What do you think?
Rate this book
Save As... Digital Memories
This groundbreaking and truly interdisciplinary collection of essays examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink established conceptualisations of human memory in terms of its discourses, forms and practices.
217 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
August 16, 2018
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
10 essays couched in academic language, reflecting on the accelerated impact of memory enhancing artifacts that have been introduced in recent years. Of the 3 sections, "Discourses", "Forms" and "Practice" I found the last most interesting. Each section came with an anonymous editorialized summary by one or more of the editors.
Current mediatization of memory, while more extensive is still selective, recorded but open to interpretation. By what we select we create a reconstructed narrative of our pasts.
First is Andrew Hoskins, who starts with "flashbulb memories" which are generated by touchstone events such as Tianamen Square, the Challenger Disaster or 9/11. Moreover we use the events to construct a common framework. He suggests that these are products of a mass media centric culture, New media is a more difuse many to many set of experiences across multiple media channels. The former is authoratative and from above, the latter is generated from below. Messages are conducted through social networks and the distinction between producer and consumer blurs, as does the distinction between personal and collective memory - both are mixed in the archive.
Paul Arthur's "Saving Lives" wonders whether the future of biography will change once the records have taken digital form. The sheer volume of material may serve to make the subject murkier, as are the proliferation of forms such as sms/twitter, personal blogs, email, imagery and tangled webs of interconnection.
Several essays examine common social memorialization. Margaret Ann Clark's piece on Brazil's Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person) is an encouraging grass roots mashup where Brazilians are asked to tell their own personal histories in order to weave a compelling national narrative, with similar projects underway in Canada, Indiana and Portugal. Critically though, one can find this online, only the Brazilian version has a substantial volume (20,000 stories - not great for a 20 year old collection about a population of 200 million) and coherence of the the archive could use better curation. Andrew Jakubowicz's "Remembering and Recovering Shanghai" considers an MIT based Web 2.0 project to preserve aspects of the temporary Jewish community of Shanghai, a pocket of refuge where hundreds of European Jewish families huddled under Japanese rule during WW II. Centred around a cast off Jewish music box found in a Shanghai junk store, the team selected 7 subject families to interview and record aspects of the history of this time examining the social relationships with the Jewish, Chinese and Japanese communities. Unfortunately in following this specialized project up one finds, like old floppy disks, that the archive is unavailable due to "technical obsolescence and other factors".
"Archiving the Gaze" by Bruno Lessard dates itself by focussing on CD-ROM. Today we consider CDs and DVDs like we do film, as snapshots only, the read only requirement made obsolete by archives resident in the cloud.
The essay "MyMemories" by Joanne Garde-Hanson considers the corporate scrapbook phenomenon of social networking sites (SNS), in particular Facebook, which may in the years to come suffer similar problems as users tend to be locked into a particular platform. SNS participants not only document events, they participate as archons, actively categorizing cross tagging information which, with added search, creates a dynamic personal history, but more importantly gives FaceBook as a corporation unprecedented (though as yet unused) "consigned" ownership (the author dips into Jacques Derrida) and leverage over the whole, these rights being FaceBook provides the storage and the base structure, users add connectivity - the emergent properties of the whole are pregnant with potential - marketting, identity theft, trend analysis, interwoven fake, virtual and real friendship webs, reflecting not only a need to connect but a desire to shape one's own narrative, especially amongst a younger demographic.
"Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema" by Sydney Eve Matrix linked the various memory related themes of BladeRunner, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall and Minority Report - the Matrix, while an obvious choice, merely makes a cameo in the footnotes. If memory itself is malleable, then why would reality matter? Film discussions are almost alway fun and this is no exception.
Also considered in several of these essays is how the ubuiquity of opportunities to record and access changes our relationship to the archive. Anna Reading's "Memobilia" starts with the mantra of the digerati: "Be young, be digital, be free from history" (Mosco, 2005, pp81) but notes that digital memories are also being produced for deeply historical (Holocaust) , political (Iraq) and ideological (9/11) reasons as well as by `cool kids' . The add on functions of a digital phone outstrip the original purpose of making calls to the point where users feel lost, vulnerable, even violated separated from their devices (pp88), though they reflect that without them they can feel "free, more private and peaceful."
Finally Shaun Wilson's "Remixing the Past" looks at "Do It Yourself" (DIY) mashups where authors mix together different pasts to create radically new interpretations.
