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Calculating Lives? Memory, Archive and Identity in a Digital Era

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Imaging Identity

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Abstract

Drawing upon the concepts of memory and archive, this chapter traces new affordances and dynamics of identity construction in contemporary digital media ecologies. Arguing for an understanding of technology as neither merely oppressive nor completely liberating, I show how algorithmic prediction and distributed practices of curation and self-presentation intersect and enable new forms of subject formation. These developments demand a critical interrogation of power relations and of received notions of agency in dense socio-technical networks that entail new archival and mnemonic dynamics of identity work in an increasingly image-based culture. I argue that the intrinsic logic of digital networks and databases subsumes individual online activities under the overarching frames of neo-liberal capitalism and state oppression, thus leaving little leeway for genuinely commons-based practices and solutions.

As soon as these laws of nature are discovered, man will no longer have to answer for his actions and will find life exceedingly easy. All human actions will then, no doubt, be computed according to these laws, mathematically, something like the tables of logarithms, up to 108 000, and indexed accordingly. […] Then […] new economic relations will be established, relations all ready for use and calculated with mathematical exactitude, so that all sorts of problems will vanish in a twinkling simply because ready-made solutions will be provided for all of them. It is then that the Crystal Palace will be built.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1968 [1864], 282–283)

Exposed, watched, recorded, predicted—for many of us, the new digital technologies have begun to shape our subjectivity. The inability to control our intimate information, the sentiment of being followed or tracked, these reinforce our sense of vulnerability. Our constant attention to rankings and ratings, to the number of ‘likes’, retweets, comments, and shares, start to define our conception of self. For some of us, we depend increasingly on the metrics. We start judging and evaluating ourselves by the numbers. A sense of insecurity may begin to erode our self-confidence. The new platforms start to shape what we like about ourselves. The recommendations mold our preferences.

Bernard E. Harcourt (2015, 217)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The classified documents provided to WikiLeaks by US military whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, for instance, contained comprehensive batches of military briefs from Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as huge numbers of diplomatic cables sent from US embassies around the world to the US State Department. The US diplomatic cables can be accessed via the fully indexed and searchable Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD): https://wikileaks.org/plusd/about/. For more information, see Harrison (2015).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language and Culture, UiT Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway

    Holger Pötzsch

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  1. Holger Pötzsch
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Correspondence to Holger Pötzsch .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Johannes Riquet

  2. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Martin Heusser

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Pötzsch, H. (2019). Calculating Lives? Memory, Archive and Identity in a Digital Era. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_3

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