[-empyre-] technological and human dis/remembering

[Christian Pentzold]

Thanks, Quinn, for starting this topic and for starting it with a set  
of key questions I'm looking forward to discuss in the upcoming week.  
And thanks, Mark and Attila, for sharing your ideas and experiences.

Following up on their posts, I'd too like to make a more or less  
conceptual point about the assumed never-forgetting Internet and  
social memory coming from my ethnographic work among Wikipedians.

Thinking about digital objects and the digitally networked  
environments we live by in general, I would - in accord with Attila's  
comment - suppose they could be both, oblivious and observant. On the  
one hand, too many messages, images, tweets and comments compete for  
attention and nothing attracts concentration for long. On the other,  
all activities done in, with, and through digitally networked  
technologies are recorded, archived, and retrievable and cannot be  
forgotten. In this regard, the current debates on the Internet's  
ability to record people’s activities (Mayer-Schönberger 2009) focus  
on the ubiquitous presence of communication devices and ever more ways  
to produce, store, and distribute message. In terms of forming  
personal and collective memories, these archives of documents and  
databases have been described as exceeding the human capability to  
interact with the material available. Contrasting, thus, the absolute  
archive with human deficiencies and traditional patterns of cultural  
canonization with economies of attention, such line of reasoning  
would, therefore, doubt the idea that digitally networked technologies  
sustain social remembering (Assmann 2006).

Challenging such rather techno-centered perspective, I'd argue that  
socio-technological innovations have always helped to reassemble the  
practices and materials of how people form personal memories and hand  
down artifacts, techniques and discourses from which shared memories  
are constructed. Secondly, I too would argue that a perspective on  
memory should acknowledge the vital relation between retaining and  
forgetting past experiences, beliefs, ideas and emotions (Connerton  
2008). Hence, remembering thus essentially involves both the attempt  
to explore, recapitulate or re-enact things past as well as the  
concern to neglect and disremember certain aspects of bygone times.

 From this background, my work among Wikipedians looked at the  
strategies of Wikipedia authors to employ and to ignore the  
platform-enabled archive of wiki-based activities. It examined the  
practices and institutional settings that allow editors to balance the  
technological affordances of a fine-grained and close-to complete  
register of all activities done in the wiki with the social need to  
‘forgive and forget’ so to assume good faith and continually return to  
cooperation.

Thinking about the role of digital objects in aiding remembering or  
forgetting, I'd thus like to argue that the platform’s permanent and  
thorough record of edits and versions is, on the one hand, the  
requisite basis for the set of code-enabled tools consisting of  
version histories, watch lists, automatic software agents (bots), and  
software-assisted editing interfaces that help the editors to observe  
portions of the overall editing activities and platform dynamics and  
to react promptly and tightly focused (Geiger 2013). On the other,  
however, I'd argue that Wikipedia authors have crafted institutional  
requirements in the form of etiquettes, rules, and guidelines so to  
balance the omnipresent machine memory preserving all conflicts and  
malpractice by asking editors to be oblivious for social conduct’s  
sake (Pentzold 2011).

Growing from these initial thoughts, I think other core issues  
regarding the interplay of memory and digital objects (and of  
pondering the difference of digital/non-digital objects in/for  
remembering) could become interesting points for discussion.

Hence, reading through the literature on digital objects I'm first of  
all struck by the difference some of them at least want to make  
between material/immaterial objects in terms of their interactivity  
and editability. In my view, such attempts to distinguish both sorts  
of objects, especially when made with regard to social memory, miss  
the malleability and mutability of objects and archives as a condition  
for memory per se.

In relation to that, I too would say that such accounts are rather  
a-historic in their attempt to mark an essential differences in the  
'nature' of objects. On the contrary, I'd say that at least the  
history of social memory could be read as a story where memorabilia  
and memorables were constantly reworked, remodeled, forgotten and  
regained.

Besides these questions, what too interests - also in terms of digital  
objects and memory - would be the question of decay and the  
disintegration of the material and immaterial aides de mémoire.

Christian




-- 
Dr. Christian Pentzold

Lecturer
Technische Universität Chemnitz, Institute for Media Research

Associate Researcher
Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society, Berlin

Fon: +49-(0)371-531-38798
Fax: +49-(0)371-531-27429
christian.pentzold [at] hiig.de
www.christianpentzold.de