Archiving: the email edition

So, I have a really old laptop - 6+ years old. And it runs reeeeeallly slowwwwly.

(I'll stop typing that way now.) Part of the problem, I thought, might be the 2300 messages in my inbox, which load everytime I open up Outlook. So I've been deleting or moving them, 100 a day. I am down to less than 500.

My plan is to archive them so that when I'm in the Home, I can relive the glory years. But what criteria to use to save or delete? I asked B, and he saves everything. I decided to delete anything that was just about logistics; time-sensitive materials (like conference announcements, CFPs and the like); and the plethora of weblinks that people love to send their friends, since already the links are likely no good. (I am back to 2005.) Everything else I am saving.

It's a bit of a nostalgia trip to skim through all this old stuff and read what preoccupied us all in grad school. I feel as though I've just been talking to all my friends. I can see myself enjoying a trip down memory lane every 5 years or so. Reading through all the emails is a window into the the daily triumphs and setbacks that tend to fall out of memory.

Also I've been thinking of memory lately because a friend is working on an architectural competition to design a house for the age of film. It's a maddeningly simple brief, and we've been talking about the universe of implications. For me, film is the illusion of being/moving "in" 3D space in a way that pictorial space (whether painting or still photo) can't achieve. Thus I think the age of film has potentially interesting implications for new ways in which space can be conceptualized and designed.

That's pretty basic - there is also the idea of film as narrative, and most vexingly, the possibility of film as memory. I see film more as a dream state or individual imaginary than as a collective, but of course there are various theories of psychology that posit the existence of collective memories.

Further, how can we talk about film as a generalization? What does 'Terminator' have in common with 'Chelovek s kinoapparatom'? What sorts of common narratives or collective memories are at work here? And how does the intervention of the filmmaker in staging, lighting, arranging shots etc all complicate these concepts?