the great possibility of a falsified narrative to have replaced the real one, and be accepted by Thompson as a correction to his own memory demonstrates the falsifying capabilities of digitized archives.

Another branch to the falsification issue in digitized archives are the holders of archival power beyond the collectors of personal digitized archives, such as those who run the sites where social media histories are published. There is a power that digital publications possess that is equivalent to print materials where it should not be. While it is clear to note, as Cox has, the different in viewing edits and changes in a printed text vs. a digital one—namely, that those in print can be easily noted, while those in digital form are often invisible—the average person regards a published item on social media as being in it’s original form, though they don’t possess the technological skills to know if it’s been altered. For example, a posting on Facebook from five years ago shows up in your Time Hop. Though you have no recollection of the memory, or had remembered it differently than how you inscribed it on your Facebook wall, you most likely assume that the post is in its original form and that it (unless you make a habit of writing fictitious memoirs) is true to the memory it refers. Not many would challenge the published digital archive in favor of their memory (unless they have hyperthymesia). After all, it fails you on a daily basis and the evidence of your posted memory is staring you in the face. On the other end of that post, however, could easily be a computer genius at Facebook who thought he/she would have some fun manipulating posts from years ago, and successfully manipulates your published account. That hacker would have successfully, in most cases, therein falsified the actual memory in your mind and thus the narrative of your personal history.

While all of these examples are on the very small scale of falsified possibilities in digital archives, and the concerns of the delete-ability of digital archives by Cox, as well as the unreliable record of the brain’s memory that Thompson discusses are valid, there is a vast consideration of the falsification of digital archives to be considered as we slip further into a completely technological age where digitized records are highly favored over those of the body and print.

I’m interested in this idea of forgetting, which Thompson describes as both a “gift and a curse.” He writes, “by chipping away at what we experience in everyday life, we leave behind a sculpture of what’s meaningful to us, even if sometimes it happens to be wrong” (24). On the inverse of this idea is the realization that if we remembered everything—every detail of every moment—our brains would be incapable of discerning anything through the chaos of information. There’s an intentional parallel that Thompson strings through his chapter relating this problematic idea of hypermnesia to the “perfect recall” of the lifeloggers (29). As Thompson describes, sophisticated enough algorithms have not yet been written in order to sort and search the enormous amount of data captured by lifeloggers, which at times renders their comprehensive documentary records useless, or maybe in need of a defined use value.

This all seems obvious to an extent. And so, what struck me in the examples of Deb Roy and Gordon Bell was that in each instance where technology interceded to record and/or fill the role of memory a sense of liberation resulted. Thompson describes Roy watching his son’s first steps as “genuinely lost in the moment, enthralled”(21). And, he writes of Bell: “knowing that there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment, paying closer attention to what he is doing” (32). I can’t help wonder about how realistic this idea of being freed from the burden of memory really is? And what are its nuances? How much responsibility does one have to turn over to digital record keeping in order to experience the weight of memory lifted from one’s psyche? And is this truly an ideal, since towards the end of “We, The Memorious” Thompson explores the idea of engineering artificial modes of forgetting (42)?

I can feel myself struggling with what seems like a true clash of analog versus digital values. Because there is sense that while a lifelogger might experience a freedom from memory (which even as I write that its seems like a misinterpretation on my part), they may lose the necessary perceptual abilities that the “fear” of memory loss naturally hones in everyone. What does a real time digital back up mean for how we construct our world? If almost everything (encounter/document/moment) is now recordable and therefore replicable, how does that shape what and how we produce? Again this seems like a throwback to Derrida: the act of “archivization produces and as much as it records the event.”

Maybe there’s another way of approaching this question of forgetting as a constructive force. In his essay “Drawn To That Moment” the critic John Berger offers a poignant description of his experience drawing his recently deceased father in his coffin. In addition to elucidating a how we perceive, and how a drawing functions as a collection of moments—the experience of looking—the essay discusses the construction of a drawing in terms similar to our discussion of archives, as a refusal of disappearance. And yet, this refusal comes from a process of construction. The drawing like Berger says “encompasses time,” yet its production comes from the working against time. The digital lifelog seems only to mirror time.

Cox and Thompson describe many reasons for and benefits of personal archiving: supplementing organic memory, augmenting institutional archives, freeing oneself of the “anxiety of committing something to memory,” creating meaningful narratives, defining social relations and communities, achieving political power, and surviving “by leaving something behind” (Thompson 32, Cox 3). Within each example of archiving that Cox and Thompson explore, there’s a curious feedback loop that occurs to the personal archivists from the archives that they create. Not only do the individuals’ life experiences (and any historical events that they may have participated in) become archived as significant “‘atypia’” in their personal collections, but these documentations and recollections often shape the future behavior of the individual curators themselves (Thompson 39). Studying how users of Timehop may change how they engage with current experiences because they’re aware that they will review their check-ins and posts in a future “memorial moment” or how Chinese immigrants could have shaped their community and cultural identities through the documentation of “‘paper families’” caused me to reflect on the ways in which my archiving practices may affect my future behavior and identity (Thompson 38, Cox 14).

