Code of conduct: The relentless march of the algorithm by Robin Barton, The Independent, 15 Jan 2012.

I wrote my Masters’ thesis on dust, on what it meant exactly that we are constantly sloughing off hair and skin - bodily fragments - which transform into waste strewn thinly and evenly across our living spaces. Distributed presence, former presence - a body was here.

Now I ask, what does it meant to be doing that with data?

Waste and rubbish are big topics in geography and urbanism at the moment - what happens to the stuff we throw out? Stuff we no longer use still exists and takes up space: urbanists are exploring where it goes and what this says about our society.

(cc. ICON magazine’s issue 101 out now on Waste)

But what happens to our digital waste? Facebook’s new Timeline feature has caused some consternation by its proposal to show key events from people’s whole time on the site - do young professionals really want drunken freshers-week photos (or worse!) still showcased as part of their digital identities? And what about all the old social sites still out there, but now hardly used: MySpace, Friends Reunited; LiveJournal; (the closure of Geocities etc)?

- Google etc as erasing the possibility of forgetting
- Managing memory as part of a process of online identity-making
- Social media’s tension between real time vs. history

(TBC)

via @entschwindet, who commented: “Ah, the French, with their Marxian paraphrasing…”

Hauntology has hit the Guardian.

Wrote my Master’s thesis on dust and this was the problem. Didn’t actually find hauntology completely useful or applicable, but it touches in some ways on the problem above.

Ghosts of commuters past