Overall I found it interesting in parts, pendantic in others, but not particularly outstanding or novel in its observations. Your mileage may vary.
10 essays couched in academic language, reflecting on the accelerated impact of memory enhancing artifacts that have been introduced in recent years. Of the 3 sections, "Discourses", "Forms" and "Practice" I found the last most interesting. Each section came with an anonymous editorialized summary by one or more of the editors.
Current mediatization of memory, while more extensive is still selective, recorded but open to interpretation. By what we select we create a reconstructed narrative of our pasts.
First is Andrew Hoskins, who starts with "flashbulb memories" which are generated by touchstone events such as Tianamen Square, the Challenger Disaster or 9/11. Moreover we use the events to construct a common framework. He suggests that these are products of a mass media centric culture, New media is a more difuse many to many set of experiences across multiple media channels. The former is authoratative and from above, the latter is generated from below. Messages are conducted through social networks and the distinction between producer and consumer blurs, as does the distinction between personal and collective memory - both are mixed in the archive.
Paul Arthur's "Saving Lives" wonders whether the future of biography will change once the records have taken digital form. The sheer volume of material may serve to make the subject murkier, as are the proliferation of forms such as sms/twitter, personal blogs, email, imagery and tangled webs of interconnection.
Several essays examine common social memorialization. Margaret Ann Clark's piece on Brazil's Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person) is an encouraging grass roots mashup where Brazilians are asked to tell their own personal histories in order to weave a compelling national narrative, with similar projects underway in Canada, Indiana and Portugal. Critically though, one can find this online, only the Brazilian version has a substantial volume (20,000 stories - not great for a 20 year old collection about a population of 200 million) and coherence of the the archive could use better curation. Andrew Jakubowicz's "Remembering and Recovering Shanghai" considers an MIT based Web 2.0 project to preserve aspects of the temporary Jewish community of Shanghai, a pocket of refuge where hundreds of European Jewish families huddled under Japanese rule during WW II. Centred around a cast off Jewish music box found in a Shanghai junk store, the team selected 7 subject families to interview and record aspects of the history of this time examining the social relationships with the Jewish, Chinese and Japanese communities. Unfortunately in following this specialized project up one finds, like old floppy disks, that the archive is unavailable due to "technical obsolescence and other factors".
"Archiving the Gaze" by Bruno Lessard dates itself by focussing on CD-ROM. Today we consider CDs and DVDs like we do film, as snapshots only, the read only requirement made obsolete by archives resident in the cloud.
The essay "MyMemories" by Joanne Garde-Hanson considers the corporate scrapbook phenomenon of social networking sites (SNS), in particular Facebook, which may in the years to come suffer similar problems as users tend to be locked into a particular platform. SNS participants not only document events, they participate as archons, actively categorizing cross tagging information which, with added search, creates a dynamic personal history, but more importantly gives FaceBook as a corporation unprecedented (though as yet unused) "consigned" ownership (the author dips into Jacques Derrida) and leverage over the whole, these rights being FaceBook provides the storage and the base structure, users add connectivity - the emergent properties of the whole are pregnant with potential - marketting, identity theft, trend analysis, interwoven fake, virtual and real friendship webs, reflecting not only a need to connect but a desire to shape one's own narrative, especially amongst a younger demographic.
"Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema" by Sydney Eve Matrix linked the various memory related themes of BladeRunner, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall and Minority Report - the Matrix, while an obvious choice, merely makes a cameo in the footnotes. If memory itself is malleable, then why would reality matter? Film discussions are almost alway fun and this is no exception.
Also considered in several of these essays is how the ubuiquity of opportunities to record and access changes our relationship to the archive. Anna Reading's "Memobilia" starts with the mantra of the digerati: "Be young, be digital, be free from history" (Mosco, 2005, pp81) but notes that digital memories are also being produced for deeply historical (Holocaust) , political (Iraq) and ideological (9/11) reasons as well as by `cool kids' . The add on functions of a digital phone outstrip the original purpose of making calls to the point where users feel lost, vulnerable, even violated separated from their devices (pp88), though they reflect that without them they can feel "free, more private and peaceful."
Finally Shaun Wilson's "Remixing the Past" looks at "Do It Yourself" (DIY) mashups where authors mix together different pasts to create radically new interpretations.
Overall I found it interesting in parts, pendantic in others, but not particularly outstanding or novel in its observations. Your mileage may vary.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review