The Technology of Memory

Author(s): James Poulos

Source: The New Atlantis , Spring 2008, No. 20 (Spring 2008), pp. 111-119
Published by: Center for the Study of Technology and Society

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 The Technology of Memory
James Poulos

Some seventy years ago, in his essay "The Shape of Things and Men,"
the poet and essayist Donald Davidson castigated H. G. Wells and his ilk
in the newsrooms for "continually publishing little columns to remind us
of what happened yesterday a year ago, or five years ago, or twenty-five
years ago." The pages and websites of today's newspapers make plain
that these ritual news reminders have lost little of their appeal. They
seem to reacquaint us reliably with ourselves, drawing the milestones of
our shared lives near with comforting predictability. Common memory,
prompted publicly, puts the scope of everyday life in context.
Or so it should. But Davidson recognized regimented, mediated
reminders as a symptom of something opposite: the alienation and sys-
tematization of memory. It had begun to seem that nothing was a fact and
nothing real until first, as Davidson put it, "retrospected" - "preserved
in the formaldehyde pickle of a card index," and thus "made into a
specimen."
Threescore and ten years since, the randomly accessible data archive
has progressed from card catalogue to Gmail account, with Google offer-
ing endlessly expansive storage space free to all. The twentieth-century
mania that Davidson detected for converting history into data has pro-
gressed apace, fostering a commonplace spirit of information indulgence.
We have learned very quickly how to both compile and sort data with
increasing expertise and speed - so that volume and specificity, mass and
niche, no longer work against each another. We may have our information
cake and eat it too, piling up data in the sure knowledge that we may pluck
from the heap whatever we can remember that we wish to recall. But to
what extent does our remembrance atrophy as a result?
Through technology, the alienation and systematization of memory
mutually reinforce one another, making our narratives flatter and our
experiences sharper. Unless we learn how to retain fully narrative and
relational memories, we will likely continue to enjoy more malleable iden-
tities in exchange for more managed behavior.

James Poulos is an essayist and doctoral candidate at Georgetoxm University. He blogs at

Doublethink Online, The American Scene, and Postmodern Conservative.

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 James Poulos

Memory Alienated
Davidson claimed that the spread of the scientific method to the realm
memory would "destroy the virtue of historical study," alienating us fro
our own pasts. The study of history would cease to count as a virtue
remembrance lost its attraction or became perceived as an investment n
worth its while. Sure enough, the wealth of access to things remembere
has the perverse effect of reducing the urgency of memory to neglectfu
levels. The cliché of the chronically videotaping parent, chasing offspri
around the hallmarks of their lives with camcorder always in hand, accom
panies the dust-covered boxes and shelves of forgotten moments as caus
accompanies effect. And those tapes - never quite so worth reliving as th
were living unmediated in the first place - are analogue memories, thin
you can pick up and hold, even if only in a VHS or DVD case. Able
translate ever-more-comprehensive reproductions of life into digital phan
toms in the public Internet square, the MySpace individual drips with dat
as the despot once dripped with jewels. Yet this embarrassment of riche
becomes, like gold hoarded in a vast cave, burdensome to savor piece by
piece. Each piece of information, on balance, tends to become more date
and less relevant than the last, and we begin to lose sight of the differen
between storing precious tokens of remembrance and throwing away ol
papers. Both can just as easily sit forever in our Gmail accounts.
Stony Brook University professor Robert Crease, in a 2007 column in
Physics World, observed that our

new communications techniques are good for scientists, encouraging

rapid communication and stripping out hierarchies. But for historians,
they are a mixed blessing. It is not just that searching through a hard
disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old
letters in an archive. Nor is it that the information in e-mails differs in
kind from that in letters. Far more worrying is... whether e-mail and
other electronic data will be preserved at all.

The technology of memory has the paradoxical effect of blurring the line
between archiving and trashing. We are familiar with this as the junk-
in-the-attic phenomenon: boxes of keepsakes stashed away at important
moments find themselves on the curb one spring-cleaning morning.
Stacks of receipts to be itemized for tax season disappear into drawers
dumped into the garbage when full. The capture of memories as data with
no real size, shape, or location heightens the illusion that what we sock
away today will be just as vital this time next year. But instead of stocking

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 The Technology of Memory

the warehouses in our minds, we export our memory into external h

drives, into cyberspace. We forget what needs remembering.

