Digital archaeology
September 27, 2008
The record of our passage through digital spaces has this capability, as time passes, to tell us what we were like. It can also tell us what we are like now.
Digital archaeology
In this pervasively digital age, we interact with computers and technology in almost everything we do. We leave traces, footsteps, fingerprints everywhere. The CCTV in 7-11 records the image of us being there, getting a soda. The websites we visit record what pages we looked at, and how many times we did so, and what network we came from (although not who you are; it can’t know that), and perhaps they leave cookies behind in our browsers to remind them that we have visited them before. The credit card company keeps a record of every transaction we make with its card (of course it does — that’s how it knows how much money we owe it), and the phone company every call we make (for the same reason).
We leave mountains of purposeful evidence of our digital presence, too. Our Gmail accounts fill up with gigabytes of e-mail. We update our Facebook pages, or our MySpace , or our LinkedIn accounts. We post to our blogs, to Yahoo groups. We upload pictures to flickr.com and videos to YouTube. We comment on forums, rate eBay sellers. We update our websites.
Some of this data is ephemeral, and some will remain for decades. Some of it is anonymous, and some is not. Some is private and much is public. All of it is a gold mine to the social scientist, and properly gathered and analzyed, can tell very interesting things about people, groups, and human phenomena.
It can also tell us about ourselves. In many ways, the evidence we leave behind can act to us (properly collected, analyzed and presented) as Joan Didion’s notebooks do to her, as she describes in “On keeping a notebook.” She’s kept notebooks since she was five, and she used them not as a diary but as a record of “what it was like to be me” (p. 136). She keeps a notebook to remember not the truth of events, but of what she was like, of what was important to her — not the truth of it but the gist of it. “How it felt to me” (p. 134). She does this so that she can protect herself against the sudden threat of her past selves returning unannounced (p. 139).
The record of our passage through digital spaces has this capability, as time passes, to tell us what we were like, just as a recovered audio tape of our voices as children tell us. This data can also tell us what we are like now. Review of it can allow us to do self-reflection and to admire or adjust ourselves as needed.
It is in this area, in using this kind of digital archaeology to help people and groups improve themselves, that I want to work.
