Memory in a Mediated World

Remembrance and Reconstruction

Andrea Hajek, Christine Lohmeier, Christian Pentzold, Andrea Hajek, Christine Lohmeier, Christian Pentzold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137470119
• eBook ISBN: 9781137470126
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

Considering both retrospective memories and the prospective employment of memories, Memory in a Mediated World examines troubled times that demand resolution, recovery and restoration. Its contributions provide empirically grounded analyses of how media are employed by individuals and social groups to connect the past, the present and the future.

1

Archive Me! Media, Memory, Uncertainty

Andrew Hoskins

Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel is a novella told through the diary of a fugitive who escapes his native Venezuela to what he believes is an uninhabited island. His hallucinatory account is key to the story, with time and tides out of synch and a strange reoccurrence and duplication of objects, people, animals and even two suns and two moons. At the centre of the Fugitive’s disorienting existence is Faustine, a woman he becomes more infatuated with as he watches her, although she never appears to see him.

However, Faustine, like much of what the Fugitive sees, ‘lives’ only as a multi-sensory projection from an elaborate machine. Its inventor, Morel, had brought his close friends and Faustine to the island, where he recorded their entire week together without their knowledge. Here is Morel’s critical revelation to his friends: ‘My abuse consists of having photographed you without your permission. Of course, it is not like an ordinary photograph; this is my latest invention. We shall live in this photograph forever. Imagine a stage on which our life during these seven days is acted out, complete in every detail. We are the actors. All our actions have been recorded’ (Bioy Casares,1964, p. 66).

Morel’s machine is powered by energy from the sun and the tides and this replays the week on an endless loop. Thus the recorded circular time of the projection, and the chronological real time of the Fugitive, overlap. This accounts for the duplications and distortions that initially seemed the product of his feverish state, exposed to the inhospitable conditions of the island. We learn that Morel and his friends all died in a ship that sank when they left the island, thus they live on only in the recording. However, the Fugitive believes that Morel’s motivation (including planning for their deaths) is his unrequited love for Faustine. Morel would achieve immortality with Faustine and the others would have the same with their best friends, in exchange for the otherwise uncertain duration of their lives. Yet, in the end, it is the Fugitive that sees the same opportunity by learning to use Morel’s machine: ‘The real advantage of my situation is that now death becomes the condition and the pawn for my eternal contemplation of Faustine’ (Bioy Casares, 1964, p. 100). The Fugitive follows carefully the moves of all of the characters over the week and then places himself in the recording. The new version now shows him and Faustine as being in love, and her life now forever entwined with his in the eternal projection.

The pursuit of a kind of total memory here has a devastating cost, an eternal entrapment in the life which has already been recorded – the past before that is lost – and the future falls away. Furthermore, Morel’s invention is premised upon a belief in the immortality and the incorruptibility of the archive, yet it is corrupted and altered by the Fugitive, who inserts himself into the recording.

This may all sound very familiar as an account of the misguided faith in the archival promise of technologies of the present, and a blindness to or disregard of the risks to privacy and identity in the exposure of intimate lives in and through new media such as early 21st-Century lifelogging and Facebook. However, Bioy Casares’ book was first published in 1940. It is essentially an imaginary of the power of media to seize and to hold and to control human remembering and forgetting. It is useful as just one template to place over today’s digitally infused world to ask: what is really new about emergent media and its shaping of memory?

In this chapter I respond to this question by arguing that paradoxical states of permanence and obsolescence, of empowerment and loss of control, and of stability and ephemerality define remembering and forgetting in today’s media ecology. There is a vast literature specifically on ‘media ecology’. And although a survey is beyond the parameters of this chapter, I find Neil Postman’s definition useful as: ‘the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people’ (Postman, 1970, p. 161). And to draw on my ongoing work with William Merrin: Media ecology is then the idea that media technologies can be understood and studied like organic life-forms, as existing in a complex set of interrelationships within a specific balanced environment. Technological developments, it is argued, change all these interrelationships, upsetting the existing balance and thus potentially impacting upon the entire ‘ecology’. So, at the time of the introduction of a new medium there is always a period of adjustment, or settling down, or appropriation of the established by the emergent. For example, many commentators acclaimed a revolution in ‘citizen journalism’ as shaping populist uprisings in the early years of this century. Now, however, whatever you want to call this phenomenon, it has largely been appropriated by or incorporated into the mainstream, that is, it is ‘just journalism’ (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2015).

