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Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing pp 163–183Cite as

Flourishing or Fragmenting Amidst Variety: And the Digitalization of the Archive

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Part of the book series: Social Morphogenesis ((SOCMOR))

Abstract

Some cyber-optimists see the digitalisation of the archive as offering an endless abundance of cultural goods available to all. However this chapter takes a more gloomy view, arguing that the digitalised archive can in fact contribute in many ways to the disorientation and distraction of contemporary persons, rendering the process of ‘shaping a life’ more challenging than ever. Two often co-occurent mechanisms are identified which generate this propensity towards distraction: the curatorial imperative and the algorithmic imperative. Through an analysis of their operation, profoundly conditioning the digital landscape within which ever increase tracts of social life are played out, this chapters maps the changing relation between personal reflexivity, collective agency and the cultural system under digital capitalism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Intended as a tendential claim about the diffusion of smart phones within a socio-demographic group rather than an assumption of their universality.

  2. 2.

    See Carrigan (2014) for an extensive discussion of this, building upon the work of Archer (2000, 2003, 2007). See also Stevenson and Clegg (2011).

  3. 3.

    Objects which serve to scaffold remembering through their association with, ascription to and/or use in recounting particular events.

  4. 4.

    Consider for instance the ‘vinyl revival’, the thriving trade for old instant cameras, ‘retro gaming’ cultures or the fashion for luxury stationary. See Parikka (2012).

  5. 5.

    A popular micro-blogging service representing an intermediate point between Twitter and a traditional blog.

  6. 6.

    A description used in a slightly different way, characterizing the unrealistic presentation of careers in coding by those with vested interests in the expansion of coding academies, but it’s a remarkably apt one to describe the cultural construction of all manner of career hierarchies which are undergoing radical structural constriction under digital capitalism.

  7. 7.

    Curatorial is a matter of deliberate human evaluation, whereas algorithmic entails pre-defined instructions performed in sequence by software of whatever sort. Both ultimately have their origins in human evaluation.

  8. 8.

    The use of algorithmic filtering of feeds on a service like Facebook illustrates how the two are in practice intertwined.

  9. 9.

    Embodying as they do the irreducibility of personal reflexivity and the intrinsic character of open systems.

  10. 10.

    The actual activities involved in doing this are much more mundane than these descriptions make them sound e.g. identifying particular useful instances of personalisation to attend to, identifying particular classes of people deliberately to connect with on social media networks.

  11. 11.

    The more reflexive practitioners of ‘productivity systems’ can be seen to note the risks to productivity posed by reading about new approaches, discussing their virtues and experimenting with them in one’s own life.

  12. 12.

    One which focuses particularly on young people, reflecting a much longer standing concern with the purported ills of youth cultures, as boyd (2014: loc 1349–1368) insightfully diagnoses. This sits uneasily with the popular image of young people as ‘digital natives’, for whom the internet is second nature. These contrasting dystopian and utopian images of generational characteristics illustrate how a significant process has yet to find clarity in the popular imagination.

  13. 13.

    The notion of ‘excessive’ use is itself problematic. Excessive in relation to what? If it is a matter of the population at large, we can always identify those who use the internet to a degree that would be deemed excessive on a quantitative basis but is licensed on a qualitative basis by this being intrinsic to an occupational role. The assumed standard of ‘excessive’ use is more nebulous than would appear to be the case prima facie, enfolding a network of assumptions which are rarely stated explicitly.

  14. 14.

    Second-order desires are desires about desires. For instance I may at this moment want another coffee (1st order) but I want to suppress this urge because I’m trying to limit the amount of coffee I drink while working at home (2nd order).

  15. 15.

    Representing a spectrum, from occasional ‘distraction’ to debilitating ‘addiction’, defined by the extent of the tracts of everyday life within which this is experienced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Social Ontology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Mark Carrigan

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Correspondence to Mark Carrigan .

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  1. Centre for Social Ontology, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Margaret S. Archer

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Carrigan, M. (2017). Flourishing or Fragmenting Amidst Variety: And the Digitalization of the Archive. In: Archer, M. (eds) Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing. Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49469-2_8

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