Description:
Instagram pictures of your island vacation, Facebook well wishes on the birth of your first child, an email from your father, Vine videos from your son’s graduation. There are no more diaries, letters or scrapbooks. Our personal history is digital. When we use social platforms to house the stories of our lives, we are putting a great deal of trust into the webmasters. We are taking for granted that our data will be preserved, that they won’t pull the plug on the site. Which is what happened to Broadcastr, a mobile app that encouraged folks to share and geo-tag stories about places important to them. This is where I had my first kiss, This is where I was on 9/11, This is where my brother died... People could listen to an invisible narrative as they explored a city. Then Broadcastr announced the app was shutting down. A layer of personal stories important enough to share, vanished. The story of this app embodies the threat to our personal archives in our digital world.