Title: On Collecting New and Variable Media Artifacts
Abstract: This paper is an exploration of the act of collecting. The desire to collect physical objects has been around for millennia (Csikszentmihalyi 1993). Seal impressions, similar to autograph collections, existed in Persia as early as the Fourth Century BC (Rigby and Rigby 1994), wealthy Romans collected art and copies of art, as well as coins, fossils and other natural objects (Belk 1994), but collecting really gained popularity during the Renaissance with the rise of the middle class (Blom 2003) and became solidified as a true hobby in the 1930s as a way of asserting individuality, and a means to self‐education about the world (Gelber 1991). Because we have such a long history, good models for how to collect, and how to evaluate collections of physical objects exist. However, collecting new media artifacts presents a host of problems. In this paper I’ll review traditional models of collection building and evaluation, and then provide an overview of some of the challenges inherent in collecting new media artifacts. More than providing an outlet for acquisitional appetites, a good collection is often associated in the mind of the collector with the idea of a “tangible biography” (Benjamin 1969; Beer 2008); the ability to look at a collection and remember different periods of one’s life, to associate objects with experiences, and to “transform the precariousness of consciousness into the solidity of things. The body is not so large, beautiful, and permanent enough to satisfy our sense of self. We need objects to magnify our power, enhance our beauty, and extend our memory into the future” (Csikszentmihalyi 1993, 28). Csikszentmihalyi believes that the act of collecting is a fundamentally important part of self‐creation, and identifies three ways in which collecting artifacts help substantiate a person’s sense of self: 1) a valuable collection displays the owner’s power, energy, and place in the social hierarchy; 2) objects remind the collector of the self through time, the objects providing a focus of involvement in the present, mementos and souvenirs from the past, and pointers to future goals; and 3) the act of collecting provides concrete evidence of the collector’s place in the social world, the objects in a collection acting as illustrations of valued relationships. “In these ways things stabilize our sense of who we are; they give a permanent shape to our views of ourselves that otherwise would quickly dissolve in the flux of consciousness” (Csikszentmihalyi 1993, 23).
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-10-21
Language: en
Type: article
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