I was reading the Situationists International Anthology for a class. Guy Debord talks about how most films are only worthy of detournment, or basically being rearranged to create new meaning. I was just thinking about all the footage out there these days, how so much is recorded and put on the web. I was also thinking about how temporary these things are. Many things are not archived and sometimes the ease with making moving image nowadays means the results are not cared for as preciously.

I’m not intending any judgment. It only occurred to me that this change in formatting and distribution may make moving image more like theater. A video may have a run on youtube the same way a play runs in a theater, and for good reason. It is timely, political, resonant, and then fades away. If our formats are crappy enough, media historians of the future may be studying our current movement from written descriptions of videos on blogs, just as dramaturgs study old plays from descriptions of the performances by the audience.

…unless blogs themselves somehow are not archived in the long term. I wonder what happens to a blog when the writer dies? Blogs are clearly a great window into micro-culture and will no doubt have an academic following in the future. But I wonder if we will have a blog library? It their own way, blogs are already a library, with a specified focus or author(s). And what about the trillions of baby pictures on the web? Just thinking…