Memories
Posted on February 2, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
Convergence Culture for 26th March 2007, Irish Times
The computer is one huge memory. Computers may be able to crunch numbers, create and display images, and keep us in touch but have we yet understood what they are doing to memory? A computer’s random access memory is many orders of magnitude faster than ours, capable of retrieving information from the connected resources of the Internet, as well as locally stored records, files, documents, and pictures almost instantaneously.
There are a number of question marks over the computer’s role in human memory though. One of them is: Are we emphasising size at the expense of quality?
Memory plays a central role in how we understand ourselves. It incorporates memorials to the past and commemorations of people we are taught to revere, it knits families together and links us to our own pasts. Identity is impossible without it. It has a place right in the centre of how society’s function.
We are building memories faster than we are building houses. Flickr and Picassa are simple examples:
And around the world the computer is being used to store and the internet is bring used to retrieve huge new memory projects. Virtually every state in America now has a memory Project. The American Memory Project is probably the Daddy of them all.
While we are recording more and more we are not, however, transforming. The minimal effect of creativity is to transform. Look at flickr and picassa again and then go to the Bhopal Memory Project or the September 11 Digital Archive (see Words In Your Ear below).
The September 11 Digital Archive seems to me a worthy inheritor of non-digital creative forms like the novel or factual odysseys like Anthony Beevor’s renditions of World War II. Here you can find an extensive and growing account of the day the World Trade towers were destroyed by two terrorist directed passenger planes. The collection even includes e-mails sent by people in New York as the reality of the atrocity unfolded. For example:
Sept 11, 2001. 8.09 p.m.
To all concerned friends and family members. Yes, I’m OK.
Or
Damn, this is one way to get up to the minute news. Excite news just put up a brief blurb on it. > A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. The building is on fire. I’m staring right at it.
The quantity of e-mails of this type is less important than their accessibility and tone. Whereas photographs on fickr can be beautiful, charming, entrancing, these e-mails speak beyond their obvious meaning. How can we imagine the state of mind wrote the first e-mail? Irritated, traumatised, businesslike? Or the second: Excited? Appalled? Their ambiguity has the power to transform my understanding of the day without dictating what it should be. That is also the power of creativity.
In 1984 in Bhopal India, a Union Carbide pesticide plant spilled deadly methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere. Here is the data from the Bhopal Memory Project:
Dead on the night, an estimated 2,000 – 10,000 0people. Those surviving or fleeing, 200,000 – 500,000. Twenty three years later and there is still no clear record of the number of deaths. The disparity is an astonishing 8.000 people. And of those who were injured or harmed by the poison we are told as many as 300,000 fit into the category of unknown. Where are these lives, either before or after Bhopal, that they are unknown now?
The computer increases our capacity to remember without necessarily furthering the capacity of humans to transform each other’s viewpoints.
It seems to me much of what passes for memory on the internet is a bit like memorabilia, trivial for the most part and personal. For example the photograph that places a person in one place on a particular day. A card signed by a soccer player, a record sleeve with McCartney’s signature scrawled on it.
These applications of memory anchor us in time and place. The role of creativity is to transform. In that sense the use of the vast well of memory that computers provide is wasted.
On the other hand transformative memory projects are beginning to take shape. They need nurturing in the same way that novels and paintings are nurtured and that should include the same critical oversight that works of art are subjected to.
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