By Michael Lithgow and Kirsten Kozolanka

[Presented by Michael Lithgow at MiT6 Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission on 24 April 2009, Boston, MA]

The era “globalization”, among other things, describes a shift in consciousness that includes new and emerging practices of remembrance and new locations and new forms of public memory (Stepnisky 2008).  Not so long ago,  the study of public memory rested on, at least in part, an assumed distinction between archival memory and “lived” memory.  Archival memory assumed formal and specialized practices of selection, cataloguing and access (through exhibitions, museums, archives, etc.), and lived memory assumed the more spontaneous, vernacular and generally ephemeral qualities of remembrance by citizens, often through rituals and ceremonies.  Digital technologies allow these distinctions to be conflated.  The storing and organizing functions of the archival aspects of memory have collapsed into and with the access and interactivity of vernacular ceremony through digital technologies like the internet.

The internet (along with ever expanding capacities for digital storage) has allowed for huge volumes of texts to be amassed relatively easily, in traceable ways, and often through spontaneous and collaborative efforts (Web 2.0’s much touted interactive qualities, “wikinomics”, etc.).  These masses of digital remembrance can be accessed instantly by anyone with access to the internet almost anywhere in the world.  Any number of examples come to mind: The September 11 Digital Archives, Word Digital Library, the BBC’s 90 Years of Remembrance website for World War I, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, The Kent State Remembrance website,  UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program .

We take the position in this paper that online repositories are forms of what Halbwachs (1992) called ‘collective memory’ – the meanings we share and which emerge from ongoing negotiations over what to remember, the significance of those memories, and where they will lead us into the future.  Public memory is a contested site, and the public dialogues that lead up to these “negotiations” are the way in which shared meanings are arrived at.

The ease with which people can now participate in these practices is in marked contrast to traditional forms of archival memory which, generally, only reflected the interests and values of ruling paradigms (Haskins 2007).  The expanded possibilities for digital storage, accessibility and collective authorship through new media technologies have opened the possibility for new landscapes of  memory where voices once excluded from the ordering and preserving functions of archiving can play significant roles (Haskins 2007).

One of the characteristics of this new digital online memoryscape is an overwhelming quantity of remembered materials.  But the mere “preservation of large quantities of digital material does not translate into a useable past” writes Haskins (2007, 419).  Narratives of meaning  must be created and organized from the trove of materials to be found.  It is here, in the production of narratives and meanings, in the organizing of masses of digitized information that the negotiation will and does occur: meanings will demonstrate limited, conflicting and confounding narratives – those of ruling paradigms and those who question or contest them.

The cliché about news is that it is a ‘history of the present’, a commentary on events “too soon” in historical timeframes to provide any meaningful historical analysis.  But this overlooks two important points: (1) the ways in which memory is used within the news itself to create frames of understanding and dominant narratives (Edy 2006; Leavy 2007); and the ways in which practices of journalism contribute to the ways we come to think about the world around us through dialogues about shared experiences, ideas, and expressions (Anderson 1983/2006; Habermas 1987; Leavy 2007; Van Dijk 2008).  Media archives play a role in amassing histories of the production of social reality; or to put this another way, media archives are like the “Parliamentary record” of debates which lead up to the “official” historical narratives that are eventually settled on.  These debates reflect  complicated negotiations for power and longevity amidst intertextual competitions for legitimacy.

It is with all this in mind that we examine and implement the idea of a digital media archive for “alternative” media discourse in Canada.  We do so with the knowledge that this is contested territory, that the negotiations that eventually produce shared meanings are themselves situated within “geometries of power” (Massey 1999).  Some discourses are considered suspect as legitimate carriers of memory.

Raymond Williams’s conception of meaning systems as either dominant, alternative or oppositional helps us clarify the limitations of the media to perform the social roles that society assigns to them (1977). The dominant meaning system is the terrain within which the mainstream media function, thus drawing on and contributing to hegemonic notions of society. In terms of creating memory and collective history, it is self-fulfilling and powerful. Within Williams’s conception of an alternative meaning system, we find contestation from alternative voices that nonetheless can lie within the norms of dominant society. As Gitlin and others have found, alternative views and perspectives expressed through mainstream media can be co-opted or compromised, and in fact are often the sources of the negotiation that hegemony needs to renew itself.  The oppositional meaning system, which comprises contestation that lies outside the norms of society, is a site of anti-systemic views and perspectives that only find their way into mainstream media when they are denigrated or delegitimized and where they appear devoid of context. Under such conditions, alternative voices have little opportunity for establishing and sustaining narratives of meaning or, at least, if they do, historically we do not usually know about them.

