Ryan MacMillan

That there is something unique about the disappearance of 4-year-old Madeleine McCann seems obvious. It is not the level of media coverage, which any American will be able to tell you is attendant upon the disappearance of any young (pretty, white) woman. Rather, it is the massive mobilisation of social networking websites in support of the McCanns - mostly by people who have never met the family. Emma Brockes writes a largely critical piece in Saturday’s Guardian, which is partly answered by Mary Riddell in the following day’s Observer. Riddell argues that, far from being exploited by the media, it is the McCanns who are doing the exploitation:

The McCanns are a family in need. They do not require the state support that this definition normally implies. Their lifeline is the publicity they see as vital if they are to see their missing daughter again…The McCanns have used every available stratagem in the post-privacy, celebrity-driven, commercialised world of 24/7 news.”

Riddell’s notion of “post-privacy” is particularly interesting, for in the very same paper, Peter Bazalgette (whose immeasurable contributions to the cultural life of this country include Big Brother, Ready Steady Cook and - lest we forget - Celebrity Ready Steady Cook) writes about how the current generation of teenagers will be,

…the first generation whose sexual adventures, drug taking, immature opinions and personal photographs are indelibly recorded electronically.Can you truly delete entries from social networking sites with the confidence they no longer exist on a server somewhere? You cannot.”

The indelible nature of most of what is written online is something I’ve pondered here (and here) before. Bazalgette convincingly argues that, in effect, the past we shall always have with us - or at least, the past which has made it onto Facebook and Bebo.

Things we write online will be available to read indefinitely, which is why we should not consider them akin to the ephemeral things we say in real-world conversation. What Riddell argues the McCanns fear the most - silence about the past - is precisely what Bazalgette suggests we can perhaps no longer expect to enjoy.

What we are dealing with is the web as archive. In her book Dust, Carolyn Steedman describes the archive as the repository of “everything that won’t go away.” The past is simply what happened. The archive, much more importantly, is where traces of those events are kept. No traces, no past. An archive might be anything from your own memories up to a centralised state record office. The internet is a new form of the archive in which “everything that won’t go away” becomes “nothing goes away.” Where once diaries and letters (those things of the historian’s craft) could be lost to fire or decay, blogs and message boards will potentially last forever.

So if that’s the case, what does it mean? In Steedman’s formulation formal archives are the location of state power, the manifestation of state control over things that will not go away. The question thus becomes of whose power is the internet-as-archive a manifestation? Plenty of bloggers like to claim that no-one “owns” the internet but, as the Chinese experience tells us, that hardly prevents it becoming a location of state oppression. In the USA the worry has become not the state, but the phone companies who manage the physical infrastructure of the net (or, for any Marxists out there, “who control the means of production”). The “Net Neutrality” campaign raises the spectre of two-speed internet, in which access, bandwidth and connection are all controlled by the phone and cable companies, rather than meted out, well, neutrally, as happens now. Net neutrality is important because it ensures (one hopes) that “everything that won’t go away” does not become “everything that we may or may not allow you to have access to at an unspecified date in the future depending upon whether or not you have met our access criteria and upon due payment of the requisite fee.”

Which brings us back to the McCanns and their daughter, Madeleine, who has become “Maddy”, needing apparently no surname. Riddell is, I think, right: the fear is not that the media are exploiting the family, but that they will lose interest and the case will slide into the internet archive, not going away, but becoming just a trace of the past. The ease with which such sites are created (the matter of minutes on MySpace or Blogger) is matched only by the ease with which they are discarded. Unlike the cast-offs of old, however, abandoned blogs and forums do not rot on library shelves, beocming unreadable. They just sit, waiting to be found again. Even if the McCann case does slip into the archive, it will always be accessible. Such is our likely future - one in which we never lose trace of anything, but in which there may be too many traces to either keep track of or to care about, in which History-writing as we know it becomes all but impossible because History writes itself in the precise present, like Borges’ map of the Empire which became as big as the Empire itself.