Madness & Memoria

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o'clock.

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions,

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

                                                                           Excerpt from Rhapsody on a Windy Night – T.S Eliot

                                   **********************************************

Is it possible that the more humankind develops its capacity to record and preserve information , the less it seems to remember?


We allegedly developed textual communication systems, for instance, so our memory could keep up with our ever-increasing trade links & military conquests. As we turn to the surrogate data-spheres of our cellphones, iPads & BlackBerries, frantically inscribing our lives, loves & Saturday nights from one interface to another within yet another, I wonder if the far reaches & deepening recesses of our data bases can can keep up with our many extended, protracted memories and our search-engine assisted remembrances. 

It wasn't until an active tech user shared his concerns about his own memory that my curiosity was piqued. Having been an enthusiastic end user for the past 14-15 years, he finds that the extent of his automatic dependence on the reliability of data archives like g-mail, has reworked his memory. His memory is not diminishing per se;rather he finds that the pathways of his remembrances are being rewritten, or perhaps more aptly, reprogrammed. He added on: 'When i view a lecture on YouTube, I don't come away from it remembering very much. Because it's there. I 'Like' it. It's on my list.'

Keywords, “Your Favourites”, Related Searches, bookmarks, search tags/qualifiers/refiners, tabs & 'Like' buttons are all part of an increasingly sophisticated and reliable mnemonic complex of buttons and other clickable options that'll take us where we want to go, or where others before us have gone already.

I deliberately Google searched some of the most open-ended, ill defined 'searches' I could come up with to ascertain how the engine processes and filters my 'search', providing context to an otherwise blind search.

I entered the word “Death” on Google search, and the Related Searches option yielded an instructive, almost enlightening range of choices. The “Death penalty”, “death pics”, “grim reaper”, “life after death”, “life” & “love” were all a click away.

I googled “Life” and had lots to choose from yet again- what life did I want to play? The board game or the tv show? The movie, quotes, magazine,love, death, Eddie Murphy? I could further qualify my search and could go for life shopping, or life recipes or life patents.

Sex was next on the list- and so was “love”, “cars”, “girls” and the “disney channel” as related searches. (“Cartoon network” too.)

The examples I use are playfully illustrative in the least and symptomatic at most of the fragmented world of knowledge-processing, cartoon-network sex and receiving we live, learn & love in. I'd be hard pressed to discover an artifact of the contemporary world that is more meta-referential than the Internet.

What these search trajectories reveal to me is that the button is not an end to itself- every button,tag and link begets yet more buttons, tags and links- just as the so called originate “search” leads to yet more derivative finds. There is no Nirvana here- no Holy Grail. Enter the loop where Life yields death and death yields life. You'll find love when you're searching for sex and find sex when you're searching for love. Love/sex- life/death- and therein lies the self-referential knowledge loop, the spiralling staircase with no landing that is information in the contemporary world. Search engines might encourage us to be seekers and searchers but oftentimes I feel my counterparts and I are not seekers in our digital age as much as we are passive finders. We feed and leech;we do not seek.

Information access seems no longer to hinge on the originate source as it does around the derivative fragments- as end users we are left to sift and sort through the flotsam and jetsam of a sunken vessel. I could even go as far as to cynically comment that search engines may be seen as filtering, streamlining and refining a hollow dust-bin of information. How we wish to integrate ourselves (or not) with the tech-savvy world they attend upon is a matter that begs continued introspect, debate and deliberation.

My curiosities have little to do with fears of our information technologies suddenly being no longer operative and leaving us in listless withdrawal. They do, however, have everything to do with the reality that I will wake up to every morning of their continued existence and influence in my life. The writing's on your wall/profile/page/email- technology is here to stay, and so are we. It is precisely the nature of this relationship and its bearings upon memory making processes that interests me.


Why? "Because it's there” as my respondent tells me.
What he was implying was that services such as Google, YouTube, Yahoo & other numerous search engines have assumed the role of associative memory tags: information hasn't to be found- it has to be accessed. The tag will take you there. It's all there, or @, a few effortless, carefree clicks or swipes of a finger, away.

To analogize the situation, we have moved from the memory-aid to the heavily aided memory. This was precisely my respondent's concern- the action of information technology upon memory and remembrance.

This remarkably powerful technology to record, preserve & archive it all somehow seems counterintuitive to the selective now-you-see-it/now-you-don't discrimination of memory; to what I affectionately and romantically like calling the myth of memory; rather, the mythic fabric underpinning all Memory- that capacity for improvisation, selection, approximation & omission. I can't help but think the way we orient ourselves towards historicity & continuity, our own and the worlds', has already changed greatly and will continue to do so. Facebook, for instance, just reminded me I was running low on faith and hope a year ago. My despondence has made waves and entered the Hall of Memorable Status Updates. 

