From Scrapbook to Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblage and Archives

Publishers, too, relied on scrapbooking techniques to manage media flows in the mid to late nineteenth century. Newspapers and periodicals regularly picked up and recirculated printed material from other sources, sometimes dropping the author’s name or altering the work. It was also common for amateurs to publish scrapbooks created from clippings of mass- produced reading materials (Garvey, 2006a: 160, 164). These practices highlight the diversity of ideas about authorship and attribution that informed scrapbooking in the past, and which remain relevant to debates about social media and the ethics of ‘posting’, ‘retweeting’ or ‘curating’ online content created or discovered by others (see http://www.curatorscode.org/) ⤴️
“scrapbooks are deeply social texts” ⤴️
“packed with personal information” ⤴️
“objects that were both popular and marginal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” ⤴️
“how to extract meaning from them (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008; Tucker et al., 2006; Zboray and Zboray, 2009).” ⤴️
“the validity of the scrapbook as a historical or biographical text (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008).” ⤴️
“Scrapbooks are rarely edited, nor are they ‘finished’ like formal publications. Instead they are messy, fragmentary and highly individualized.” ⤴️
“personal collections of ephemera that are themselves ephemeral (Tucker et al., 2006: 18).” ⤴️
“unclear what kinds of functions scrapbooks served for their users in the past” ⤴️
“Were they mostly private objects for storing thoughts and memories, as is commonly assumed, or did they also serve a more immediate and social purpose?” ⤴️
“Tucker et al. (2006: 18) put it, ‘culture makers with their guard down’.” ⤴️
“Is there any ‘right’ way to ‘read’ these messy pages?” ⤴️
there’s no right way to read anything
“While scrapbooks are commonly under- stood as private hobbyist creations, and Facebook as a site of public and social interaction, here I draw from a range of studies that call attention to the fluidly social and archival dimensions of each form.” ⤴️
this is another piece showing how the personal and private and social and public are fluctuating states with blurred boundaries
“Historians have likened scrapbooks to personal web pages and online photo albums, and it is common to encounter websites and software programs that play on the idea of the ‘digital scrapbook’ (Helfand, 2008; mixbook.com; scrapgirls.com; smilebox.com).” ⤴️
“ocial media has not yet been analyzed as a continuation of earlier scrapbooking habits, nor have historical scrapbooks been examined as forms of proto-social media” ⤴️
“the often blurry distinctions between scrapbooks and other social/archival media traditions, such as autograph, photograph and confession albums, and commonplace books (Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 27–36, 65; 2009).” ⤴️
“digital carryovers of these traditions” ⤴️
often the originating metaphor of choice has shaped the primary mode of interaction but increasingly these sites have tried to monopolise/converge usage rather than allow better interoperability
“my aim is not to propose a ‘history of Facebook’, but rather to offer an histori- cization of it and similar media platforms” ⤴️
“entrenched in a long history of habits and hobbies by which people inter- acted with media texts to both express themselves socially and, simultaneously, to docu- ment their lives.” ⤴️
“a key shared feature is their containment of − and formal depend- ence on − diverse streams of personal content” ⤴️
“personal media assemblages: individualized collections of media fragments both original and appropriated, including notes, mes- sages, photographs, symbolic tokens, and snippets of meaningful items.” ⤴️
“In historical scrapbooks, personal media assemblages typically include newspaper clippings, maga- zine cutouts, correspondence, stamps, stickers, food wrappers, ticket stubs, photographs, doodles, signatures, pressed flowers and other mementos. In the digital domain of Facebook, personal media assemblages include posted photos, videos, applications, links to external media and personal interests, ‘gifts’, ‘notes’, ‘questions’, messages and status updates” ⤴️
“in both scrapbooks and Facebook, owners are not necessarily the only ones producing or annotating content in their personal media assemblages.” ⤴️
“a long history of this form of collaborative and creative communication is also evidenced in scrapbooks, which, from their earliest versions, were commonly passed among groups of friends and inscribed by multiple users (Matthews, 2000; Tucker et al., 2006: 7; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 30–31).” ⤴️
“providing a setting in which users can creatively assemble content, both scrapbooks and Facebook also serve as reservoirs for that content.” ⤴️
“both are personal media archives, or sites that house personal media assemblages within a bounded setting, with options for both private viewing and public display.” ⤴️
“an amalgam of relatively recent developments in digital communication such as the weblog, asynchronous messaging, news feeds and the personal webpage, making it much more intelligible as an arena of everyday communication than an archive of accumulated activities (Cox, 2009; Hogan, 2010).” ⤴️
“both popular and scholarly discourses tend to describe Facebook as a site for social, not archival, activity.” ⤴️
“sites like Facebook as not only arenas of social activity, but also as expanding archives of personal artifacts.” ⤴️
even more so in the 2010s Instagram age
“presenting oneself online through social media differs from offline communication in that it is not a targeted ‘performance’, bounded in space and time, but more of an open-ended ‘exhibition’.” ⤴️
“one user’s posts may pop up in another’s search or news feed in ways that the first user cannot fully anticipate” ⤴️
“Hogan likens users’ uploading of content to a handing over of their personal artifacts, a relinquishing of control over their online self-presentation to a third-party ‘curator’, such as an algorithm or server, which has the power to recon- figure their submission(s) in unexpected and unintended ways.” ⤴️
this is why i highlight the importance of only the self as curator of the assemblage (is the software then always the curator of the experience? is this why need for many interface options etc)
“structural and corporate mechanisms that shape how the archive is assembled, maintained and made accessible to different users, algorithms and publics (Derrida, 1995).” ⤴️
“scrap- books tend to be discrete objects created and owned by individuals, Facebook is an institutionalized archive co-created by users, Facebook Inc., and third-party applications or ‘apps’” ⤴️
“different levels of control that they afford to users.” ⤴️
even templated-scrapbooks can have headings scribbled out and similar - i guess id liken this to browser extensions but these are still somewhat black-box
“Compared to today’s social media users, scrapbookers have historically enjoyed greater authorial direction over the arrangement and display of their objects. Unconstrained by specific categories of input,” ⤴️
“as long as they were in possession of their scrapbooks, they could also control the degree to which their personal media assemblages were put on public display.” ⤴️
“its communicative superpowers come at a significant cost to users in terms of privacy and control” ⤴️
it doesn’t have to!
