Hanhardt, in her introduction, highlights the importance of “archived documents and ephemera” to her research process. While she did conduct interviews, and worked with the FIERCE group highlighted at the end of the book, when documents are available they form the core of her argument. This is because “interpretations of events—let alone memories of them—can diverge and have changed” (p. 27). Reflecting her commitment to the archive of documents available from the organizations and movements she tracks, the book is filled with pamphlets, flyers, and clippings from the groups she interrogates. The visual rhetoric of these documents say something without Hanhardt having to directly invoke the figures in her text. “Countering anti-gay violence through legislation” (p. 174) is the cool, bold angles of a document intended for policy makers working within the existing system. FIERCE’s flyer “Reclaim! Revolt! Resist!” (p. 213) is crowded, exclamatory, and seems to literally have figures dancing on the page. It is a bit messy, and totally vibrant.
I’ll say this now, I’m addicted to documentation. When I conduct research online, I save everything. I have hundreds of hours of my playing video games saved to my laptop hard drive. I have hundreds of screen shots from tumblr, with user names blacked out so I couldn’t be accused of saving identifiers. I have documentation of my life online from before my foray into graduate school. I have html files of websites I made when I was 15, chatlogs from old fansites, instant messaging conversations, social media profiles from before web 2.0 became commonplace. I have all of it. A colleague of mine and I joked about danah boyd’s new book, and how she missed the opportunity. In explaining this most recent book as being a culmination of 10 years of talking to youth about their internet use, she should have gone back to the same youth she spoke to 10 years ago to see where they are at now. My colleague and I, born within the same year, said we could see ourselves in our internet use 10, even 15 years ago, we have those social media accounts as long as the site wasn’t closed down. We were those youths 10 years ago, and we’re the researchers now. Wayback Machine has some of the pages and places we used to go that we didn’t save ourselves, but more than that, we’ve saved everything.
Hanhardt carves her way through fifty-plus years of organizational material highlighting contradictions and challenges faced by advocacy groups contesting for physical space, seamlessly connecting it to interview information to fill in gaps in the archive. Hanhardt is unclear in her writing what comes from the archive and what comes from interviews. This isn’t to say she necessarily has to be more explicit about what piece of information comes from what source. But when I attempt to do my own interweaving of auto-ethnographic experience, document interpretation, and original ethnographic and interview research, I often feel like I cannot remove myself from the writing of analysis because I’m here, researching this thing, because of my particular relationship with digital life. When conducting internet research, it seems difficult to separate “the field” from “outside,” or to even divide out what documents are core to a given project. Hanhardt starts in a moment where documents must make up the majority of her information, as activists have passed away, and moves forward to a group that at the time of writing, were still influential in New York and, presumably, she had instantaneous access not only to their documentation, but also their documentation process. These strike me as two different questions of methodology, and Hanhardt’s writing doesn’t necessarily reflect this break.
In internet research, I suppose, everything can be saved. This isn’t the same thing as everything will be saved. When YouTube changed its commenting structure from one based on the time a comment was posted (with an upvote/downvote mechanism) to a comment system attached to a google plus account (if you have more people in your google plus circles, your post would appear higher in most cases) anonymous posts disappeared from the site. Websites do close down, and sometimes they reappear in unexpected places (google has made searchable all these old usenet groups, in a flurry of overwhelming documentation). What I choose to save and what I may subsequently take up as a research project is influenced already by what is meaningful for me. I saved these silly things because I couldn’t let them go. I sort of envy the somewhat dispassionate way Hanhardt was ultimately able to write Safe Space. She speaks of the emotion running through her during the writing process in her introduction, but ultimately, she can mime that objective tone so valued by academics. In the ever increasing archive of digital life, everything I save is emotionally charged, because that saving began as an emotional impulse aided by the very technology I now try to interrogate.
Even the fact I’m asked to post to a blog each week is filled with this sort of documentation-emotion hybrid. This is meant for class, so I always go in saying I’ll talk less about myself this week, and then it never happens. It all feels so self-indulgent. But blogging is self-indulgent for me. I grew up throwing my thoughts and analysis and emotions into the internet winds for an unknown audience. Even though this assignment is locked down for our class, I can’t help but approach each post as a document of my life online.
No comments:
Post a Comment