Mobile Mementos: Expanded Archives, Fragmented Access

Personal wireless communication devices such as mobile telephones are regularly presented as enabling technologies with emancipating powers, giving instant and ubiquitous access to people and information resources which would not have been as easily - if at all - available previously. The emphasis is often on reaching harmony and agreement through the exchange of knowledge, and on making progress through the fusion of ideas. What easily becomes 'Depresented' in such imagery, however, is that, while an enormous amount of visual, textual and aural data is captured by millions of mobile device users every day, only a small fragment of that data is made available for query on a large scale.