Abstract
The rapid expansion of the seemingly limitless digital universe invites us to rethink the question of archives. If information in the time of high-speed Internet connectivity is easily produced, searched, circulated and consumed, it is as easily deleted and effaced from the public domain too. The digital content (especially user-generated) on blogs, websites, and social media platforms is both plentiful – often expressed as ‘information overload’ – and fragile; it risks perishing almost as fast as it is produced. The historians of the future seeking to write the history of the early twenty-first century will be faced with this problematic. While one approach is to seek technological solutions toward storing the digital content, another is to reconsider what the very notion of past might mean in the age of acceleration. The past is produced rapidly as every passing moment is buried under fresh layers of information and news almost every second on multiple media. This article considers the challenges of writing the history of the vanishing present.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | History Workshop Journal |
| Volume | 79 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Pages (from-to) | 243-253 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISSN | 1363-3554 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Humanities
- HISTORY
- Archives
- digital archives
- social media
- Faculty of Social Sciences
- digital archives
- history
- archives
- social media
- internet