Scrapbook culture the new cut & paste ?
Rachel Lewis started to notice a trend among creative/visual types that reflects a wider shift towards a more visual culture. When was the last time you screen-grabbed something from a blog? Saved an image you found, or several, into various folders, or even just littered your desktop with visual research?
It’s becoming second nature to create this informal ‘digital scrapbook’. Blogs are a great example of a continual stream of consciousness – people screengrab and save images in a split second decision, to inspire them and to come back to later.
An instantaneous facebook “Like” attitude has influenced this new generation of designers and consumers who respond instinctively to personal choice, and are now reducing many decisions to a single binary reponse – ‘Like’ or ignore. We now respond to content in the most basic sense and quickly absorb messages. Images and information are posted and reposted, tweeted, retweeted and reappropriated in a never-ending search for ‘the new’ or the next, often in the quickest medium possible.
The way we embrace and consume the online world through our digital desktops can create opposing and often random elements, especially with throw-away files like screen-grabs. The spontaneity of collecting imagery on your personal computer creates this digital scrapbook approach to visual life. This culture is evident in the work of graphic designer Elvira Barriga, whose project ‘The tree of knowledge of good and evil’ consist of merged images of seemingly unrelated ‘grabbed’ imagery.
I’m undecided what this means for actual scrapbooks, and the creation of future physical ephemera which is now surely in decline because of this digital way of collection and storage. Does it mean people are no longer keeping written diaries; instead writing blogs? What does this mean for example, for handwriting and other idiosyncrasies that are so important to pinpoint the era they are created in?
It can also be a question of permanence vs temporary. You could say that written diaries, scrapbooks, analogue photographs, have far more permanence than anything digital; and it’s one reason my mother cannot fathom why I have a Facebook of thousands of photos, and not one real photo album, while she has shelves of them. ‘What if they get deleted?’ She asks. ‘What if there’s a fire?’ I say.
In many ways, digital ephemera can be more permanent than anything physical. It’s almost impossible to permanently delete something entirely from the internet; there will always be a ghost of it somewhere, thousands of reflections of it floating around. A sketchbook, a diary, is so precious, it is a unique thing; digital files are so commonplace in comparison; perhaps that’s why this digital scrapbook culture is taking such shape because it feels so throwaway, so temporary, that things barely register.
Examples of this digital scrapbooking culture are springing up everywhere. Pinterest and FFFound.com, both currently invitation only, are to all intents and purposes visual bookmarking tools, creating a personal curated collection of the internet without losing the original source, with the opportunity to repost and share findings. It’s this social aspect which has made the newer Pinterest so successful in it’s early days; an almost twitter-like ‘follower count’, being able to re-pin and comment, and the fact it feels very user friendly and almost visually in a scrapbook has made it extremely popular with people who work visually; artists, designers, bloggers. Tumblr is also a good example of the posting and reposting culture; fast paced publishing from other sources, the most basic form of blogging you can get.
Increasingly, the divide between the digital and the physical is becoming blurred, so that ideas such as this ‘digital scrapbook’ can be transferred to something tangible. Supermarket Sarah is representative of this; her shop is a jpg image of her physical, actual-real-life decorated living room wall – with click-to-buy functionality. The “walls” have now appeared in brick-and-mortar stores as well as in the virtual realm. In Selfridges, her installation duplicates the webpage layout but holds real items. This visual-merchandising-as-screengrab approach creates a seamless experience between online and offline retail spaces, and is something that brands, especially fashion retail, really need to take note of.
Is this the end of the physical scrapbook, the physical photo album? Perhaps not quite. There is a movement, called ‘Slow Media’, which rejects all forms of modern communication, in order to slow down life; writing letters not emails, polaroids not digital photos, diaries not blogs, and Monotasking – the belief that multitasking is in fact destroying our concentration spans.
Whatever your opinion on this digital scrapbooking culture, it is definitely something which is changing the way we digest and interact with media; however time will tell if it is progress or not.