“they could stow their personal media assemblages out of public view until the desired audience came along.” ⤴️
“their personal media assemblages are shaped by and ultimately belong to the sites that host them.” ⤴️
“both scrapbooks and Facebook have devel- oped as sites in which users document friendship and visualize their social networks.” ⤴️
“tools and spaces to help users navigate periods of new media abundance.” ⤴️
“accumulation of cultural capital through the expression of class distinctions and personal taste.” ⤴️
“y highlighting the historically fluid boundaries between archival and ‘social’ media, this study advances the view that a wide variety of personal media practices can be seen as promoting a range of simultaneously documentary and performative behaviors.” ⤴️
“The authors note that the main purpose of a SNS is not to ‘network’ or meet strangers, but rather to ‘enable users to articulate and make visible their existing social networks’ (2007: 211). The majority of contacts on SNS are between users who already have some sort of offline relationship.” ⤴️
this distinguishes some sites from others as well as some categories of use within one site
“boyd and Ellison define SNS as ‘web-based services that allow indi- viduals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and trav- erse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (2007: 211). In short, a core function of SNS is to visualize relationships” ⤴️
“A forerunner to the scrapbook was the album amicorum or ‘friendship book’ (known in German as the Stammbuch, or ‘register of acquaintances’) (Tucker et al., 2006: 7). From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the primary users of these books were male aristocratic university students who traveled Europe for their intellectual training.” ⤴️
“unlike a directory or diary, the album amicorum was an intrinsically social medium − it was the contacts themselves who left their mark in the owner’s book.” ⤴️
“friends could convey their personal touch through a reference to some other form of popular media − a motto, a poetic verse or a short epigram” ⤴️
“for social circulation, sharing and display” ⤴️
“what Rosenthal (2009: 620) calls ‘a portrait of friends and personal experiences that form a communal self for posterity’.” ⤴️
“friendship books flourished in American culture in the early nine- teenth century. Known most widely as autograph albums, these recreational items ranged from commercially produced blank books with embossed covers to hand-bound card- board constructions made at home. Like their European predecessors, the books were regarded as deeply social objects: by the mid 1800s, the word ‘album’ referred to any blank book in which friends left ‘memorials’ to one another (Vosmeier, 2006: 208). As Tucker et al. (2006: 7) note, ‘the friendship album was a place for inscribing autographs, poetry, prose, and wishes from friends’, where the contents often ‘combined mass- produced sources and friends’ words and autographs’.” ⤴️
“Many used albums to mix textual and visual tokens, including cartes de visite, the small calling cards left behind by con- tacts after a social visit (Milne, 2004). Other ‘memorials’ included homegrown items like pressed flowers and locks of hair. Vosmeier (2006: 208–209) notes that such tokens were not considered valuable in their own right; rather, they were prized for their social asso- ciations with a certain person, place or shared memory.” ⤴️
“Soon after photography arrived on the consumer market in the 1860s, many users opted to replace those textual-material tokens of friendship with modern photographs.” ⤴️
“friendship books can be understood as early forms of social media insofar as they were constituted by acts of social exchange and collaborative inscription.” ⤴️
“t allowed participants to construct public or semi-public ‘profiles’ within a bounded system (e.g. personalized inscriptions in each other’s books), to document and visualize their real-life contacts, and to ‘view and traverse’ those contacts by flipping through the pages (2007: 211).” ⤴️
“he emergence of both media practices was driven significantly by students (Helfand, 2008: 113-116; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008; Vosmeier, 2006: 212).” ⤴️
“rom the sixteenth century to the present, students have relied on variations of the flexible ‘blank book’ to record the friendships and fleeting encounters” ⤴️
“neither format remained limited to students or to tex- tual inscriptions for long” ⤴️
“Since the addition of the photo application in 2005, the news feed and extension of membership to non- students in 2006, various third-party applications in 2007, and the ‘timeline’ in 2011, Facebook has become a multigenerational and multimedia depot where a wealth of per- sonalized texts, images and videos are exchanged daily” ⤴️
“diversification of Facebook’s capa- bilities amid an accelerating Internet culture is reminiscent of the proliferation of scrap- books in the late nineteenth century, in which the predominantly textual traditions of friendship albums, commonplace books and literary scrapbooks converged with the explosion of popular print media.” ⤴️
“In 1872,” ⤴️
“Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook’ (Kaplan, 1991: 150). Like many of his contemporaries, Twain spent a lot of time reading newspapers and magazines, and often wanted to save articles for personal and professional reuse. Frustrated by the hassle and mess of paste, Twain invented a scrapbook with pre-glued paper.” ⤴️
“in the mid to late nineteenth century scrapbooks served as handy social tools for helping consumers navigate new waves of print abundance (Garvey, 2004: 209)” ⤴️
