Storing and sharing: Everyday relationships with digital material

Abstract

Solid-state drives, Bluetooth capabilities, smartphones, “the cloud,” social media platforms, and other digital technologies have fundamentally altered how we share and store digital materials. This article sets an agenda for understanding how people manage the proliferation of digital material in their everyday lives through a close examination of the strategies and rituals different people around the world employ to organize, curate, or delete digital materials. Drawing upon findings from 11 articles, it contextualizes contemporary forms with digital media and technologies with existing cultural practices of sharing and storing in relation to wider social and cultural systems and infrastructures such as household and family, logistics, health, government, and governance. We argue that the proliferation of platforms, changes in temporalities, and the emergence of different forms of digital labor have fundamentally shaped the ways in which we share and store digital material.