Casual Consciousness, Professional Recollection

The value of casual communication ushers us along. Both the effort of
writing letter-like e-mails and the effort of memory, individual and col-
lective, no longer reward as once they did. Why need any of us become
experts at remembering for anything other than novelty? Memorization
is no longer an efficient technology.
The decreasing relative efficiency of unaided memory augurs a failing
grip, especially on memories that interconnect over time. We could lose the
context that situates our pivotal moments and makes sense of them: not all
memories are created equal. Yet, in a further paradox, amid the creeping
purge of memorial technology, powerful memories take on the character
of endangered species. Stripped of context, their import becomes at once
more exaggerated and less comprehensible. Where once there had been
stories, told person-to-person, which linked loved ones to one another and
to events in the world, now we are more likely to share a fragmented resi-
due of similar individual memories - "the high school crush," "the psycho
ex," "the whole marriage thing," "the whole divorce thing." These cultural
catchphrases, meant to encapsulate narratives supposedly so common as to
render the details a waste of time, actually debilitate the practice of narra-
tive itself. Lives play out as series of episodes. The necessity of articulating
and rearticulating unbroken storylines about ourselves, rich in particular
detail, fades. In consequence, our accountability through time as unique,
particular selves tends to erode. While moral philosophers like Charles
Taylor struggle to defend an integral self who can't really be a differ-
ent person from one decade to the next, technologies of memory give us
license to personal proteanism. That single, unbroken life can be archived,
with the appropriate privacy guarantees, if one so chooses. If not, simply
archive the greatest - or worst - hits. But this seemingly free choice traps
us in a certain tension. Deconstructing unique, unified personal lives into
all-too-conventional episodes pressures our casual consciousness in two
contrary directions. On the one hand, we seek in our everyday lives to
enact ever-more-unique events, personalizing everything and insisting on
how special we are. Yet, on the other hand, we long for the "sense of togeth-
erness" that unites us in the shared experience of episodic synergy - the
mind-blowing concert as much as the bonding retreat, the deep love affair
as much as the bad breakup. The duration of these experiences - and the

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 James Poulos

trajectory of our relationships in them - isn't what matters. The mintin

of memories that can stand alone in a scrambled sea of data is. To the
extent that technologies of memory can help us through that process, we
learn to depend on them, deleting what we wish to suppress and archiving
what we wish to reliably outsource into virtual permanence. Permanent
things in the real world - non-negotiable facts about who we are, derived
directly from who we've been - take on the quality of obsolete impedi-
ments to the real-world contingence of modern life.
So instead of shedding the most painful memories, we retain only the
most indelible experiences, so that irrecoverable joys glimmer beneath
unforgettable pains. Happiness and unhappiness cease to be the titles
of narratives filled with cumulative experiences, complete with lessons,
becoming instead the names of isolated experiences themselves -
emotional sensations to be sought out or avoided on their own terms. The
encouragement is to live life à la carte, with no event linked to another
for any duration except by choice. Even on those terms, we may be con-
demned to let sleeping memories lie.
The effect of alienation upon memories, as with many freedoms, is
only as noticeable and woeful as it is cumulative. No single e-mail or
media file will do memory in, but the power of information and commu-
nications technology is precisely its cumulativity - the ease with which
vast, functionally infinite amounts of information once stored in the brain
can be digitally transcribed and kept ready for retrieval. Under such cir-
cumstances, the diminishing sharpness of our human recall seems a fair
trade for the instantaneous search logarithms and economies of scale
provided by the technological systematization of our memories. Absolute
memory (that is, such-and-such a fact) becomes much less important than
relative memory (that is, the path to a fact so it can be recalled when
needed). What we do recall is dwarfed in value by what we have the poten-
tial, through technology, to recall. The absolute memory of our machines
becomes paramount - running on technologies which cannot choose to
remember for us unless so instructed.
Wikipedia is outstanding for stories told anonymously that keep pace
with interest and whim. YouTube helps personalize the face of anonymous
storytelling. But emotional narratives of self and soul require that we
attend memories together, in person, constantly. Too often, the fixation on
autobiography that results from a breakdown of those narratives decays
into self-diagnostics competitions. The pop culture vernacular of roman-
tic relationships dishearteningly consists of descriptive exchanges of "my
baggage" or "my issues" or "my pattern." Brokenness and detachment

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 The Technology of Memory

nearly account for the only shared narrative, forming what the late
ologist Philip Rieff called "a communications system of loners."
Detachment from our memories can be painful, but, at the same tim
a therapeutic comfort. Systematization mitigates the pain of the a
ation that makes it possible. As the importance of remembering th
ourselves decreases, the guilt associated with forgetting them slides a
too. Archiving permits the reminder itself to become a commodity; m
ory, in a way, is outsourced. Hewlett Packard's ideal-typical Little
America, real-life fifth grader and movie actress Abigail Breslin, said
recent HP commercial, "I don't think I would remember anything, at
if I didn't have pictures." The responsibility of memory, with the m
discrimination it requires, may be comfortably subcontracted.