“n the mid nineteenth century, scrapbooking was a predominantly literary pastime enjoyed by members of the middle and upper classes, who avidly collected and saved snippets of reading material for future reference or recirculation.” ⤴️
“crapbooking was shaped in many ways by the tradition of keeping commonplace books (also known as ‘extract’ books), in which users hand-copied passages of interest from books and peri- odicals to help them keep track of information or make intelligent references in letters or conversations (Garvey, 2004: 211; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 31).” ⤴️
“The popularity of scrapbooking surged with the rise of ephemeral printed texts and visuals in the late nine- teenth century, following developments in steam-powered printing, embossing, chromo- lithography and railway transport (Casper et al., 2007). In response to this influx of cheap, colorful printed material, more people began saving scraps − including newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, trade cards, pictures from catalogues, even food wrappers − to exchange with their friends or keep for themselves.” ⤴️
“As Garvey (2006b) points out, manufacturers and retailers were quick to capitalize on users’ desires for colorful scraps, printing chromo- lithographed trade cards with brand names accompanied by illustrations of products, flowers and birds. Trade cards were often identical in design to prayer cards and calling cards, making it easy for users to mingle advertisements with other kinds of social texts in the pages of their scrapbooks (Garvey, 2006b: 98).” ⤴️
“social media-oriented advertising texts (e.g. ‘themed’ product boards on Pinterest, corporate ‘fan’ pages on Facebook, or brand-related hashtag phrases on Twitter) in an effort to be ‘liked’, ‘shared’, ‘retweeted’ or ‘repinned’ by users who spend time and socialize in these online spaces.” ⤴️
“a similarly enduring tendency of market capi- talism to both provide the source material for and attempt to profit from such practices.” ⤴️
“commercial scrapbooks offered the user special pre-printed fields for posting specific kinds of printed and written informa- tion. Helfand (2008) describes a 1921 scrapbook called A Girl’s Graduation Days, one of countless scrapbook-related products marketed to young women, which included vari- ous student-specific section headings like ‘Class Prophecy’, ‘Interclass Debates,’ and ‘Candy Recipes’. Helfand notes, however, that scrapbook holders often resisted such pre-printed recommendations, retrofitting their own preferred content to the page and paying no mind to the apparent incongruity.” ⤴️
“The frequency with which users went against commercial recommendations within scrapbooks presents a problem for research- ers, who often must rely on scant textual clues to make interpretations of what was included (and not included) in these personal media assemblages.” ⤴️
“it is common to encounter users playfully oppos- ing the dominant posting conventions of websites’ data fields (Marwick, 2005: 15-17).” ⤴️
“collecting clippings more selectively and creating personal media assemblages that more coherently testified to their individual interests. Single-theme scrapbooks, often devoted to a single celebrity or cultural phenomenon, became a popular way of tracking some- thing” ⤴️
“the fan scrapbook became the media con- sumer’s hub for compiling articles, pictures and magazine gossip about their favorite figures in the media. Such practices of mediated ‘following’ also allowed, at times, for connections between fan and celebrity. Hastie (2007: 28–33) notes that in the silent film era, female stars welcomed scrapbooks made for them by fans who meticulously tracked their lives and careers in the media.” ⤴️
“For Certeau, citizens of modern societies actively respond to the influx of texts in their lives through a process of ‘textual poaching’. Moving through their media-saturated societies not as passive consumers but as active users, individuals actively appropriate and refashion mass-produced texts for their own personal needs (Certeau, 1984).” ⤴️
“As Johnson (2006) observes in her study of a scrapbook created by avant-garde artist Hannah Höch in Weimar Germany, Höch’s juxtaposition of images of Hollywood glamour with barren or alienating tableaus of industrial modernity communicated her position as both an avid consumer and an active critic of American mass culture.” ⤴️
“In both sites, heavily involved or curated personal media assemblages can be just as easily interpreted as artful creations or as evidence of overreliance on or obsession with media.” ⤴️
is why sites of creation beside collection are more valuable
“While expressing taste is a way of denoting one’s existing cultural capital, it can also serve as a bridge to amassing more capital and facilitating further social mobility. Several studies have shown that social media sites are arenas in which users engage in impression management, identity performance, and/or expression of taste,” ⤴️
“In the sixteenth century, European elites kept their albums of collected print matter − then a luxury enjoyed only by society’s upper crust − inside Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities (Tucker et al., 2006: 6). As treasured objects, these primitive scrap albums were displayed along with other collected specimens as a way of signaling the wealthy status and cultivated tastes of the owners.” ⤴️
“as scrapbooks became cheaper to create they evolved into what Tucker et al. (2006: 6) describe as ‘the equivalent of the poor family’s cabinet of curiosities’. They were assembled ‘not so much to serve the memory as to enact rituals of consumption and the hoarding of treasure’.” ⤴️
but is this inherently problematic in regards to digital media that is somewhat endlessly replicable??
