Self-archiving families produce records that fundamentally mislead about their inner life

Evidence

The gaps in the Friedman narrative are all the more glaring because of the plethora of recorded material that IS available. This was a family that seemed — like many now I suppose — to obsessively record itself. Part of the “capturing” of the Friedmans is their capturing of themselves, on film and on tape. A documentary like this only became possible now that filming technology — cine cameras and later camcorders — had become widely available for the first time and kids are filmed from the moment of birth. … In a way, the most painful material consists of home movie footage of the Friedmans shot in the 1970s, in which they look for all the world like a perfectly happy family, the kids mugging and clowning for the cameras. Never has Deleuze’s observation that “family photos” are, by their very nature, profoundly misleading, been more bitterly borne out. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 479

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch25 on perfect digital archivisation killing what made media culturally fertile, and Fisher’s broader theme of recording density. — connects to: Colonial officials’ family histories shaped and discredited their accounts; Conflicting archival accounts destabilize the very boundaries of events and causal claims — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1032; State birth records for sharecropper families were systematically inaccurate. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard…, 47 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: If family photos are ‘by their very nature’ misleading, what would a less deceptive self-archive look like — and is Jarecki’s use of amateur footage a correction or a compounding of the distortion?

Broader Connections

• Official records overrode and falsified her mother’s lifelong oral account of her own birthday #exemplifies (0.85) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 286
• Colonial officials’ family histories shaped and discredited their accounts #corroborates (0.78)
• State birth records for sharecropper families were systematically inaccurate. #corroborates (0.75) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 47
• Conflicting archival accounts destabilize the very boundaries of events and causal claims #complicates (0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1032