Kate Eichhorn is Chair and Associate Professor of Culture and Media at The New School, New York. She is the author of five nonfiction books in the media studies and cultural studies fields, including The End of Forgetting, and is the author and editor of three more literary titles. Recurring themes and topics in her research, writing, and teaching include media and memory, media and social transformation, and youth-media making practices. Eichhorn has written for Wired, The MIT Technology Review, Science, and The Times Higher Education Supplement. She serves on several boards and as Series Editor for Page and Screen – a book and media studies series published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
Zan Boag: In the past, people had a yearbook, something which is really, for the most part, innocuous, there’s very little information, probably just one photograph and some text. Now, everything is online, their every move, every thought that they have had – which can be judged as being good, bad, racist, sexist, whatever it may be – is there, recorded forever. What happens with the current generation, those who are growing up as digital natives?
Kate Eichhorn: If you think about the yearbook, there were embarrassing photographs of yourself in those books if you grew up in North America.That book was made for 300 people or maybe a thousand people, if you went to a bigger high school, and what do you do with a yearbook after you graduate? You probably put it on your bookshelf, maybe you shove it into a drawer or a box in your parents’ basement or something and you never look at it again. Maybe you take it out once every 10 or 20 years but it’s very much contained. That’s changing a bit, now that those yearbooks are being digitised but that was the thing, is that those memories were incredibly contained.
And now of course, students graduating from high school, some of them have thousands, tens of thousands of digital images in circulation, the images are tagged and they are not entirely but largely out of control. Same thing with things that people say. Historically, if somebody was suddenly arrested, journalists like to go through their yearbook and they’ll look at their graduation quotation, but now... There’s a case recently, a young woman had become the new editor of . She had tweeted something that was