With the use of smartphones, many of us are capturing loads of data about our mundane day-to-day activities. In my own life, a couple apps readily came to mind when I considered active documentation I use on my iPhone. Through Mint, which markets itself as an app for “managing your personal finances,” I track my income and expenses. The decision to track the comings and goings of money in my life was active: when faced with a meager graduate student’s wages, I decided to budget (or at least track) my monthly expenses. However, once I made that decision, the app ran on its own: by inputting my account information, the app used data from various online banking platforms to collect and archive all income and expenses that passed through my checking, savings, credit card, and retirement accounts. Mint offers ways to categorize expenses through type and date, and compare them to any goals you set for yourself. Similar to Deb Roy or Gordon Bell’s digital lifelogging practices, once I pressed “go,” I could have simply let Mint record and never take a second look through the data. However, I tend to log in once a day to categorize the new expenses that have popped up and check if the green income bar is higher than the red expense bar for the given month. This is where the feedback loop comes in: Mint has affected my spending decisions. Checking my Mint account influences the price of the drinks and food I buy, when I decide to get my overpriced hair cuts downtown, and when I use my menial stipend as an excuse to get out of travel I really don’t want to take. While using the app, I feel organized and conscientious, maybe even downright frugal. But when I take advantage of the option to pull the data into an Excel spreadsheet to determine how my expenses fluctuated throughout the year, sometimes the data illuminates ways in which I tried to live beyond my means. The app augments my organic memory of where my money went, but also allows for a big-picture view of my behavior. Similar to Roy’s warped memory of his son’s first steps, sometimes Mint robs me of the possibility of a sunny image of my perfect frugality for one of a staid, but imperfect spender. Now, sometimes I make better financial decisions simply to avoid the feeling of disappointment I know I will feel when in the future I look back at the data and could have spent smarter.

Cox and Thompson both bring up the role personal archiving plays in survival. Cox describes archiving as instinctive as “eating, drinking, seeking shelter, and sleeping”—“linked to the human impulse for resisting oblivion” (3). In a concrete example, Thompson brings up how Bell’s obsessive lifelogging has helped him with his healthcare in the wake of a heart attack (31). Similar to Bell, I used archive information to support my medical treatment. After a bout of stomach problems, my doctor asked me to keep a food diary. I used My Fitness Pal, a web-based food diary and activity log with a searchable database of more than one million foods, to track my eating habits and any related symptoms. While the intention was to determine food sensitivities, I gained access to a plethora of information regarding my nutrition. The days I overate or had a burger and fries instead of chicken and spinach, the app collected the nutritional consequences of those decisions. As an unintended consequence of using My Fitness Pal, I began to educate myself about healthy diets to understand the data I was collecting and viewing through the app’s various graphs. Similar to my interaction with Mint, I began to make better health choices simply to avoid the terrible feeling that I had behaved in ways that were detrimental to my own wellbeing. Through some strange form of punishment, the data collected in the app enabled me to eat healthier to avoid the disappointment of seeing how poor meal choices impacted my health. The app gave me accountability through futurism.

While my use of Mint and My Fitness Pal are different from lifelogging since they only capture one aspect of my life, both apps support my survival financially and physically. They foster my ability to spend within my means (well, sometimes) or eat with greater self-awareness, as well as create a narrative of my own contentiousness and self-care. Like Jonathan Edwards’ devotion to recording and archiving his experiences as a means to lend credibility to religious awakenings, by using these apps, I can develop my own proof that I am a frugal, healthy person who will clearly live till one hundred. I’m archiving to ‘resist the oblivion’ of bankruptcy and disease (at least that’s the meaning I create for myself).

At the outset of Forwards in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s intention and purpose are stated as “to grasp such diverse material under the general category of signifying the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century” (ix) and “to document as concretely as possible, and thus lend a ‘heightened graphicness’ to, the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century” (xii). At the first glance, this kind of aspiration appears to be an impossible collective dream. However, the historical configuration of archive shapes itself by the awakening of recording, collecting, analyzing, filing, which, finally, turns out to make itself come true.

Consideration should be given to “wholly unique experience of dialectic” (389), which manifests the archive in the way of continuous reversal, introspection and enlightenment. In this process, the fact that archive reveals itself as an awakening method, rather than comply with the gradual developing history, suffice to put diverse time and space together into the whole system of archive.

“The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!-Therefore: remembering and awaking are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance. [Kl,3]” In this sense, the dialectical method provides a way researching into the documentary and the art of archive from both sociological and psychological aspects. The inside of the “what has happened” is not only a single universe that conducts the operation of archive or shapes the inherent concept we originally regard it to be, but miscellaneous personal experiences and thoughts that integrate each other throughout different time and space as well.

In On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, the positive and negative elements on the cultural-historical dialectic are investigated as a methodology in archive that encompasses the understanding of history. The “dialectical image”, a central term of The Arcades Project, casts a light on the interpretation of time and space of the silent documentary. “In the dialectical image…it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch-namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation. [N4,1]” (464). This is an interesting part of the “dialectical image” theory that regardless of the far-away living space in different stages of history, the objects that may have been forgotten for a long time suddenly come to live due to the dialectical thinking about the past. Time and space have a reunion and the realization of the collective dream reconstructed itself from thousands of ramifications which encompass the combination of time and space by the dialectical method.