Beyond the failure of the mainstream media to reflect more than a narrow segment of society, alternative media are themselves constrained by the precarity of their labour and their lack of funding.   Certainly, in the very slight recorded history of alternative media in Canada, we can only guess at the level to which illegitimate or counterhegemonic knowledges have been remembered.  Specific histories inform us of thriving alternative media, many of which were active during the time of grass-roots labour organizing between World Wars I and II (Mazepa, 2003).  They also inform us of regional differences, with the province of Quebec having perhaps the only known recorded history, and that itself only in the form of an exhibition and a keynote address (Levanthal, 2008).   In the course of our research, we have heard of, but have yet to verify, a niche collection of alternative media artifacts at the Vancouver Public Library. This is unusual. We do know that libraries in Canada typically do not carry large holdings of alternative media products, which are often produced in small numbers in localized settings by volunteer labour within a highly transient culture. Current databases are scant, and/or housed within much larger archives with limited search and retrieve structures. One such archive is the A-infos Anarchist Archive which specializes in media from all over the world specifically of interest to the anarchist movement.

What does exist in a haphazard form are the localized archives that alternative media organizations keep of their productive work.  Campus and community radio stations, for example, often automate the archiving process and maintain digital files of on-air programming indexed only by date and time.  Alternative media organizations that predate digital technologies have analog stores of various formats of tape.  These are important and largely disorganized archival resources, sometimes collated, sometimes in shoe-boxes and milk crates in basements.  Their disaggregated quality and lack of indexing make retrieval difficult and, in cases where there is no information about what is on a digital file or a tape, next to impossible.  Of course, the organization and preservation of archives depends on resources and to some extent technical capacities.  Unfortunately, most alternative media organizations lack the resources to address archival needs.

The goal for the Canadian Alternative Media Archive is to provide aggregated and retrievable archival resources for historians, activists and researchers - to make available for those interested in the production of social meaning the voices, ideas and opinions of those whose avenues of public communication fall into what Nancy Fraser called “subaltern counter-publics” (Fraser 1997).  These are the realms of cultural exchange that arise as a result of barriers and exclusions from the mainstream public sphere of dominant discourses.  Often these counter-publics activate at such a micro grassroots level of making meaning that we refer to them as ‘sphericles’ (Karim). This makes them difficult to uncover by traditional methods of archival retrieval.

The alternative archive will be oriented as widely as possible to include, for the most part, materials from organizations who self-identify as “alternative”, or citizen’s media, or independent media, or non-profit media, or community media. The goal is to gather and to make available media materials that would otherwise remain difficult or impossible for researchers and activists to locate and incorporate into their work.

The archive will be organized as a collaborative archive, or what some writers describe as “self-archiving … the act of authors depositing their work in institutional repositories”  (Ghosh 2009:35).  We envision the archive as practice, as part of ongoing public memory work.  We take the firm political stance that the objects of memory, the materials of the archive, are only as important as the practices involved in their recovery, preservation, organization and retrieval.  As Sturken argues, such an emphasis away from the object and towards the constructed nature of memory“ thus shifts attention from empirical concepts of memory to the ways that memories are highly political” (2008:75).  The Alternative archive as a collaborative remembering project acknowledges and highlights, as suggested by Van House (2008), the dynamic between technologies of memory and associated socio-technical practices.

Alternative discourses exists in the twilight of legitimacy. Their inauthentic cultural status in large part is what makes them alternative: these are the articulations of people whose exclusion from dominant media flows has driven them, so to speak, into production. Cultural illegitimacy is not the final word on whether or not something manifests memory culture (Sturken 2008).  The archive exists in part as a component of a legitimizing process.  The very existence of the archive, for example, itself suggests that these are cultural expressions worth remembering.

The Archive is in an early stage.   Our first step has been to create a presence online, and to invite interested scholars and activists to participate and help shape and realize what we firmly believe will be an invaluable resource.  Our second step has been to begin introducing ourselves to the alternative media organizations in Canada, to tell them about the archive, and to solicit their input with a brief survey. Our goal with media organizations is to enlist their curatorial support and to have contributions to the archive become part of their production routines.  Our role, as scholars and archivists, is to structure the archive in a way that makes it accessible for contributors and researchers and that embues it with sufficient human and financial capital to ensure the project’s longevity and ability to respond in timely ways to technological changes. We include the United States in our scope of research in order to benefit from existing experience with collaborative archiving and from those who may already be familiar with the ways in which untraditional historical collections can be uncovered.  We welcome your questions and suggestions.

Thank you.

References

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