“Marshall and Bly (2004) observe that the value of circulating articles among friends and coworkers goes far beyond the items’ informational content. Rather, exchanging clippings is a way to establish mutual awareness among contacts, express common interests and tastes, and build rapport.” ⤴️
“scrapbooks, and related personal media forms, were created not simply for safe- keeping or posterity, but also for the more immediate task of being shown socially and/or helping the owner achieve distinction (Bourdieu, 1984).” ⤴️
“the confession album. Reaching peak popularity in Victorian Britain, these books contained blank questionnaires on a number of topics designed to elicit information about the inscriber’s attitudes, opinions and aspirations. Confession albums were typically filled out by friends during social visits or at school, and by the twentieth century their format was replicated in various autograph albums and student scrapbooks. Confession albums are paradoxical because, as Matthews (2000: 128) notes, they are ‘an intimate form that invites self-revelation with no guarantee of discretion’.” ⤴️
“Matthews (2000) notes that confession books were a printed outgrowth of a nineteenth- century parlor game in which groups of eligible young men and women asked and answered playful questions as a way of subtly screening each other as suitable romantic partners. Players could respond only through selected quotations of poetic verse, but in this context of pretend courtship the answers acquired ‘exaggerated significance’. This seemingly ‘innocent recreation’ of hinting at one’s desires through textual quotation was in fact a mask for the more serious business of finding a partner and securing a position within a comfortable social class (Matthews, 2000: 129–130).” ⤴️
this was popular in sites/trends/on Facebook and tumblr etc in the 2010s and now likely represented in tiktok/instagram trends also
“‘interest tokens’ (Liu, 2007). Today, interest tokens are references to books, music, movies, TV and other socially recognizable phenomena, which double as ‘a cultural vocabulary for the language of taste’ (Liu, 2007: 257).” ⤴️
“a scrap- book user in 1943 could express a similar sentiment by pasting a Casablanca ticket stub or advertisement in the pages of her scrapbook.” ⤴️
“speak volumes about a user’s cultural aspirations, dispositions and desires for social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 28–36).” ⤴️
“Scrapbooks helped peo- ple visualize ‘the good life’, lending expression to their media-driven fantasies of fine homes, international travel, improved physical appearance and desires for specific con- sumer products. L” ⤴️
“‘scrapbooks fit seamlessly into the rituals of consumption and etiquette that helped new members of the middle class identify one another’ (Tucker et al., 2006: 10).” ⤴️
“a practicing ground for the kinds of real-life taste performances that today are just as common on- as offline (Liu, 2007; Papacharissi, 2009).” ⤴️
“questions about their accessibility to different cultural groups and their capacities to reproduce social privilege.” ⤴️
“While it is worth celebrating that both scrap- books and Facebook are strongly associated with women and youth − two groups histori- cally underrepresented in ‘official’ archives − there is also a longstanding and troubling association between these kinds of social-archival media practices and predominantly white, middle-class media users.” ⤴️
“enduring inequalities in the distribution of personal media tools and skills in the past, paralleling what many see as a ‘digital divide’ today that stratifies levels of online social media use by socioeconomic status (Jansen, 2010).” ⤴️
“the kinds of representations that these media promote along the lines of gender, race and class (Nakamura, 2008).” ⤴️
“evidential of an enduring overlap between social and auto-archival processes in modern media culture, where the impulse to perform through media in public and social ways is often coupled with a private or personal desire to preserve that media for the future.” ⤴️
“assumptions that users approach old and new forms of personal media with fundamentally different objectives, and that the personal record produced by the former is somehow more legitimate than the latter.” ⤴️
“‘Cyberspace When You’re Dead’ exemplifies this idea, suggesting that the reason why fewer people are choosing paper-based media for ‘leaving a record of life … for heirs or the future’ is because they are too ‘busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff’ (Walker, 2011).” ⤴️
“In addition to serving as a storage place for memories, the scrapbook often functioned as an everyday object of social sharing, co-inscription, performance and display.” ⤴️
“The website is at once one of the richest social archives in recent history and one of the most tightly controlled. It is, as McCown and Nelson (2009: 1) put it, a ‘“walled garden” where user activities are trapped’.” ⤴️
“ersonal media assemblages and archives are ubiquitous and enduring cultural formations in modern mediated societies.” ⤴️
“Helfand (2008: 9, 17) notes that the flexible, personal nature of scrapbooks has historically allowed users to ‘bury the truth or doctor the evi- dence’ regarding their self-representations, and present a kind of ‘selective oblivious- ness’ about political events and social concerns that may have been salient in the world around them.” ⤴️
“significant as much for their inclusions as their omissions” ⤴️ ^9e0c9c
“With careful attention to the multiple functions, ranging from public to private, that scrapbooks and Facebook have performed for their users, as well as the varying levels of archival access and control afforded by the different technologies, scholars might continue to find new ways of ‘reading’ these assembled archival texts that yield useful insights into the social behaviors of the past and present.” ⤴️

From Scrapbook to Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblage and Archives

Publishers, too, relied on scrapbooking techniques to manage media flows in the mid to late nineteenth century. Newspapers and periodicals regularly picked up and recirculated printed material from other sources, sometimes dropping the author’s name or altering the work. It was also common for amateurs to publish scrapbooks created from clippings of mass- produced reading materials (Garvey, 2006a: 160, 164). These practices highlight the diversity of ideas about authorship and attribution that informed scrapbooking in the past, and which remain relevant to debates about social media and the ethics of ‘posting’, ‘retweeting’ or ‘curating’ online content created or discovered by others (see http://www.curatorscode.org/) ⤴️