Mythic fabric aside, and "fatalistic drum" at hand, I imagine a future where we proceed from the hyper/omni-memorial 'IT'S ALL MEMORABLE!' thrust of 21st century information dissemination to a place where the amemorial reigns. Amnesia turned in on itself. If this 'place' looks anything like the dystopian, neo-noir landscape of Blade Runner Los Angeles, I'd really like to pay a visit. What a trip that would be. In all seriousness, sometimes I feel we remember , 'know' & 'record' too much. I hang out with my friends and take a couple of pictures (mostly of myself) and then commit those pictures to a cache on my computer and the World Wide Web. There's no extricating yourself once you're caught in that Web (think former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner); the “information explosion” appears a thing of the past already- an impending implosion seems more appropriate.

Of course, I am not running out of my memory- but memory increasingly seems to be running out of me.

It's not simply the Pods, Phones & Pads that command my attention, it's the conspicuous i that attends upon the super convenient world of touch screens & iPod Touch devices which prides itself on extending human contact rather than diminishing it. It is the invisible hyphenated bridge, i & millions others, traverse every day of our lives. It's the prospect of this bridge collapsing; the possibility of the gap between the i & the Pod growing ever wider, or conversely, narrowing in. It's a social-media-frenzied world where my subjectivity, and yours, is stirred and served on a template. It's the realization that before myspace is my space, it belongs to the World Wide Web and the Domain Name System(DNS). To this end, the lines separating where I begin & where this interface & that iPod/Pad/Phone ends become irrevocably blurred.

I feel that in some unfathomable but very tangible way, communication and information technology are reworking my fundamental cognition. This is a thought that excites & troubles me in even measure. Perhaps I would be more comforted if this "tangible" force were a group of cognition technicians dressed up for conspiracy- sort of like in The Matrix Trilogy. But it's not. The force rests in buttons & "Save As" & "Refresh” & clickability,interfaces,templates. 

The iPod touch's video-recording abilities are certainly reworking a lot. They are marketed thus: "Because your iPod touch — and its built-in HD video camera — go with you everywhere, you’re always ready to record when the moment strikes. And now you can do it in stunning high definition (my emphasis).

  

How hyper-real is the ability to record a "moment" in "stunning high definition" & render it into an 'HD memory' almost instantaneously!? "Always" being "ready to record when the moment strikes" aptly reflects the contemporary technological drive to memorialize the moment, & therein crucify it, all in stunningly redemptive "high definition." This state of readiness throws me off a little and leaves me wondering whether the "moment" can ever "strike" back as we continue to mediate & negotiate it via an increasingly sophisticated tech-sensorioum.     

If memory entails retention, recollection & the reproduction & recognition of information, all of these processes are increasingly mediated technologically. A lot of my associations & recognitions are hyper-linked & hyper-connected. They're sprawling across my Facebook profile & the History Tab on my browser window. They're navigable & accessible in a way they never were before.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines memory as “the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms.” As these mechanisms evolve & extend themselves, my powers of memory devolve from my being to the device I clutch in my hand. This reads like an intervention & they're not asking my permission (or are they?). The intervention might not pose an apocalyptic threat to my human but it does stir the very depths of my being. I'd rather not go on about the existential, ontological, metaphysical, political, spiritual, epistemological & other big worded implications of what I'm struggling with here, because therein exist potentialities & possibilities that are so much bigger & wordier than I am.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric and also significantly bigger and wordier than I am, describes memory (memoria) as "the treasury of things invented". I can't help but envisage a time when that treasury assumes instead an inventory not of "things invented", but of invented things.

Perhaps the tech-privileged world will, at some point in a higher-than-HIGH-DEFINITION inter-galactic future far far away, need then to remember how it forgot. And being accident-prone, erect in memoriam, on Moses' tablet of stone:

                       Here Lies A Precious Memory;

                       In earnest forgetfulness,

                       It Rests in Eternal Peace.

                    
                       Pray, leave it fucking be.

                      (                        )

I'm squinting the eye of my mass mediated hyper-linked mind to conjure an image of my father- smell, touch, a kiss and a hug.  Some sensual detail, a less-than-vital sign. It's not working, though. In another time & place, Dad would have been a myth. A fade in fade out projection. A blur on the rim of my eyes, diffuse retinal guise. A game of disembodied eye-spy in the dark room of my very own sensory studio. Aggressive metaphors, like that one, & signal-Noise- & we've lost contact.

But he's less than myth now. He's a photo in an album: now I see him; now I see him some more. It doesn't even hurt, let alone heal. That's not my father, though.

I just shook a dead geranium.

"Reminder: Forget the rest."










Because midnight can't shake the memory without a reminder.