Recent academic scholarship has used these challenges to call attention to the opposite of persistence: ephemerality. Overall, automatic archiving requires active self-management about which data should be persistent.Įphemerality as an Alternative to Permanence Studies of digital possessions also found that users need to actively decide what data to preserve and dispose of in order to maintain a meaningful collection of digital artifacts. Such older data can cause conflicts with the presentation of the current self and lead to serious issues and active work to remove data from the archive. In particular, there are tensions between self-presentation and archiving, in part because systems might “exhibit” data in unintended ways. Īutomatic archiving also creates challenges. Our chat log is saved on Facebook Messenger, and when we post pictures in Instagram, they will stay there “forever.” Besides its business value to the companies for modeling users’ interests, such automatic archiving has useful features for users, supporting coordination, collaboration, reminiscing, and life-logging.

In most online systems, permanent data retention is the default. With the ongoing rapid drops in price for storage, including cloud technologies, retaining data has never been so easy.

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