Digital Regeneration: Media Archives and Residual Cultures of Time Travel

• In Event: Constructing Memories: Comparative Historical Sociotechical Analysis of Media, Communication and Information

Abstract

When Google StreetView updated its map with historical imagery, the new feature was pitched as a way to “time travel” to streets of the past. Similarly, the Internet Archive offers historical web snapshots through a portal called The Wayback Machine. And social media apps like “Time Hop,” invite users to “relive your past” by recycling old photos to generate “a daily time capsule of you!” What to make of this semiotic frenzy to construct digital memory and personal archiving alongside the mythology of time machines? This paper examines the material-semiotics of time travel as residual cultural practices that infuse contemporary digital memory with media imaginaries that accompanied the emergence of photography and cinema during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. New modes of archiving signal new temporal experiences: the photographic instant; the cinema’s ability to archive duration; the algorithmically generated “memories” of social media. Understanding new archival practices is crucial because, as Derrida poignantly observed, “what is no longer archived the same way is no longer lived the same way.” How then has the feeling and imaginative dimensions of time travel been articulated to distinct temporal experiences associated with emerging media? Drawing on Wendy Chun’s notion of the “enduring ephemeral” as a digital logic that complicates future-oriented promises of speed, progress, newness and innovation, this paper argues that generation/regeneration/degeneration is a useful critical device for analyzing the historical resonances, preservation practices and data epistemologies that organize the lived experience of an archived life.


Sources

Wendy H.K. Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 18.

Author

• Megan Sapnar Ankerson, University of Michigan