“scrapbooks are deeply social texts” ⤴️
“packed with personal information” ⤴️
“objects that were both popular and marginal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” ⤴️
“how to extract meaning from them (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008; Tucker et al., 2006; Zboray and Zboray, 2009).” ⤴️
“the validity of the scrapbook as a historical or biographical text (Garvey, 2004; Helfand, 2008).” ⤴️
“Scrapbooks are rarely edited, nor are they ‘finished’ like formal publications. Instead they are messy, fragmentary and highly individualized.” ⤴️
“personal collections of ephemera that are themselves ephemeral (Tucker et al., 2006: 18).” ⤴️
“unclear what kinds of functions scrapbooks served for their users in the past” ⤴️
“Were they mostly private objects for storing thoughts and memories, as is commonly assumed, or did they also serve a more immediate and social purpose?” ⤴️
“Tucker et al. (2006: 18) put it, ‘culture makers with their guard down’.” ⤴️
“Is there any ‘right’ way to ‘read’ these messy pages?” ⤴️
there’s no right way to read anything
“While scrapbooks are commonly under- stood as private hobbyist creations, and Facebook as a site of public and social interaction, here I draw from a range of studies that call attention to the fluidly social and archival dimensions of each form.” ⤴️
this is another piece showing how the personal and private and social and public are fluctuating states with blurred boundaries
“Historians have likened scrapbooks to personal web pages and online photo albums, and it is common to encounter websites and software programs that play on the idea of the ‘digital scrapbook’ (Helfand, 2008; mixbook.com; scrapgirls.com; smilebox.com).” ⤴️
“ocial media has not yet been analyzed as a continuation of earlier scrapbooking habits, nor have historical scrapbooks been examined as forms of proto-social media” ⤴️
“the often blurry distinctions between scrapbooks and other social/archival media traditions, such as autograph, photograph and confession albums, and commonplace books (Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 27–36, 65; 2009).” ⤴️
“digital carryovers of these traditions” ⤴️
often the originating metaphor of choice has shaped the primary mode of interaction but increasingly these sites have tried to monopolise/converge usage rather than allow better interoperability
“my aim is not to propose a ‘history of Facebook’, but rather to offer an histori- cization of it and similar media platforms” ⤴️
“entrenched in a long history of habits and hobbies by which people inter- acted with media texts to both express themselves socially and, simultaneously, to docu- ment their lives.” ⤴️
“a key shared feature is their containment of − and formal depend- ence on − diverse streams of personal content” ⤴️
“personal media assemblages: individualized collections of media fragments both original and appropriated, including notes, mes- sages, photographs, symbolic tokens, and snippets of meaningful items.” ⤴️
“In historical scrapbooks, personal media assemblages typically include newspaper clippings, maga- zine cutouts, correspondence, stamps, stickers, food wrappers, ticket stubs, photographs, doodles, signatures, pressed flowers and other mementos. In the digital domain of Facebook, personal media assemblages include posted photos, videos, applications, links to external media and personal interests, ‘gifts’, ‘notes’, ‘questions’, messages and status updates” ⤴️
“in both scrapbooks and Facebook, owners are not necessarily the only ones producing or annotating content in their personal media assemblages.” ⤴️
“a long history of this form of collaborative and creative communication is also evidenced in scrapbooks, which, from their earliest versions, were commonly passed among groups of friends and inscribed by multiple users (Matthews, 2000; Tucker et al., 2006: 7; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 30–31).” ⤴️
“providing a setting in which users can creatively assemble content, both scrapbooks and Facebook also serve as reservoirs for that content.” ⤴️
“both are personal media archives, or sites that house personal media assemblages within a bounded setting, with options for both private viewing and public display.” ⤴️
“an amalgam of relatively recent developments in digital communication such as the weblog, asynchronous messaging, news feeds and the personal webpage, making it much more intelligible as an arena of everyday communication than an archive of accumulated activities (Cox, 2009; Hogan, 2010).” ⤴️
“both popular and scholarly discourses tend to describe Facebook as a site for social, not archival, activity.” ⤴️
“sites like Facebook as not only arenas of social activity, but also as expanding archives of personal artifacts.” ⤴️
even more so in the 2010s Instagram age
“presenting oneself online through social media differs from offline communication in that it is not a targeted ‘performance’, bounded in space and time, but more of an open-ended ‘exhibition’.” ⤴️
“one user’s posts may pop up in another’s search or news feed in ways that the first user cannot fully anticipate” ⤴️
“Hogan likens users’ uploading of content to a handing over of their personal artifacts, a relinquishing of control over their online self-presentation to a third-party ‘curator’, such as an algorithm or server, which has the power to recon- figure their submission(s) in unexpected and unintended ways.” ⤴️
this is why i highlight the importance of only the self as curator of the assemblage (is the software then always the curator of the experience? is this why need for many interface options etc)
“structural and corporate mechanisms that shape how the archive is assembled, maintained and made accessible to different users, algorithms and publics (Derrida, 1995).” ⤴️
“scrap- books tend to be discrete objects created and owned by individuals, Facebook is an institutionalized archive co-created by users, Facebook Inc., and third-party applications or ‘apps’” ⤴️
“different levels of control that they afford to users.” ⤴️
even templated-scrapbooks can have headings scribbled out and similar - i guess id liken this to browser extensions but these are still somewhat black-box
“Compared to today’s social media users, scrapbookers have historically enjoyed greater authorial direction over the arrangement and display of their objects. Unconstrained by specific categories of input,” ⤴️
“as long as they were in possession of their scrapbooks, they could also control the degree to which their personal media assemblages were put on public display.” ⤴️
“its communicative superpowers come at a significant cost to users in terms of privacy and control” ⤴️
it doesn’t have to!
