The Institute For Digital Life And Ephemera (IDLE)

IDLE was created in 2016 to address the increasing ephemerality of digital culture. Digital technologies allow us to create and share content across the globe more easily than ever before, but that culture is at risk of being lost for future generations. As websites are taken down or revised, earlier versions are lost. Social media offers a record of daily life in the 21st Century but also vanishes into the digital ether. Devices quickly become obsolete and so how they were experienced and used also gets lost. The revolutions in storytelling facilitated by digital platforms have created fascinating, but intangible, experiences. IDLE is committed to developing an archive of digital culture that fully represents life in the 21st century. We used this backdrop story to explore what it would mean to loose such an all-encompassing archive or in effect all of our digital archives, as we certainly cannot guarantee the long-term availability and quality of digital data. We project that in 2020, a solar flare will have wiped the planet’s digital records and that this will have disproportionally affected the human history of the last few decades. In this context, we developed and sent out the ‚Storytelling Box’ with the aim to begin to recreate an archive, but also to engage storytellers and audiences with what it means to develop engaging story content. We document the storytelling box, document the ways that we engaged storytellers with the process and critically reflect on the outcomes.