Venice, California and World of Warcraft: Persistence and Ephemerality in Playful Spaces

Persistent digital media extend content beyond immediate ephemeral interactions and conversations. Systems such as email, instant messaging, digital kiosks, social networking sites, and wikis collect large quantities of electronic data and store it for later use. How will people encounter and understand these data now and later? How do people move between the ephemeral and persistent in everyday settings? Can persistence exist beyond visible data? We have been exploring these questions through field studies in an urban setting and an online game. This paper is a preliminary exploration of issues that have arisen in our empirical research on the ways people move between persistent and ephemeral media. In this paper, we investigate an expanded concept of persistence which renders ephemerality as a complementary element during processes of communication and interaction. Drawing on previous work and findings from our empirical studies, we argue that seeing persistence and ephemerality as intimately linked opens up possibilities for analyzing and creating new design spaces and forms of interaction with digital media.