“they could stow their personal media assemblages out of public view until the desired audience came along.” ⤴️
“their personal media assemblages are shaped by and ultimately belong to the sites that host them.” ⤴️
“both scrapbooks and Facebook have devel- oped as sites in which users document friendship and visualize their social networks.” ⤴️
“tools and spaces to help users navigate periods of new media abundance.” ⤴️
“accumulation of cultural capital through the expression of class distinctions and personal taste.” ⤴️
“y highlighting the historically fluid boundaries between archival and ‘social’ media, this study advances the view that a wide variety of personal media practices can be seen as promoting a range of simultaneously documentary and performative behaviors.” ⤴️
“The authors note that the main purpose of a SNS is not to ‘network’ or meet strangers, but rather to ‘enable users to articulate and make visible their existing social networks’ (2007: 211). The majority of contacts on SNS are between users who already have some sort of offline relationship.” ⤴️
this distinguishes some sites from others as well as some categories of use within one site
“boyd and Ellison define SNS as ‘web-based services that allow indi- viduals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and trav- erse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (2007: 211). In short, a core function of SNS is to visualize relationships” ⤴️
“A forerunner to the scrapbook was the album amicorum or ‘friendship book’ (known in German as the Stammbuch, or ‘register of acquaintances’) (Tucker et al., 2006: 7). From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the primary users of these books were male aristocratic university students who traveled Europe for their intellectual training.” ⤴️
“unlike a directory or diary, the album amicorum was an intrinsically social medium − it was the contacts themselves who left their mark in the owner’s book.” ⤴️
“friends could convey their personal touch through a reference to some other form of popular media − a motto, a poetic verse or a short epigram” ⤴️
“for social circulation, sharing and display” ⤴️
“what Rosenthal (2009: 620) calls ‘a portrait of friends and personal experiences that form a communal self for posterity’.” ⤴️
“friendship books flourished in American culture in the early nine- teenth century. Known most widely as autograph albums, these recreational items ranged from commercially produced blank books with embossed covers to hand-bound card- board constructions made at home. Like their European predecessors, the books were regarded as deeply social objects: by the mid 1800s, the word ‘album’ referred to any blank book in which friends left ‘memorials’ to one another (Vosmeier, 2006: 208). As Tucker et al. (2006: 7) note, ‘the friendship album was a place for inscribing autographs, poetry, prose, and wishes from friends’, where the contents often ‘combined mass- produced sources and friends’ words and autographs’.” ⤴️
“Many used albums to mix textual and visual tokens, including cartes de visite, the small calling cards left behind by con- tacts after a social visit (Milne, 2004). Other ‘memorials’ included homegrown items like pressed flowers and locks of hair. Vosmeier (2006: 208–209) notes that such tokens were not considered valuable in their own right; rather, they were prized for their social asso- ciations with a certain person, place or shared memory.” ⤴️
“Soon after photography arrived on the consumer market in the 1860s, many users opted to replace those textual-material tokens of friendship with modern photographs.” ⤴️
“friendship books can be understood as early forms of social media insofar as they were constituted by acts of social exchange and collaborative inscription.” ⤴️
“t allowed participants to construct public or semi-public ‘profiles’ within a bounded system (e.g. personalized inscriptions in each other’s books), to document and visualize their real-life contacts, and to ‘view and traverse’ those contacts by flipping through the pages (2007: 211).” ⤴️
“he emergence of both media practices was driven significantly by students (Helfand, 2008: 113-116; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008; Vosmeier, 2006: 212).” ⤴️
“rom the sixteenth century to the present, students have relied on variations of the flexible ‘blank book’ to record the friendships and fleeting encounters” ⤴️
“neither format remained limited to students or to tex- tual inscriptions for long” ⤴️
“Since the addition of the photo application in 2005, the news feed and extension of membership to non- students in 2006, various third-party applications in 2007, and the ‘timeline’ in 2011, Facebook has become a multigenerational and multimedia depot where a wealth of per- sonalized texts, images and videos are exchanged daily” ⤴️
“diversification of Facebook’s capa- bilities amid an accelerating Internet culture is reminiscent of the proliferation of scrap- books in the late nineteenth century, in which the predominantly textual traditions of friendship albums, commonplace books and literary scrapbooks converged with the explosion of popular print media.” ⤴️
“In 1872,” ⤴️
“Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook’ (Kaplan, 1991: 150). Like many of his contemporaries, Twain spent a lot of time reading newspapers and magazines, and often wanted to save articles for personal and professional reuse. Frustrated by the hassle and mess of paste, Twain invented a scrapbook with pre-glued paper.” ⤴️
“in the mid to late nineteenth century scrapbooks served as handy social tools for helping consumers navigate new waves of print abundance (Garvey, 2004: 209)” ⤴️
