I arrived at the Frederic Wood Theater at 9:30am on Friday, February 12th for the ACA at UBC 8th Annual International Seminars and Symposium (2016).

The first lecture titled “Mobile Records, Social Media, and Recent Trends in Records Destruction” was by Amelia Acker. She began by asking the audience to think of “the feeling of the desire to delete something”, and to hold onto that sensation for the duration of the talk. Throughout the lecture, Acker returned many times to the idea of the forensic imaginary, emphasizing the idea that technology is made up of two sides of the same coin, where we believe both that the things we put into social networks can last forever, but also can disappear quickly. She explained that the “born network records” created through the very being of social media creates data shadows, which even when content is deleted can still be traced and stored by the network’s database. Acker ended by asking what archivists should pay attention to in regard to social media – whether the focus of future archive work in “liquid knowledge” should be on front end or back end information, or potentially both, and what that could mean for the process of archiving. For me, this talk really brought up a question of ethics: whether it is an ethical practice to keep something someone thought they had deleted, especially if they later decide they want it back after realizing that the information was never really deleted in the first place. The question of ownership is difficult in the context of something as ephemeral as the internet, but I think that it’s a rising issue when it comes to social media networks.

The second lecture was titled “Gaps in the Past and Gaps in the Future” by Kate Theimer. She addressed the issue of archival silences, specifically with regard to some issues that could potentially arise in the near future from the problem of how to archive social media and other facets of the internet. Her suggestions to avoid creating new archival silences included a call to action for today’s archivists, which included five points advocating for more involvement with the communities to encourage developing self-archives, working to scale in your own community to establish local, “personal” archives, and approaching corporate entities such as social media networks to develop tools and resources for individuals to create and donate archives made of their own digital identity. Overall it seemed that Theimer was suggesting that archival studies needs to branch out of academic hierarchy if it wants to eliminate the silence born of power imbalance. Her final question “Are we worrying too much about preventing the inevitable” was answered in the negative, as she concluded that liquid knowledge is ultimately a threat to archives, because we don’t have a system for storing that nonphysical and widely distributed sort of information. I agree that it is a threat to archives as we know them, but taken in combination with Acker’s closing sentiments, that we may be saving more information than we have permission for, juxtaposed just how complicated and uncharted the field of liquid knowledge is.