Media Times| Archiving Protest Digitally: The Temporal Regime of Immediation
Abstract
Media technologies are crucial for the experience of time and temporality. Hence, changes in the technological configurations of the media ecology have far-reaching consequences for temporal experiences and practices. At the same time, social practices are shaping media technologies in diverse ways. One way the dialectical relationship between time and technology is expressed is the current preservation of the past for future generations. In that context the notion of the archive as practice and institution has long been central to discussions of social organization and cultural production. However, archival practices are changing with digitization. This article explores the changes in temporality of the archive through the lens of protest movements that are both objects of archiving and subjects of self-archiving practices. Combining experiences with different kinds of archives ranging from the institutional physical archive to digital archives including born-digital materials, I ask after the consequences of the changing temporalities and time regimes of the archive in terms of its politics and, ultimately, after the historicity of protest movements.