Are Memories Made of This Any Longer?
Posted on January 8, 2007
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
Part of the fascination of reading blogs is asking what are they replacing? And as instant, regular and throw away thoughts become more prevelant and interact with formal creative dramas like 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, and reality driven narratives like Survivor, questions go begging. For almost ever drama and art have been about memory and remembrance. What are they becoming?
Every major transition in communications has an effect on the way people think. Proof of the pudding is easy to cook up. For example when people began to write, they lessened their dependence on memory.
Imagine the early civilised human endlessly reiterating directions, recipes, truisms and names, just so nothing of value would be forgotten – well we see that in rhymes, epic poems like the Iliad, and the begot and begat lists of the Bible.
Language at that point is imbued with mnemonic devices like alliteration and rhyme. That argument was first presented by people like Eric Havelock (The Muse Learns to Write) and Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy), and of course by Milman Parry.
Once people learned to write – or at least when writing became pervasive within a social group - the purposeful inner dialogue changed.
The mind was released from its copious and continuous memory tasks and began its slow transition into the variegated potential we’ve seen realised since classical antiquity: literature, maths, objective science, philosophy, pragmatic technology. A mind bedevilled by remembering cannot spare the time for these activities.
But once you have a computer, which does all the memory work for you, what then? The question isn’t just confined to how you and your memory might possibly change when you are further liberated from memory tasks.
Memory tasks are deeply social as well as personal. Collective memories usually led, in the past, to some form of memorialisation, the Lest We Forget type symbols of past struggles, sacrifices and heroism that are dotted around cities, the countryside and Mount Rushmore, among other places.
What is the role of modern TV drama and blogging, reality TV and the rest, in the necessary activities of memory and remembrance?
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5 Responses to “Are Memories Made of This Any Longer?”
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There are two things to consider:
1. We’re exposed to much more information than ever before, and with the advent of the www means it’s available at the touch of a button meaning we don’t have to flex those memory muscles any more.
2. I’m sure that attention span and long term memory must be affected by the readily available online information. Why attempt to remember when you can look it up?
3. I forget what my third point was, what were we talking about?
Donncha, ha, like the third point
I think you’ve riffed on this before Haydn, and I fully agree, a well trained memory is a glorious asset to have. You only have to read a little Cicero, and you realise all his speeches were given sans notes, and made all the more powerful for it.
The art of memory wasn’t totally lost with the invention of print though. The early Renaissance was just as obsessed with memory training as the Greeks.
I think the distinction needs to be made -
1) we can still have memory training + instant web lookup
2) but human laziness being what it is, it will just choose instant lookup
As with all “new ages” we still have the choice to cherish the best of the past. That’s an individual decision we all have to make at some point.
great post, and I loved all the stuff you did at Blogcritics. I think a lot more love went into it (please don’t take that as a jibe)
garry
Hi Garry. Yes with blogcritics youfelt like you were setting out a proper article but Ialso got the feeling it was one way, delivering a lot to Eric but not much back. What I’m trying to do ehre is play around with dieas more and gradually decide do i want totake on the arduous task of writing a book - professionally it’s time i did but philosophically I can’t much see the reason for it. Glad you lik the stuff anyway.
Haydn, I’m not sure it would be a book these days, more likely a PDF
Keep plugging away, you are one of the few people examining the consequences of this “new media form” called the internet. So many technocrats around these days, and not enough thinkers.
garry
thanks for that - really encouraging to know somebody even reads the stuff.