The rental market didn't only cut into my blogging time these past few weeks, but also my reading time. I'm just in the beginning of Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia, and already I'm starting to make connections between the concept of the web-as-cultural-archive and the function and flow of reflective nostalgia. Specifically, I find it particularly interesting to think of these swarming media networks as a way that we try to rebel against the concept of an ever-moving time, in the same way that nostalgia operated, in both restorative and reflective cases.

Being not even a quarter of the way through the book yet, I don't want to make too many sweeping comparisons between Boym's writing and the concepts I often write about here just yet. After all, I believe she does eventually get to the topic of the internet and nostalgia. But I think nostalgia - or, perhaps, the anticipation of nostalgia - is a good lens through which to see our actions in web-based media. The socially driven archivization which occurs through all these media could be seen as the prefiguring of an idealized, future past rather than the display of an over-blown present. In other words, identity tendrils are created with the idea that it is for a future self.

Bear with me here, these thoughts are only half-formed. The idea that identity production in an archival/networked environment is a set of actions that anticipate nostalgia meshes with the thought that nostalgia is driven by the desire and inability to recover a selectively remembered past, while nostalgic actions (photos, reenactments, genocides even) are in fact largely struggles against a temporal tyrrany. Tthrough acting in our swarming media networks and creating our distributed identities, what we are actually doing is creating an idealized, future past. I upload photos to Flickr, post interesting webpages to del.icio.us, and describe myself through my connections on any number of social networking sites. We are creating what will become our objects of nostalgia, and what could be used as tools in this struggle against time.

I'll probably finish The Future of Nostalgia sometime in the next few weeks and find myself putting it down on the table, saying to myself, "wow, I was completely wrong about that connection between nostalgia and web-based media!" But until that time, I'll have plenty to think about.