A Contribution to the Political Economy of Personal Archives

One of the still unfolding impacts of the computer age is that everyone now must be their own digital archivist. With digitization, archives are now everywhere, from online libraries to personal timelines on social media. These days, the archive is less of a critical concept and more of a socioeconomic category. Indeed, the issues that surround the archive concern techniques of digitization and modes of access in an environment dominated by a few corporate players such as Google. In this new reality of the archive, the relation between the digital and the archive is often presupposed: the digital serves the purpose of archiving, from management to access. In this chapter, I want to bring this presupposition into question. Let us first ask: What really is an archive after digitization? The way we talk about digitization and archives today assumes a concept of the archive comparable to...