Conor Galvin (UCD College of Human Sciences)
Creatures of an outward digitality: documenting the self as transigent product & project – an elision of commitment to truth?
Is a weblog a document? A YouTube video? A FaceBook page? Are any of these in any traditional sense either fixed or truthful? And why might this matter? With the digital turn of the past decade, notions of what constitutes the act of documentation and the product of such acts has ‘gone liquid’ to a startling extent. Digital documents are germane to almost every emerging practice around contemporary economy and society. They run native to the possibilities of communication networks, they travel on demand and so invite transposition, translation and repurposing to a previously unimaginable degree. But their exogenesis and ‘fabric’ are computational and there is something unsettlingly about the essentialising, information architectures that serve both to publish such documents while simultaneously rendering edgeless the meanings they carry.
This paper considers the ways that digital documentation can both construct and hollow-out the self. It seeks to place and understand the rise of the act of transigent documentary in our digital lives and particularly the role that data syndication plays in constructing viral events and the (re)presentations this affords I terms of our imagining of, and engagement with, the wider world.
Conor Galvin, BA MA(Kent) MPhil PhD (Cantab), is a Lecturer and Researcher at UCD College of Human Sciences, Dublin, Ireland. He holds The President’s Award for Teaching Excellence at UCD and speaks when necessary (and attends when possible) at national and international conferences on politics and public policy, ICT / digital literacy in higher education, 21st century schooling. His teaching and research interests include policy change, professional knowledge and lives, the social & political context of education, and the cultural politics of knowledge.
This paper considers the ways that digital documentation can both construct and hollow-out the self. It seeks to place and understand the rise of the act of transigent documentary in our digital lives and particularly the role that data syndication plays in constructing viral events and the (re)presentations this affords I terms of our imagining of, and engagement with, the wider world.
Conor Galvin, BA MA(Kent) MPhil PhD (Cantab), is a Lecturer and Researcher at UCD College of Human Sciences, Dublin, Ireland. He holds The President’s Award for Teaching Excellence at UCD and speaks when necessary (and attends when possible) at national and international conferences on politics and public policy, ICT / digital literacy in higher education, 21st century schooling. His teaching and research interests include policy change, professional knowledge and lives, the social & political context of education, and the cultural politics of knowledge.