“n the mid nineteenth century, scrapbooking was a predominantly literary pastime enjoyed by members of the middle and upper classes, who avidly collected and saved snippets of reading material for future reference or recirculation.” ⤴️
“crapbooking was shaped in many ways by the tradition of keeping commonplace books (also known as ‘extract’ books), in which users hand-copied passages of interest from books and peri- odicals to help them keep track of information or make intelligent references in letters or conversations (Garvey, 2004: 211; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 31).” ⤴️
“The popularity of scrapbooking surged with the rise of ephemeral printed texts and visuals in the late nine- teenth century, following developments in steam-powered printing, embossing, chromo- lithography and railway transport (Casper et al., 2007). In response to this influx of cheap, colorful printed material, more people began saving scraps − including newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, trade cards, pictures from catalogues, even food wrappers − to exchange with their friends or keep for themselves.” ⤴️
“As Garvey (2006b) points out, manufacturers and retailers were quick to capitalize on users’ desires for colorful scraps, printing chromo- lithographed trade cards with brand names accompanied by illustrations of products, flowers and birds. Trade cards were often identical in design to prayer cards and calling cards, making it easy for users to mingle advertisements with other kinds of social texts in the pages of their scrapbooks (Garvey, 2006b: 98).” ⤴️
“social media-oriented advertising texts (e.g. ‘themed’ product boards on Pinterest, corporate ‘fan’ pages on Facebook, or brand-related hashtag phrases on Twitter) in an effort to be ‘liked’, ‘shared’, ‘retweeted’ or ‘repinned’ by users who spend time and socialize in these online spaces.” ⤴️
“a similarly enduring tendency of market capi- talism to both provide the source material for and attempt to profit from such practices.” ⤴️
“commercial scrapbooks offered the user special pre-printed fields for posting specific kinds of printed and written informa- tion. Helfand (2008) describes a 1921 scrapbook called A Girl’s Graduation Days, one of countless scrapbook-related products marketed to young women, which included vari- ous student-specific section headings like ‘Class Prophecy’, ‘Interclass Debates,’ and ‘Candy Recipes’. Helfand notes, however, that scrapbook holders often resisted such pre-printed recommendations, retrofitting their own preferred content to the page and paying no mind to the apparent incongruity.” ⤴️
“The frequency with which users went against commercial recommendations within scrapbooks presents a problem for research- ers, who often must rely on scant textual clues to make interpretations of what was included (and not included) in these personal media assemblages.” ⤴️
“it is common to encounter users playfully oppos- ing the dominant posting conventions of websites’ data fields (Marwick, 2005: 15-17).” ⤴️
“collecting clippings more selectively and creating personal media assemblages that more coherently testified to their individual interests. Single-theme scrapbooks, often devoted to a single celebrity or cultural phenomenon, became a popular way of tracking some- thing” ⤴️
“the fan scrapbook became the media con- sumer’s hub for compiling articles, pictures and magazine gossip about their favorite figures in the media. Such practices of mediated ‘following’ also allowed, at times, for connections between fan and celebrity. Hastie (2007: 28–33) notes that in the silent film era, female stars welcomed scrapbooks made for them by fans who meticulously tracked their lives and careers in the media.” ⤴️
“For Certeau, citizens of modern societies actively respond to the influx of texts in their lives through a process of ‘textual poaching’. Moving through their media-saturated societies not as passive consumers but as active users, individuals actively appropriate and refashion mass-produced texts for their own personal needs (Certeau, 1984).” ⤴️
“As Johnson (2006) observes in her study of a scrapbook created by avant-garde artist Hannah Höch in Weimar Germany, Höch’s juxtaposition of images of Hollywood glamour with barren or alienating tableaus of industrial modernity communicated her position as both an avid consumer and an active critic of American mass culture.” ⤴️
“In both sites, heavily involved or curated personal media assemblages can be just as easily interpreted as artful creations or as evidence of overreliance on or obsession with media.” ⤴️
is why sites of creation beside collection are more valuable
“While expressing taste is a way of denoting one’s existing cultural capital, it can also serve as a bridge to amassing more capital and facilitating further social mobility. Several studies have shown that social media sites are arenas in which users engage in impression management, identity performance, and/or expression of taste,” ⤴️
“In the sixteenth century, European elites kept their albums of collected print matter − then a luxury enjoyed only by society’s upper crust − inside Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities (Tucker et al., 2006: 6). As treasured objects, these primitive scrap albums were displayed along with other collected specimens as a way of signaling the wealthy status and cultivated tastes of the owners.” ⤴️
“as scrapbooks became cheaper to create they evolved into what Tucker et al. (2006: 6) describe as ‘the equivalent of the poor family’s cabinet of curiosities’. They were assembled ‘not so much to serve the memory as to enact rituals of consumption and the hoarding of treasure’.” ⤴️
but is this inherently problematic in regards to digital media that is somewhat endlessly replicable??
