English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Can we call the scrapbooking fad a type of "technology"? The vast amount of tools and colors and papers littering Hobby Lobby suggests to me that technology is a relative term. Scrapbooking is the Web 2.0 of photo albums.
Scrapbooking normalizes and formalizes the American experience visually, encoding and decoding memory in the same way that newspapers regulate and contain public events via column space and AP regulations. Scrapbooking allows the users a sense of mastery over memory (that elusive faculty that disappears with age, can be not only lost, but modified as time passes) through a new kind of iconography. Although commodification of the process has allowed for seemingly endless design possibilities, users are limited by not only artisitic ability, but by the commodification itself. Companies that make scrapbooking materials limit how the users can describe (and thus remember) their own experiences: the trinkets and stickers become simulacra, more real than the event itself. The pompoms used to *represent* cheerleading end up defining for the cheerleader what his/her experience should have been. Baudrillard differentiates representation and simuluation in that "representation" assumes there is still an original out there somewhere (Simulacra 6). The fictions my mother is creating about me in her scrabooks are taking precedence over whatever the hell actually happened.
Moreover, as commodification continues, scrapbooking itself becomes normalized. The medium of the book encourages/invites categorization of life events into temporal or spatial modes "Wedding" "School" "Christmas" Plato's fear of writing's ability to erase memory might now well be replaced with a fear of photography replacing memory--of "memoirs" becoming iconography, with all the worship due to that practice. The books become sacred, like the family tree in the front of the family bible used to be: Instead of dates of deaths and births, we now use brightly colored stickers and ribbons. All of this to stave off the fear of death the disappearance of the self represented within those pages. A chance to write our own eulogies long before we die. Herein lies Amy Clemons at her best--all else has been cropped with scissors, erased with red-eye remover pens.