Reading against the Digital Archive: Historiography and What Is Not

Social media sites like Buzzfeed and Twitter provide significant opportunities for understanding circulation of meaning in our contemporary media ecology. Aligning these social and viral media with cultural productions and reproductions, we argue that Heidegger’s theoretical frame of historiography illuminates the ways in which genres are created, memed and mutated across the digital archive. A homological historiography, then, highlights social and viral media as those that require constant feeding, expanding the digital archive and calling upon scholars and lay audiences to consider the limits of the form.