Archive Fever

Archiving is purely instinctual and inherent to our thought processes as humans. Our ability to devise a sense of order to information and content hinders the term ‘Archive Fever’. Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, coined the term ‘Archive Fever’ in order to understand the human process of archiving, and pur need to archive things.

Derrida argues that “The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content…archivization produces as much as it records the event”. – (Derrida 1997, Stokes 2003, Enszer 2008).

But what is archiving? Archiving to me is how we keep and store memories and data. When I think of an archive I think of a storage warehouse full of paper files. When I think about archiving in broader terms, the thoughts are endless. There is digital vs physical archives, historical archives, ‘invisible’ archives such as your thoughts, and probably so many more I’m forgetting.

Facebook, earlier this year it introduced ‘Timeline’ which meant that you could backtrack through every Facebook wallpost, status and photo you had been involved with. For some (including me) this was highly embarrassing as I had all these geeky, weird Facebook statuses from when I was 15 that I thought were funny at the time, and they were now on public display for everyone to see (including people I’d met from the age of 20 that I thought would never have to see me at age 15). Why do we have the constant need to archive everything?

I am in 2 minds with social media, sometimes I feel like it makes us live in the moment more, but others I feel like it makes us fall out of the moment. I mean, isn’t having the memory in your mind enough?

Derrida outlines the importance of ‘authority’ that the archives possess and that they hold the power as to which data is publicly available, which are hidden and which are destroyed.

This made sense, its who posts things an archive, not what.

Those who create archives and input data have control over what is recorded, preserved, destroyed, and what can or can’t be accessed. As such, you could consider what the data was like before it was put in the archive, and how it may affect how you engage with it.