The New Life Science

A society made up of Abigail Breslins abdicates accountability fo

memory of its own life story. Stripped of context, the meaning of e
peels away from their significance. The sensibility of randomn
senseless - what begins as sensory overload ends in the dulling o
senses. How can the constituents of such a society speak meaning
with one another? In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche traces the
of forgiveness to men so overflowing with health that they instantly
get the injuries their enemies inflict. Our heroes of everyday life ex
a similarly fleeting present - only their survivorhood is characteriz
neurotic weakness as much as absentminded strength. Without a c
ent narrative of life and meaning, where does happiness come from
how is unhappiness evaded? If we, the freely choosing authentic selv
the contemporary liberal imagination, still possess the right to writ
own life stories and enact our own preferences, the technology of me
offers systematization as the template upon which to pattern our ac
The first lesson of science is the scientific method, and, in that res
science is method. In a society where choice of the method of one
is individual, the value of expert methodologies for living would see
be very high. Indeed, our bookshelves are choked with "self-help gu
oxymoronic manifestoes designed to persuade individuals having tro
effectively executing individualism that they can do it all by themsel
if only they follow the method of this or that lifestyle expert. Psych
not biology, is the definitive 'life science" of today.
But if you look closer into the "nature" of the new life science, y
find that the methodology of psychology departs from the depersona

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 James Poulos

rigor of the scientific method. A science of people, it seems reasonable

say, must meet humanity on its own terms. It must engage the way peop
live and think, not as if they were objective facts but as beings who liv
over time in complex, shared social worlds composed of one another
subjective experiences. The classic distinction between facts and valu
does not neatly apply to the realm, so broad in contemporary society, i
which values themselves must be studied and medically managed. Values
adopted contingently by individuals freed from narrative memory must
systematized at a level general enough to encompass a protean diversity
meant to be infinite over time.

Memory Systematized
Davidson shows us how the systematization of alienated memory works
in his critique of Wells's futurist 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come.
He begins by asking why Wells, a devotee to the end of utopia by the
means of science, makes his case for such progress by the very unscientific
means of fiction, concluding that he does so because he

knows that fiction persuades where logic fails, since the human mind,
though modern enough in some ways, has its old contrary habit of accept-
ing the truths of art and rejecting the truths of science. This is an odd role
in which to find the advocate of a scientifically controlled world-order.

To the contrary, it is in fact the only role in which to find that advocate.
The requirement for a world controlled by scientific experts, as Wells
admits, is "a comprehensive faith" in the desirability of social scientific con-
trol. This present faith reflects its future object - "socialistic, cosmopolitan,
and creative" human order. Predicated on a social fact which cannot be
proven true because it exists only in the future, the requisite faith in turning
society over to expert scientific management turns out to be unscientific.
The justification of what Wells calls the "Lifetime Plan" for world
social order mirrors the justification for psychological management of
individual "life plans." "For the masses," as Davidson puts it in his brief
against Wellsianism, "the old naïve wonder at the prodigies of science has
dwindled to a passive expectation that anything can happen; and that,
since it can, it probably will." With memory alienated and systematized,
this passive expectation applies just as well to one's personal life. People
change unpredictably; motives are impermanent and inscrutable; power-
less to predict events, one can only refine one's attitudes of preparation
for, experience of, and reaction to them.

