Ephemera
[email exchange]
sarah to kim:
what counts as "ephemera"?
I've been reading a lot of comic strippy type things online lately...
kim to sarah:
I think of ephemera as: pamphlets, games, invitations, postcards, letters, political cartoons, advertisements and other non-book printed matter that is worth preserving for the cultural information it conveys. The comic strippy things would fit nicely into this category.
Here, as elsewhere, it's clear we're starting with a print paradigm and trying to look at the digital realm and work backwards. And once more the dilemmas become quickly evident: what are digital "equivalents" to the print texts, when the two develop for and within such different purposes and contexts? where do we begin and end? Just what qualifies as digital ephemera?
There seem to be two senses of ephemera that are emerging for me as I ponder this category. The first has to do with a text's situation in time-- that is, it's ephemeral, time-responsive and context dependent. The second is less explicitly graspable to me, but the best I can do is call it a quality of slightness.
Least substantial of all, there is the entire ever-shifting, ever-growing and morphing body of palimpsestic, fleeting construction comprised by email and personal web pages to take into account - which has to greater and lesser extents been "preserved" by endeavors like the Internet Archive project's Wayback Machine (which has archived the web from 1996) and specific listerv archives set up by their overseeing institutions (universities, libraries). Of particular note here is Usenet, the original dynamic newsgroup platform dating back the dawn of the internet (1980), which persists, most recently acquired by Google Groups.
At another level of concreteness within this broadly floating sea of the Internet are texts crafted with a formal audience in mind by auteurs-- similar in this sense to our Critical-Creative works, but substantively more "slight" in that problematic sense in which I'm using it here (and by which I intend none: they're my recent favorite works). These objects definitively don't seem to aspire, at least overtly, to the same level of canonical high literary seriousness that the Crititcal-Creative works do. I'm thinking of ephemera in this sense as gorgeous little bits, that are characteristically countercultural and resistant to commodification, like web-based "comics" A Softer World and Return to Sender. Comics as a genre have typically been constructed in the print world as effluvial, serial, and somewhat negligible next to their more monumental cousins, bound books-- however in an age of burgeoning popular appeal and appropriation and proliferation by Hollywood, graphic novels are gaining both momentum and cultural currency in both electronic and paper-based contexts (rendering my use of the descriptor "slight" even more problematic-- and yet I continue to think it's appropriate).
In this ephemera category I'm also placing digital texts that occur explicitly in time and of time: contextual cultural artifacts that respond to a specific sociolinguistic moment and then pass away into obscurity, like the Budweiser "True" beer commercial and its numerous "Whassup?" parodies.
In a pervasive sense, of course, Ephemera is useful simply as a catch-all category for "anything else"-- and likely to grow exponentially as the drain to a leaky, improvised structure.
sarah to kim:
what counts as "ephemera"?
I've been reading a lot of comic strippy type things online lately...
kim to sarah:
I think of ephemera as: pamphlets, games, invitations, postcards, letters, political cartoons, advertisements and other non-book printed matter that is worth preserving for the cultural information it conveys. The comic strippy things would fit nicely into this category.
Here, as elsewhere, it's clear we're starting with a print paradigm and trying to look at the digital realm and work backwards. And once more the dilemmas become quickly evident: what are digital "equivalents" to the print texts, when the two develop for and within such different purposes and contexts? where do we begin and end? Just what qualifies as digital ephemera?
There seem to be two senses of ephemera that are emerging for me as I ponder this category. The first has to do with a text's situation in time-- that is, it's ephemeral, time-responsive and context dependent. The second is less explicitly graspable to me, but the best I can do is call it a quality of slightness.
Least substantial of all, there is the entire ever-shifting, ever-growing and morphing body of palimpsestic, fleeting construction comprised by email and personal web pages to take into account - which has to greater and lesser extents been "preserved" by endeavors like the Internet Archive project's Wayback Machine (which has archived the web from 1996) and specific listerv archives set up by their overseeing institutions (universities, libraries). Of particular note here is Usenet, the original dynamic newsgroup platform dating back the dawn of the internet (1980), which persists, most recently acquired by Google Groups.
At another level of concreteness within this broadly floating sea of the Internet are texts crafted with a formal audience in mind by auteurs-- similar in this sense to our Critical-Creative works, but substantively more "slight" in that problematic sense in which I'm using it here (and by which I intend none: they're my recent favorite works). These objects definitively don't seem to aspire, at least overtly, to the same level of canonical high literary seriousness that the Crititcal-Creative works do. I'm thinking of ephemera in this sense as gorgeous little bits, that are characteristically countercultural and resistant to commodification, like web-based "comics" A Softer World and Return to Sender. Comics as a genre have typically been constructed in the print world as effluvial, serial, and somewhat negligible next to their more monumental cousins, bound books-- however in an age of burgeoning popular appeal and appropriation and proliferation by Hollywood, graphic novels are gaining both momentum and cultural currency in both electronic and paper-based contexts (rendering my use of the descriptor "slight" even more problematic-- and yet I continue to think it's appropriate).
In this ephemera category I'm also placing digital texts that occur explicitly in time and of time: contextual cultural artifacts that respond to a specific sociolinguistic moment and then pass away into obscurity, like the Budweiser "True" beer commercial and its numerous "Whassup?" parodies.
In a pervasive sense, of course, Ephemera is useful simply as a catch-all category for "anything else"-- and likely to grow exponentially as the drain to a leaky, improvised structure.
posted by sat at 10:34 AM
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