Saved from Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams

by Andreas Kitzmann

What lies behind our need to rigorously document the thoughts, deeds, images, and sounds of everyday life? And more curiously, why would anyone want to spend time going over such material? At any given point someone is using a pen, a camera, a web cam, or a computer to document with varying degrees of detail, personal thoughts, observations, or glimpses of private space and life. And for each of these, there is usually at least one person reading, watching, and even responding. Saved from Oblivion is a comparative analysis of how individuals have used various media technologies to document their everyday lives. More specifically, this book focuses on the major forms of self-documentation that have been in use since the late nineteenth century and covers traditional diaries, snapshot photography, home movies/videos, and web-based media such as web cams and online diaries or journals.

204 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2004

Reviews

[Lindley Walter-smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I may be assessing this a little unfairly, as the digital social world has moved on very much since 2004 - bewilderingly, I found this on a New Acquisitions shelf at a university, despite the fact that the content must be over a decade old. Time is not kind to internet studies. However, I found this an oddly detached read and oddly lacking in theoretical substance. Looking at something as intimate as the documentation, presentation and sharing of lives, there seems to be no actually engagement with the humans involved - why the impulse to share, or to consume, trivia about everyday life? The connections between people are barely dealt with, and the section on truth and misrepresentation takes no real account of the emotional and financial investment and lives damaged by, for example, falling in love with a false identity, or being drawn into Munchausen's by Internet (not even mentioned), or of the motives of people representing non-authentic selves and of those who want to believe in them. (This section was typical - there was an anecdote about a false persona, then the author moved on.)

The culture which makes self-representation accessible and desirable is also dealt with on what feels like the most shallow level. It is one thing to say we might need to have new definitions of "the real" and "public and private" - but that needs to go hand-in-hand with exploration of the deeper meanings and implications. Equally, diary-writing, home movies, web cams and "web diaries" (i.e. blogs) felt like they were just described in the most basic manner and not analysed in any helpful or meaningful way, or situated properly in the wider culture.

Despite a reasonable depth of references, I didn't feel like I came out with this with any new insights into the subject matter - just a potentially useful (but small) toolkit of jargon to describe things.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so wonderful. It has a lot to do with the private/public and how they are no longer binaries, as well as identity in self-documentation. It took me a while to read because I always had to review what I'd read before when I started. The writing was excellent, the ideas were just deep.