Digital Provenance

In Spook Country, William Gibson talks about the connections being more important than the content. I don’t really pretend to understand what he’s getting at although I am struck by the resonance with social rather than informational technology. But it did occur to me that digital artefacts do make some interesting crossings. Take the picture of Ruth I posted before. It’s a self-shot taken on her Blackberry and sent to me through messenger. I bluetoothed it from my phone on to my laptop, and uploaded it to Flickr. Next day I posted it in my blog and there it is, each time re-contextualised and there, ready to be changed again. Replay and remix are not, as we know, particularly new but they are certainly more commonplace in new technology.