[-empyre-] technological and human dis/remembering

[Attila Marton]

Hi there,  
   There are a couple of very interesting points addressed in your comments and I will think about all of them in due time. 
I think that the so-called permanence of cultural heritage artefacts has been a cultural construct based on the notion that institutions need to be carried beyond the immediacy of face-2-face interaction and the identification afforded by what Halbwachs calls collective memory. In this sense, the re-membering of oneself into more abstract social units (such as the nation state) requires communication media and artefacts that reach beyond one's personal lifeworld. At the same time, one also forgets the peculiarities of an event or diversity amongst individuals. In the words of Elena Esposito, with the increased complexity of society we need more abstract operations of memory giving rise to a true social memory that is autonomous from individuals and the immediate memory practices shared in a group. Hence, social memory and artefacts (or communication media) have been tightly intertwined and what we observe today with respect to digital objects may not be that new, as Sean said. Is the interplay between digital objects and memory that radically different or just more of the same? Maybe, the ontology of digital objects brings simply taken-for-granted assumptions to the forefront and makes us question them. I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle: the immateriality of digital objects leads to more forgetting but also to more remembering. What may be different, however, are the metaphors we use to understand and conceptualize contemporary developments. The metaphor of the library or archive turning remembering into a problem of information retrieval is certainly not viable anymore. New metaphors could draw on notions of navigation and emulation in the sense that we are not only navigating through a memory palace but rather that the memory palace is constructed anew each time we want to walk through it. Search engines or SNS are obvious examples. I would say that Wikipedia also points towards that notion that memory (or should I say memorization) is fluid and constantly changing. Obviously, memory has always been highly malleable but now that finds expression in the artefacts that mediate it.