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 The Technology of Memory

The virtue of the predictable past yields to the value of expect

the unexpected. Future facts determine present values, and past p
become proof of the need to improve one's capacity to cope. Unmanag
memories - memories which cannot be systematically sorted - take o
character of obstacles to the enjoyment of inevitable change, guaranto
unnecessary pain. The new life sciences reject the circularity of memo
an effort to "get over" old narratives. In Rieff 's terms, the "progressi
conception of an evolution that never repeats replaces remembrance w
a telos of scientific fatalism. Under well-managed progress, systematiz
and alienation are both the cost and standard of living. Practically sp
ing, that is, the benefit is never being painfully stuck in the past, whil
cost is the lived memory of that past. Put in pop culture terms, cons
the world of The Simpsons - a world in which only the most trauma
events (such as the death of Ned Flanders's wife Maude) can regist
the timeless limbo that keeps every character the same age. The episo
character of The Simpsons belies its false historicity, in which, at the
cretion of its revolving team of writers, sometimes characters have a
and sometimes they don't. Managing this repressive trick in real life
accordance with our fleeting passions and interests, is a task poorly su
to the non-expert. Technologies of memory, optimized by the experts
are adequately compensated for their service, keep us open to change
the world no matter how dedicated we are to our private idiosyncras
Thus the technology of memory has political implications. Th
evolutionism seems revolutionary. Under managed systematization
purpose of the technology of memory is to maintain the potency of
seeming. Revolutionary feelings - those sudden changes in sensa
that Nietzsche apotheosized as "a perpetual movement between high a
low" - close the gap between experience and subject, intensifying
lengthening the present. The longer the present, and the more urgent
future, the lesser the need for memories. This limitation is made to
liberating instead. Turning over memory to systematization prom
the following return on alienation: despite the inevitability of all sor
revolutionary innovations, we have the capacity to embrace them. W
will be painlessly - perhaps even joyfully - changed.

All Memory, No Remembrance?

Thus lodged in a present that no longer belongs to us, we find oursel
like Jorge Luis Borges's character Funes, who fell off a horse to disc
he could remember perfectly everything he experienced thereafter.

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 James Poulos

noted that Funes is supremely memorious but holds no remembrance of

things truly past - he remembers only what he has learned since becom-
ing able to remember everything. Thus, in Borges's tale, he develops
dark and haunted taste for learning ancient languages in ten minute
time and filling the interminable hours reciting tomes he had only glance
at. Funes is all knowledge and no wisdom, all events and no narrative. He
knows more about an eyelash than he does about himself, for now, prop
erly speaking, he has no self.
The technology of memory can tell us everything - or the most
refined selection of things - but it cannot tell us how to refine or choose.
There is nothing in accordance with which to choose. The task of sup
plying a rationale will be left to those who manage our memories for us
"To be memorious and yet not a remembrancer," Rieff suggests, "herald
a technological super-successor" to the human intellect: "Imagine an
idiot savant as forerunner of the computer data bank." He refers us to th
vaudevillian Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps, a freak capable
of total recall, unable to judge what not to remember or even say. Lik
Rieff, Davidson recognized the question that follows the surrender of ou
memory to systematization - Why noi? Mistaken as a powerful expressio
of confident openness, Why «oí? perhaps better captures the final passivity
of he who cannot remember what, or how, to remember.
A very modern farce it is when our amateur technologists of memory
seek to push the deconstruction of remembrance into aspiringly post
modern territory. Brave-New- Worlders like Microsoft computer eng
neer Gordon Bell have stepped through the looking glass of memoriou
technology. Like Aldous Huxley studying his own acid trips, Bell is both
memory expert and memory subject. As a so-called "lifeblogger" or "life
logger," he uses a program called MyLifeBits, along with a SenseCam
(a small camera worn around his neck), to archive everything he doe
All his documents, sent and seen, are scanned. Every sixty seconds th
SenseCam goes off. In a telling admission, Bell has told Fast Company
magazine that lifeblogging "gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness.
can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something
now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it." Regrettably, notes Ar
Technica's Nate Anderson, "Bell's data store has grown so large and diffi-
cult to search that he can often recall an event but has difficulty in pullin
up the computer records of it." Even the memory experts, it seems, nee
experts to adjudicate their memories.
When memories are purely instrumental, called up or suppressed a
technology permits, the need for experts in memory management an

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 The Technology of Memory

memory selection grows apace. The hijinks that memory tech

share with the rest of us have been lampooned in such books as
Hides the Hurt (where a nomenclature consultant must rename
town) and films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (wh
Lacuna Corporation zaps unwanted specimens from pickled life s
Meanwhile, in real life, scientists continue working toward th
that will block or even delete unwanted memories. Under pressure
those in pain, memories seem likely to continue being alienated
properly accredited organization is able to do so systematically. As
more exclusively into the habit of casual communication and outso
remembrance, our more informal arrangements of memorial t
ogy will increase both the incentive and the need for more formal
Nonetheless, our power to keep possession of our memories, sep
and together, remains our own.

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