How do archives rewrite the past and platforms arrange what comes next?
Two P4 research propositions examine the selection and rearrangement of archives, and the viewing sequences arranged by recommenders. Each develops its concepts, cases, and counterexamples.
The future-perfect archive
The evidentiary meaning of an image archive is not completed when the material is preserved. Later events, testimony, absences, classifications, and re-edits can change what it is able to establish in public history. That later change must not be backdated as knowledge already held when the image was made.
Old footage does not predict the future by itself. What is kept, how it is labelled, who can see it, and what it is later placed beside determine the evidence it may become.
- Inherits
- 2 concept relations
- Modifies
- 2 explicit shifts
- Cases
- 2 test entries
- Falsifiers
- 2 failure conditions
Governance of nextness and the right to stop
A platform governs nextness not by predicting the future with certainty, but by turning the viewing that just occurred into ranking signals and using them to arrange the next field of visibility. A right to stop requires continuation, exit, return, deletion of behavioural traces, and refusal of recommendation to be intelligible, executable choices that are not covertly cancelled.
The problem is not simply that videos are short or scrolling is fast. Pausing, skipping, replaying, and leaving can all become material for arranging what appears next. Stopping must alter that feedback chain, not merely freeze the screen.
- Inherits
- 2 concept relations
- Modifies
- 2 explicit shifts
- Cases
- 2 test entries
- Falsifiers
- 2 failure conditions