But what is surprising about today’s digitally affected media ecology is the short time in which the above paradoxes of memory have become established and the rapidity of the advance of historical amnesia over the nature and experience of the preceding media ecology (that which William Merrin (2014) calls the ‘broadcast era’, particularly that of the mid- to late 20th Century). This follows from the ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins, 2011), a heady cocktail of immediacy, volume and pervasiveness of the digital – driving an ontological shift in what memory is and what memory does, giving remembering new scale and potential, yet also ushering in new risks to active remembering and of a perpetual haunting: a loss of control over forgetting. What I mean by this is that what was once an active memory, a human memory that had to work to sustain a continuity of past – of identity, of place, of relationships – is fundamentally weakened with the shift from reliance to dependency on the search devices of our machines.

However, the weakness of human memory has long been signalled by attempts to bring it external aid. Growing technological externalization through increased use of and reliance on media forms and devices is seen to strengthen and enhance memory. Pick your discipline (psychology, philosophy, sociology, cognitive science, media studies) and the chances are that it sees media as augmenting, extending and prosthetizing human memory. Writing, printing and the electronic media in successive phases have transformed human cognition and the capacity, control and power to remember. Technological progression is said to equate to an advancement of memory and its human mastery. Memory as such is constantly renewed by the media and technologies (and the metaphors) of the day – in this way it is always ‘new’ – as well as through these same media reflexively shaping a reassessment of the very value of remembering and forgetting under these conditions (Hoskins, 2001, 2004a, 2004b, 2009, 2010).

For instance, Bernard Stiegler (2010, p. 67) considers that: ‘Human memory is originally exteriorized, which means it is technical from the start.’ He distinguishes the stages of this process as beginning two million years ago, as a lithic (stone) tool as a ‘spontaneous memory support’ from the much later Paleolithic ‘conscious methods of memory storage’, namely ‘mnemotechniques’, through to the digital devices of today that are ‘ a full-fledged mnemotechnology, a technology that systematically orders memories’ (2010, p. 67). But with each transition, with each greater medial embedding of human memory, there is also a cost, a giving up of control over the propriety over one’s own memories. (The ultimate cost of Morel’s invention is that the recording kills the subject.)

Yet connectivity, or hyperconnectivity for some, signals the organic and the technological – long seen in relation to one another (David Channell, 1991) – finally in consort, and the mark of a post-human condition. For example, Arthur Kroker (2014, p. 105) sees hyperconnectivity as ‘not old school mechanical or even electronic connectivity in the sense of point-to-point communication in a world suddenly stitched together by ubiquitous mobility, but connectivity as something immanently cellular, networked, biological, and metabolic’. Kroker writes of the emergence of the ‘network ego’, a kind of cellular subject without an earlier sense of individual privacy (of the prior media ecology). For him (2014, p. 106) the loss of privacy is not merely some kind of trade or exchange for the realization of the network ego, but when declared by some new media executives as a public good, it is ‘one of the key expressions of the new ethics of digital ideology’.

And it is precisely the rapid and wholesale relinquishing of privacy that makes the 21st-Century memorial self so peculiarly vulnerable to the ravages of post-scarcity culture. The remembering and forgetting of self and society under digital conditions is today less a matter of recollection, and more one of search. At least greater reliance on human recollection once offered a degree of certainty in its relatively steady change, decline and dissipation, including with its embedding in the delimiting finitude of the media of the day (‘decay time’, Hoskins, 2013). In contrast, search is premised on a model of the pursuit of total memory, where the ease and the compulsion of connectivity, the recording of everything and the entanglement of the network ego obfuscates the precariousness of future access.

Today, the digital’s messing up of the decay time of media – and our presence within it – ushers in a new set of risks and uncertainties to communications and activities that were comparatively benign in terms of the knowable limits of their reach and the ephemerality of their record. To take a photograph and to be knowingly photographed was once to understand not necessarily or fully the technical operations of the representation (film, developer, paper) but at least to be aware of the finitude of the medium, its circulatory potential, its gatekeepers, the potential and the limits of embarrassment, scandal or even ruin that could arise from the photographic act. But today we live in an age with a diminished media consciousness. One can become an expert in computer code and algorithms and all that is computational, but that is not the point. All of this knowledge would not offer an increased security of memory, any greater certainty as to the limits or lifespan of an image, or object, or account, nor the capacity to intervene or affect such parameters or trajectories of media. This applies both to the knowing and/or willing (but not necessarily enlightened) media participation, and also to the barely noticed and everyday random recordings but also systematic surveillance, that will feed the future memory of today.

