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Debates over a proposed national data center in the 1960s reveal how anxieties around privacy and digitization led to the shift toward corporate control of personal data.
Each morning, like so many other people, I start writing by firing up my word processor. Recently, the executable program that I use on my laptop became an online application. It is now just one app in a suite of software tools that my institution licenses. When I shut down my computer for the day, I instinctively go to save my file-but there is no longer a "save" option. The app instead has a message in its menu that reads "Where's the Save button? There's no Save button because were automatically saving your document."
The banality of this dialog response always intrigues me because it elicits questions that the drop-down menu has left conspicuously unanswered. Why is the document saved automatically? Where isit saved? Howis it stored? Who made the decision that saving and accessing information automatically on platforms that are managed in the cloud rather than as a file on my laptop's hard drive is a good idea?
The answers to these questions lie in the evolution of archiving from storing files to managing digital information. Today's archives do not belong to the person who creates them. Instead, they are "born networked," or created within connected information infrastructures,
because corporate data collection is now seamlessly integrated into the networked technologies that we use most. Where our data was formerly managed and controlled by public institutions, such as government agencies, libraries, or universities, today it is the domain of private platforms. This transition from public institutions to corporate firms explains how the noun archive-which once meant a place or set of records- became a verb denoting data handling, collection, and accumulation, infused with the power to control what information we can save and the means to access it. Cell phones, apps, and social networking platforms all depend on information management systems that archive data and manage access to data collections. Despite their ubiquity, these data archives are increasingly hard for people to find, know, or even envision. Born networked data is distanced from users, and access points are becoming more distributed and invisible. Much like the automated...