“Marshall and Bly (2004) observe that the value of circulating articles among friends and coworkers goes far beyond the items’ informational content. Rather, exchanging clippings is a way to establish mutual awareness among contacts, express common interests and tastes, and build rapport.” ⤴️
“scrapbooks, and related personal media forms, were created not simply for safe- keeping or posterity, but also for the more immediate task of being shown socially and/or helping the owner achieve distinction (Bourdieu, 1984).” ⤴️
“the confession album. Reaching peak popularity in Victorian Britain, these books contained blank questionnaires on a number of topics designed to elicit information about the inscriber’s attitudes, opinions and aspirations. Confession albums were typically filled out by friends during social visits or at school, and by the twentieth century their format was replicated in various autograph albums and student scrapbooks. Confession albums are paradoxical because, as Matthews (2000: 128) notes, they are ‘an intimate form that invites self-revelation with no guarantee of discretion’.” ⤴️
“Matthews (2000) notes that confession books were a printed outgrowth of a nineteenth- century parlor game in which groups of eligible young men and women asked and answered playful questions as a way of subtly screening each other as suitable romantic partners. Players could respond only through selected quotations of poetic verse, but in this context of pretend courtship the answers acquired ‘exaggerated significance’. This seemingly ‘innocent recreation’ of hinting at one’s desires through textual quotation was in fact a mask for the more serious business of finding a partner and securing a position within a comfortable social class (Matthews, 2000: 129–130).” ⤴️
this was popular in sites/trends/on Facebook and tumblr etc in the 2010s and now likely represented in tiktok/instagram trends also
“‘interest tokens’ (Liu, 2007). Today, interest tokens are references to books, music, movies, TV and other socially recognizable phenomena, which double as ‘a cultural vocabulary for the language of taste’ (Liu, 2007: 257).” ⤴️
“a scrap- book user in 1943 could express a similar sentiment by pasting a Casablanca ticket stub or advertisement in the pages of her scrapbook.” ⤴️
“speak volumes about a user’s cultural aspirations, dispositions and desires for social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984; Zboray and Zboray, 2006: 28–36).” ⤴️
“Scrapbooks helped peo- ple visualize ‘the good life’, lending expression to their media-driven fantasies of fine homes, international travel, improved physical appearance and desires for specific con- sumer products. L” ⤴️
“‘scrapbooks fit seamlessly into the rituals of consumption and etiquette that helped new members of the middle class identify one another’ (Tucker et al., 2006: 10).” ⤴️
“a practicing ground for the kinds of real-life taste performances that today are just as common on- as offline (Liu, 2007; Papacharissi, 2009).” ⤴️
“questions about their accessibility to different cultural groups and their capacities to reproduce social privilege.” ⤴️
“While it is worth celebrating that both scrap- books and Facebook are strongly associated with women and youth − two groups histori- cally underrepresented in ‘official’ archives − there is also a longstanding and troubling association between these kinds of social-archival media practices and predominantly white, middle-class media users.” ⤴️
“enduring inequalities in the distribution of personal media tools and skills in the past, paralleling what many see as a ‘digital divide’ today that stratifies levels of online social media use by socioeconomic status (Jansen, 2010).” ⤴️
“the kinds of representations that these media promote along the lines of gender, race and class (Nakamura, 2008).” ⤴️
“evidential of an enduring overlap between social and auto-archival processes in modern media culture, where the impulse to perform through media in public and social ways is often coupled with a private or personal desire to preserve that media for the future.” ⤴️
“assumptions that users approach old and new forms of personal media with fundamentally different objectives, and that the personal record produced by the former is somehow more legitimate than the latter.” ⤴️
“‘Cyberspace When You’re Dead’ exemplifies this idea, suggesting that the reason why fewer people are choosing paper-based media for ‘leaving a record of life … for heirs or the future’ is because they are too ‘busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff’ (Walker, 2011).” ⤴️
“In addition to serving as a storage place for memories, the scrapbook often functioned as an everyday object of social sharing, co-inscription, performance and display.” ⤴️
“The website is at once one of the richest social archives in recent history and one of the most tightly controlled. It is, as McCown and Nelson (2009: 1) put it, a ‘“walled garden” where user activities are trapped’.” ⤴️
“ersonal media assemblages and archives are ubiquitous and enduring cultural formations in modern mediated societies.” ⤴️
“Helfand (2008: 9, 17) notes that the flexible, personal nature of scrapbooks has historically allowed users to ‘bury the truth or doctor the evi- dence’ regarding their self-representations, and present a kind of ‘selective oblivious- ness’ about political events and social concerns that may have been salient in the world around them.” ⤴️
“significant as much for their inclusions as their omissions” ⤴️
“With careful attention to the multiple functions, ranging from public to private, that scrapbooks and Facebook have performed for their users, as well as the varying levels of archival access and control afforded by the different technologies, scholars might continue to find new ways of ‘reading’ these assembled archival texts that yield useful insights into the social behaviors of the past and present.” ⤴️