Indeed, uncertainty is heaped on memory through the perpetual haunting of the network ego by the mediations of its former self. This is part of the generalized state of ‘emergence’, namely the vastly increased potential of the increasingly digitized present and past being available to literally emerge without warning at some future point. For example, Article 17 of the European proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation in seeking a ‘right to be forgotten and to erasure’¹ is symptomatic of a belated political realization of a loss of control over the hyperconnectivity that drives the everyday for so many.

Today’s ‘ethics of digital ideology’ then are also expressed in what I call a sharing without sharing: the digitally fostered values of unbridled commentary, so-called ‘open access’ and the embrace of network narcissism that all perpetuate memory’s new uncertainties. This is evident in the nostalgia for forgotten earlier media ecologies that did not require digital participation for the maintenance of self-identity and basic sociality. For example, as Lev Grossman and Matt Vella (2014) suggest: ‘One forgets how to be alone and undistracted. Ironically enough experiences don’t feel fully real till you’ve used your phone to make them virtual – tweeted them or tumbled them or Instagrammed them or YouTubed them, and the world has congratulated you for doing so.’ And this compulsion of connectivity helps feed a new kind of archive of self – a shadow archive – of one’s digital traces.

As the uploading and the downloading of self and society continue to run amok, the flipside of the repeated warnings of a looming digital dark age are the risks in moving, as Geoffrey Bowker (2007, p. 26) puts it, ‘from the era of recorded memory to one of potential memory’. Although preservation and remembering are not the same, the very accumulation of digital content awaiting prospective emergence renders a generation perpetually spooked by an almighty dormant memory. The likelihood of potentially transcendent missed, or hidden, or thought to be deleted images, videos, emails and the like emerging to transform what was known or thought to be known about a person, place or event constitutes a spectacular uncertainty for the future evolution of memory and of history. We need a new kind of sociology of haunting.

Entanglements

A useful means to consider the new digital relations of remembering and forgetting is through the self’s entanglements with media. These are not merely some latest extension of the co-constitutive nature of human memory and its external tools and props but, rather, an entanglement of human and machine and human. Entanglement equates to an invisibility of sorts, it is never truly outside the self, never wholly represented and visible, and temporally it is about becoming rather than being. To see memory as an emergent entanglement is to resist the traditional way of seeing memory as discrete entities or phenomena, or even as memory’s favourite mistaken metaphor of ‘container’: the body, the brain, the group, the cultural and so on. Rather, an ecological approach is premised on memory as constituted through emergence, enfoldings and interactions. Memory is thus made and lost through an ongoing dynamic trajectory of hyperconnections rather than being merely residual (in brains, bodies, media) and also inevitably in decline. But it is the massive growth in the number of devices and opportunities for digital enfoldings that pushes the entanglements of memory into a new orbit. Luciano Floridi (2013, p. 32–33), for example, identifies this shift partly as ‘the reversal from entity’s primacy over interactions to interactions’ primacy over entities’.

Yet not all entanglements are equal, benign or visible. It is our entanglements with the increasingly unknown and invisible – a diminished media consciousness – that places new uncertainties just below the surface. For all the computational, big data, new ways of seeing, the more we rely on and pursue connectivity, the more it slips from our grasp. To be clear, the unnoticing of these entanglements should not be mistaken for a functional symbiosis with computational tools. The notions of extended cognition or the extended mind, for example, are a fashionable extension of the history of media’s augmentation of memory, as set out above. It is said that we lend our memories out to our machines, our social networks, and they circuit or loop back to the self, like continuous aides-memoire. And especially since the turn of this century, a slew of concepts envisage all that is new about media as extending memory in some fashion: Alison Landsberg’s (2004) ‘prosthetic’ is the extensionist archetype. And some of the traditional and popular categories of memory have been stretched to try to capture movement and the new mobilities of the age: the ‘transcultural’ (Crownshaw, 2011), ‘travelling’ (Erll, 2011) and the ‘multidirectional’ (Rothberg, 2009).

Unfortunately, the extensionist idea is exuberantly applied to the digital. For example, ‘Don’t fear the Cybermind’ is the title of a commentary by the psychologist Daniel M. Wegner (2012) in which he claims that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Remembering and Reviving in States of Flux
• 1. Archive Me! Media, Memory, Uncertainty
• 2. Memory, Media and Methodological Footings
• Part I: Rejoining through States of Emergency
• Part II: Reforming States of Affairs
• Part III: Recollecting States of Identities
• Part IV: Recalling States of Life
• Index