metropolis m

When the civil protest in Teheran happened in the summer of 2009, we were witnessing an interesting moment: for the first time there was an archive of the present. Tons of pictures, films and messages appeared on the Internet.Until a short while ago, knowledge about the present was limited to one’s personal context combined with a handy summary of the world affairs in the evening news or in the morning papers. We never knew much about the actual moment, while in every library we could find detailed information about WW II, how the automobile industry was doing back then; the important role that football was already playing in a nation’s identity. There was extrensive knowledge about poor children’s nutrition or who was an important player in the development of communication technology, which diseases haunted Europe or what the political situation in Africa, was and so on. Complex data could be requested for the past, but not for the present ̶ except if you were the American president and had a swarm of experts, consultants and think tanks buzzing around you. That has changed. Slowly and more or less without our noticing, the Internet has transformed into an archive of the present. Slowly indeed. If you didn’t know exactly where to look, it took at least a few weeks back then to find actual information on the Internet. Remember, we joked about the www stood for ‘world wide waiting’ – and that included search engines. At that time, the importance of your webpage was identified via links to your page, so it took weeks for a new page to crawl up to the first search result page, because at that time you actually couldn’t ping Google and say: Hello, here I am. So it wasn’t till blogs, picture and video platforms like Flickr or YouTube were invented, when the present got a hold of the internet. And now that these services are interconnected with Facebook or Twitter via the new smart mobile phones, they even create their own broadcast platform. The internet arrived in the present, which it brings to you live and direct. Therefore the present, the attendance of an event at a certain time and a certain location, is not what it used to be: immediacy is no longer the most intense form of perception. Today, you might know more about an event when you are actually not there, which is something we already experience, when we attend a football game. The atmosphere might be amazing, but you easily miss an important occurrence, because you simply don’t know where to look. So being on site doesn’t mean you are there. Here is another example. Whoever consulted Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and relevant blogs during the civil protests of the Iran election 2009 had a more detailed knowledge about what was going on the central streets of Teheran than any car mechanic, who lived in the outskirts – even though it is certainly true that you can judge a situation in a foreign country much better if you have lived there and got to know the special ways humans, houses and social spaces are organized. But since the present is accompanied by a thick layer of information nowadays, you can discover a lot of details. Details from people who are actually there now. Even if they have to hide and can’t reveal their identity because of political reasons, they can raise their voices in modern media to produce something one can call ‘a statistical truth’, a statistical truth that can’t be denied. So being visible in modern media is sometimes more public than being out there on the streets (and sometimes not less dangerous). And raising your voice in the new public can actually be significant for all of us. It doesn’t matter if it is about governmental decisions or the politics of certain companies. Since we live in an archive of the present that everybody can search, it is very efficient to make your concerns public. Modern media, of course, do not guarantee that you win your fight, but medial awareness of an issue produces a certain pressure, which might help your cause. So therefore it’s time to turn the old slogan upside down: Think locally, act globally. By the way, that’s a strategy we all know from the art world. Since the local art crowd was too small to be relevant in terms of money as well as in terms of opinions, artists have always produced for an international market. And this trick is now relevant for all of us. There is a new archive of the present out there, which provides us, the public, with a more direct voice, and this archive of the present is a very powerful thing. Therefore it leaves us, of course, with new problems and questions: What can be found? What is hidden? What is deleted in that archive? Who controls the archive of the present? What are the governmental regulations and how do they affect us? Which economical investments are being made and for what reasons? Which technological decisions push it in a certain direction? Or in short: What kind of archive do they produce for us, what would be the alternative we really would have wanted? Before we had to be aware, what can be heard. Now we have to be aware of what may be present. Mercedes Bunz is journalist and media & technology editor of The Guardian, London.