By Ruby Day — Senior Culture Editor
Recently, I read an article on Substack about the typography of band names on old concert tickets. The piece mourned this specific art form in the wake of QR codes and nylon wristbands, but what really caught my attention was the name of the newsletter itself: The Casual Archivist. Using the term ‘archivist’ invokes images of innumerable shelves and dusty books and white cotton gloves, but when I really got to thinking about it, the words ‘archive’ and ‘archivist’ were cropping up again and again in unexpected places. Namely, the bios of various blogs and Instagram accounts I like to keep up with.
They vary in content, based on similarly varying interests. A few favourites include an account dedicated to the daily exploration of a late father’s record collection, an assortment of ‘Personals’ ads from 20th century newspapers, which describes itself sentimentally as “a journey through the search for connection in the pre-digital age”, and a fan page of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Constant streams of high-velocity content are dispersed with little windows into the lives of singles in 70s Chicago, or a Prada collection from 1997, or Nicole Kidman’s unreal Getty Images catalogue. What charms me is the individuality of these pages, how people are choosing to express their interests in a visually curated way. Presented almost as online galleries and museums, tailored to your liking, this accessible format easily allows for interaction with contemporaries, or the indifferent passerby. As a result, many of these accounts describe themselves in this pseudo-professional terminology: archivists of today.
In some ways, these archives represent a yearning for when collections had meaning, especially in today’s transient consumerist culture. The discourse around ‘personal’ archives (diaries, knick-knacks, clothes, etc) is a convoluted one, in which guilt over materialism in the age of landfill competes with an intrinsic need to immortalise lived experience. This dichotomy presents us with a future of two outcomes; potentially, future archivists will look back on our time and access personal information about individuals easily, making full use of the way we document our lives online. Whilst the concept of someone combing through my social media is seemingly hellish, it’s nothing, in my sentimental worldview, compared to the other possibility. Because of our reliance on digital media we neglect to leave anything of ourselves behind, physically. If there comes a day where the world forgets the phone, a significant part of modern human expression, communication, and memory is erased, point-blank. It’s a hypothetical dystopia, I know, but one that nonetheless terrifies me.
Whilst this concept of our lives being forgotten behind a screen is disturbing (and albeit farfetched), I admire the internet archivists. They bare the soul of the diary, the purposeless trinket, the act of keeping the receipt, through a medium so fleeting as social media.
I am a proud useless-object owner, diary-keeper, CD enthusiast, and polaroid taker. I believe such things are unequivocal windows to the soul. Physical media is a conduit for the intangible; there is a fulfilment in leaving something behind beyond the obvious academic or career achievements, something personal and durable that reflects human nature. This profound normality is an enduring concept in daily life, one captured by buying that sexy red notebook and writing how you’re feeling in it, for fear of being lost like the art on a concert ticket, remembered only on a niche blog by a practitioner of the new archival.
Image: photographed by Ruby Day