The anxious flâneur: Digital archiving and the Wayback Machine

• Published in: The Quarterly journal of speech Vol. 106; no. 4; pp. 377 - 398
• Main Author: Hartelius, E. Johanna
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Routledge 01.10.2020; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: archive; browsing; Digital archives; Flaneur; unheimlich; Wayback Machine
• ISSN: 0033-5630; 1479-5779
• DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2020.1828604

The Wayback Machine, the world's most extensive web archive, contains over 370 billion webpages dating to 1996. Yet despite its tagline, "Universal Access to All Knowledge," overwhelmed visitors report frustration and trouble with keyword searching and site navigation. This essay uses the Wayback Machine to demonstrate how access as a digital archival ideal is realized only to the extent that it is defined in terms of delivery and not disposition. Further, I submit that the combination of copious delivery and a weak structure, or lack of meaningful arrangement, is conducive to flânerie, a perusal movement through digital objects. Contra the cultural imaginary of the flâneur as a figure of pleasure, I suggest that practices of flânerie generate an experience of displacement and angst. With reference to Martin Heidegger's concept of the unheimlich (uncanny), I characterize being in a web archive as immersive but anxiously placeless. I then rely on Heidegger again to identify a productively dispositional role for rhetoric in digital archiving. As logos, rhetoric builds a structure, or "dwelling," that might provide orientation and make the archival unheimlich tolerable. The essay's implications pertain to the conditions of inhabitability in networked culture, which by design is functionally archival.