There’s really no other way to say this: I like to save junk. Receipts from favorite stores or meals, pamphlets and travel maps, ticket stubs and clothing tags—whether any junk is a treasured keepsake or just plain well-designed, I keep it in random corners of my house and most of the time I forget about her. Until I go find something else.
The urge to accumulate documentation will probably bother anyone who lives with me. Unfortunately for them, it’s also very good for my job. At least one Wayback Machine tab stays open at all times, and I have a frightening amount of screenshots, recordings, transcripts, and notes clogging up every device I own. But unlike the physical ephemera packed into drawers and boxes, the files on my computer are just that: reportless, searchable, not littered on top of dressers or forgotten in pockets and piles. My stash of small items hasn’t become a problem yet, but I finally started thinking about what I could actually do. do with them — when we talk about getting receipts for something, I don’t think it was literal.
I have plenty of digital outlets at my disposal to archive what I do with my time, but none seemed right for my precious pile of junk. I considered Instagram Stories: buttoned down and casual enough that a soft arrangement of scraps of paper and cute shopping bags wouldn’t feel out of place. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to share my fixations with others for archiving. And once I’ve taken a photo, what to do with the physical evidence? I was back at the starting point.
Ultimately my solution was the lowest tech possible. Rather than come up with a clever new way to preserve these little trinkets, I grabbed a glue stick, scissors, and an empty notebook and headed out on the town.
Scrapbooking is an activity that people have been doing for centuries, and once you start, it becomes clear why it has endured for so long. One of my favorite Instagram accounts, @papeldelpasado, collects and documents old and vintage scrapbooks dating back to the 19th century. Scrolling through the photos is as surreal and captivating as it is beautiful, but I try not to linger too long on what the original owner wrote for fear of feeling like an intruder. Before I came across the Instagram account, I hadn’t really considered that these everyday documents could survive at all.
Generations ago, someone was saving cigarettes, food packaging labelsand fingerprints of friends in bound books. Now, 100 years later, the contents are immortalized on social networks. It feels a bit strange to be able to peer into a stranger’s private musings, but seeing what people thought to keep is surprisingly moving, and the designs and aesthetic feel incredibly contemporary and modern.
The scrapbook has also been fully contained, even when the material it contains does not represent real life. For fake scrapbook videos, it’s the assembly process that draws people in. Viral TikTok accounts like @senajournal create ASMR level scrapbooking videos peeling off stickers, tearing paper, and arranging pieces on the page, but the clippings in question come mostly from a decorative pad of paper or from images that look like they’ve been ripped from mood boards (some collages even include torn bits of fake paper). letters written in italics). The pages look perfect and there is something off about the whole exercise. Imagine someone finds a scrapbook 100 years from now and a taped letter begins, “It is very important to be patient…”
There is very little in modern life that companies have not tried to digitize, whether or not it makes sense to do so. From software for making shopping lists to apps that track and share the user’s career path, a technological “fix” is constantly appearing. It happened with collages, too: Last year, Pinterest’s invite-only mood board app, Shuffles, caused a brief frenzy among young people desperate to use it.
It may be old, but so far, nothing beats the physical experience of putting together and reviewing a book of my favorite things that I can hold in my hands. Each piece put in its place feels like a treasured memory; It’s hard to imagine getting that satisfaction from clicking “publish.” And when it’s time to move on, from one chapter of life or from this plane of existence entirely, I can do what I want with my junk. Hopefully, my random odds and ends won’t be sitting on some alien future’s Instagram account and definitely not being held in digital form on some company’s data servers. I prefer offcuts in their truest form: jagged, imperfect, and disposable if necessary.