Digging Up Obama Hope:

Recovering Digital Infrastructure with Media Archeology

Conclusion

From a grassroots poster, to the iconic image of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, to a meme with conflicting and controversial politics, Shepard Fairey’s image “Obama Hope” has lived, in Laurie Gries’ words, “an extraordinary rhetorical life” (Still Life 2). Over ten years have passed since Fairey first created the Obama Hope poster, although one could just as easily trace the origins of the image back further to Mannie Garcia’s photograph of then-senator Barack Obama in 2006. In this time, Obama Hope posters on the streets of America have been placed, defaced, reworked, and removed, while digital reproductions and remixes of Obama Hope have been created, shared, corrupted, and forgotten. Given all of this, does the Obama Hope image still live? Insofar as physical versions of the image continue to persist on streets, walls, magazine covers, and various other material artifacts; insofar as digital versions of the image continue to occupy URLs; and insofar as the memory of the image continues to manifest in instances of recognition, interest, and inspiration, the answer must be affirmative: yes, the Obama Hope image still lives. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to characterize the image as eternal and unaffected in light of all the changes and signs of decreased vitality discussed above. Although these changes are supported by complex and multiple determinants, this chapter has worked to show the role of infrastructure in enabling—and disabling—visual culture online.

Media archeology offers digital visual studies a methodological orientation that reframes the object of study in ways that foreground the conditions of possibility for the creation and maintenance of visual culture. It also offers a cautionary tale about the impermanence of images online, showing the infrastructural precarity in the face of competing economic imperatives and the challenge posed by link rot as a general phenomenon. Additionally, this chapter has proposed a particular approach to media archeology: infrastructural inversion. This approach was applied to the case study of Obamicon.me in order to show the possibilities for application, the research value of the Wayback Machine, and the socio-technical nature of the visual in the Visual Web. Given the range of goals and interventions, this chapter is intended to be generative rather than exhaustive in its argumentation, to show the possibilities for future work even as they are not argued for extensively or demonstrated fully.

Within this spirit of generativity, I would like to conclude by offering some more explicit suggestions for future research. First, the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine offer important and under-utilized resources for the study of digital visual culture. So far, these resources have received very little academic attention, outside of research librarians assessing their value as online resources and legal scholars documenting the strengths and limitations of the Wayback Machine as a form of legal evidence and relevant case law. For media archeologists interested in the web, these resources are accessible, understudied, and offer a challenge to the dominant presentist orientation of the Internet that privileges the now and the new. For visual studies scholars, the archive offers a rich account of changing web aesthetics, show the importance of visuality in current efforts at web preservation, and provide access to images that may otherwise be no longer available online. This is particular importance for anyone interested in the history of visual culture. As Cara Finnegan has compellingly argued, to understand the role of images in history requires attention to the production, reproduction, and circulation of those images. However, as many of these processes have moved online, it is important to rethink these categories in the context of digital technologies. The Wayback Machine provides a particularly compelling resource for this work.

Second, the concept of infrastructure provides a theoretical frame for studying the socio-technical materiality of images on the web. Errors and breakdowns offer a method for connecting particular cases with contexts, for drawing attention to the otherwise invisible or unacknowledged infrastructures. This approach brings insights from Science and Technology Studies to bear on the study of media and shows another possibility for interdisciplinary work. Additionally, the concept of infrastructure emphasizes the importance of taking context seriously and considering the ways that the Visual Web is enabled through an assemblage of technologies, standards, and practices. No infrastructure, no #selfie.

Third, and finally, remember that the digital visual is also and always technological: digital images hosted on the Internet are networked images, and it is important to approach the meaning and significance of these networks agnostically—as a question to be answered through research. While the Internet is often praised as open and decentralized, as a force for freedom and democratization, the case of Obamicon.me shows how highly centralized organization is built back into the web with platforms. The attention economy and the resulting monopolization of the web introduce a far greater potential for controlling the visibility and circulation of images than analog environments. Scholars interested in the politics and culture of images online should consider the ways the affordances of technology, and their underlying commercial imperatives, work with—and against—the lifecycle of images. This suggests a more complicated account of interactivity as an accomplishment of social and technical design: interactivity as simultaneously empowering and exploitative for users, creating affordances for interaction that can also be leveraged by online corporations towards competing commercial and political ends.

While Lauren Orsini designated 2013 as the year of the image, images have continued to proliferate, growing both quantitatively and as a site of significant cultural engagement. While Obamicon.me is now a vacant URL, just another domain for sale, the premise of the site as a tool for users to create and share stylized images lives on. Filters, frames, image and meme generators are now built directly into social media networks like Facebook and Instagram, and are also available through newer stand-alone websites and mobile applications. In response to these sociotechnical developments, the framework for media archeology pushes scholars to be skeptical towards tidy periodizations, to be curious about the discursive and material conditions underpinning the Visual Web, and to consider the ways that the Visual Web manifests outside of the most popular sites and accounts, at the margins. Errors or not, these seem worthwhile dispositions for visual scholars to take up.

Works Cited