If you’ve been on TikTok recently, you might’ve seen the newest “junk journaling” trend. Reminiscent of scrapbooking, the idea is to collect various pieces of your day and then save them in a journal, with each piece of “junk” carrying a memory. The receipt for the coffee you grabbed with your friends, the business card of a store you visited, maybe even a random scrap of paper you found. There’s no pressure to invest in artisan materials or expensive stationary, the purpose is literally to tape garbage to the page. It’s very raw and real, a heavy contrast to the highly over-produced and aesthetics-first nature of most other trends today. And while I love this as an exercise in creativity, I love it even more as an act of historical preservation. Â
To a historian, these things are not just random garbage. These pieces of “junk” are known as ephemera: things created to serve a temporary purpose and be thrown away. They allow us to get a glimpse of what life may have been like in the past, something that is often glossed over in historical conversations. Sure, we all know the broad strokes of major events. But do you know what groceries the average family bought during WWII? Do you know how the French Revolution affected the cost of living? Do you know what cosmetics were popular during the Roaring 20s? The answers to these aren’t found in textbooks or treatises; they are found in receipts, price tags, menus, bus tickets, greeting cards, and wrappers. The slogan on a pamphlet, the writing in a used calendar, the prices listed on an advertisement, the ingredients used in a food product, even the time printed on a punch-card. All of these things that we’re so quick to throw away provide invaluable context to the time period. Â
Today, ephemera seems to be losing popularity. Physical media is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as most of our daily lives have migrated to the digital space. I haven’t seen physical tickets in years, my receipts are now e-mailed to me, and every restaurant insists on having a QR code instead of a menu. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. It’s much more convenient and a lot less wasteful to have everything on your phone. But, I worry that most of this won’t be preserved in the future. We are in the most documented era of history, and yet this documentation exists in a space that we just assume will be there forever. I imagine that there will be a time that the servers storing this data will either stop being maintained or stop functioning entirely, and then I guess we’re out of luck in that regard?
I obviously don’t know how it would work, but I can’t help but wonder if we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket. It sounds ridiculous to say that media like Instagram reels will eventually become the focus of future study, but think about how significant of an impact social media and online content has had on our society as a whole. There is so much anthropologically, historically, and culturally significant content held only on the Internet, and for that to be lost would be a horrible disservice to future academics and scholars. Â
All of this is to say, the historian in me is begging you to start junk journaling! Not only could your junk journal end up being a key piece of history, it’s also just fun and fulfilling to create something beautiful out of materials you’ve previously overlooked. It reminds us that there’s significance and meaning in everything, if we’re only willing to look for it. And in a society which is constantly pushing us to consume, consume, consume, maybe there’s something to be said about honouring what we already have. Â