Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom

Digital communication has changed society’s collective knowledge. What we know, and what we preserve of what we know, is no longer stored primarily and dependably on paper. While vast repositories of information now exist digitally, as Abigail De Kosnik tells us in Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, these “archives” of knowledge are fragile nonetheless. Generational revolutions in digital platforms, such as PDFs and jpegs, for example, mean the image you see today may not appear the same tomorrow, if it is accessible at all. De Kosnik’s main point is that, without artisanal fan archivists, who do the “immaterial labor” of actively collecting, organizing, and upkeeping archives and the technologies to create and maintain them and who are often not professionally trained—but who are simultaneously collectors of information, social “actants,” and producers coordinating with volunteer contributors—much of the archival work we find in digital culture would not even exist.