Excellent visualization of explosion in data storage courtesy of The Washington Post accompanying “Exabytes: Documenting the ‘digital age’ and huge growth in computing capacity.”
File under the evolution of prosthetic memory. More to come on that.
Click the chart for a better image.
H/T: Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front
Some blogs have a regular post each week (sometimes cleverly titled, unlike mine) in which they list a bunch of links that they think readers might enjoy visiting. Without being regular about it, I have in the past put up similar posts, and now may be good time to revisit the format. So here are some items that, had I more time, may have generated something more than passing reference, but, as it stands …
Our Father, who art in pixels,
linked be Thy name,
Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done,
on Explorer as it is on Firefox.
Give us this day our daily app,
and forgive us our spam,
as we forgive those
who spam against us,
and lead us not into aggregation,
but deliver us from e-vil. Amen.
Two pieces that will either excite you or depress you depending on your disposition:
And, finally, on publishing revolutions old and new:
In 1993, at a gathering in honor of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich spoke of Ellul’s influence on his own thinking, particularly through Ellul’s theorizing of technique. Along the way, Illich gives us this intriguing genealogy of his first encounter with Ellul’s work:
La technique entered my existence in 1965 in Santa Barbara, the day when, at Robert Hutchins’s Center, John Wilkinson gave me a copy of The Technological Society that he had just translated, following up on the strong recommendation of Aldous Huxley.
The author of Brave New World clearly found much to admire in Ellul. Illich goes on to explain the advantage conferred by appropriating Ellul’s analytical concept:
I have adopted this Ellulian concept because it permits me to identify – in education, transport, modern medical and scientific activities – the threshold at which these projects absorb, conceptually and physically, the client into the tool; the threshold where the products of consumption change into things which themselves consume; the threshold where the milieu of technique transforms into numbers those who are entrapped in it; the threshold where technology is decisively transformed into Moloch, the system.
That, of course, is a rather grim analysis of the imperialism of technique, which for Ellul is not simply equated with technology. In The Technological Society
Echoing McLuhan on media as extensions of man, Illich continues in dire vein:
Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one’s whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception. We submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality.
Precisely (and perversely) where we have adopted a tool to connect us with reality, we have lost touch with reality.
It is interesting in the end to note the point to which Illich brings his appreciation of Ellul and his own indictment of technological society:
Therefore, it appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages. This reclaiming of the senses, this promptitude to obey experience, the chaste look that the Rule of St. Benedict opposes to the cupiditas oculorum (lust of the eyes), seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.
One is reminded of the conclusion of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Memory, knowledge, identity, technology — these are intimately bound together and it would be difficult to disentangle one from the others. What is it to know something if not to remember it? Beyond the biological facts of my existence what constitutes my identity more significantly than my memory? What could I remember without technologies including writing, books, pictures, videos, and more? Or to put it in a more practical way, what degree of panic might ensue if your Facebook profile were suddenly and irrevocably deleted? Or if your smart phone were to pass into the hands of another? Of if you lost your flash drive? Pushing the clock back just a little, we might have similarly asked about the loss of a diary or photo albums.
The connection among these four, particularly memory and technology, is established as early as the Platonic dialogs, most famously the Phaedrus in which Socrates criticizes writing for its harmful effects on internal memory and knowledge. What we store in written texts (or hard drives, or “the cloud”) we do not remember ourselves and thus do not truly know it. The form of this debate recurs throughout the subsequent history of technology all the way to the present debates over the relative merits of computers and the Internet for learning and education. And in these debates it is almost de rigueur to begin by citing Plato’s Phaedrus either the reinstall or dismiss the Socratic critique. Neil Postman began his book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
The rejoinder comes quickly though: Surely Socrates failed to appreciate the gains in knowledge that writing would make possible. And what if I offload information to external memory, this simply frees my mind for more significant tasks. There is, of course, an implicit denigration of mere memory in this rebuttal to Socrates.
Yet some tension, some uneasiness remains. Otherwise the critique would not continue resurfacing and it wouldn’t elicit such strong push back when it did. In other words, the critique seems to strike at a nerve, a sensitive one at that, and when again we consider the intimate interrelationship of memory with our ideas about knowledge and education and with the formation and maintenance of our identities it is not surprising at all. A few posts down I cited Illich’s claim that
What anthropologists distinguish as ‘cultures’ the historian of mental spaces might distinguish as different ‘memories.’ The way to recall, to remember, has a history which is, to some degree, distinct from the history of the substance that is remembered.
I’m wondering now whether it might also be true that a history of personal identity or of individuality could be told through a history of memory and its external supports. Might we be able to argue that individualism is a function of technologies of memory that allow a person to create and sustain his own history apart from that of the larger society?
In any case, memory has captured my attention and fascinating questions are following hard. What is memory anyway, what is it to remember a name, a look, a person, a fact, a feeling, where something is, how to do something, or simply to do something? What do we remember when we remember? How do we remember? Why do we remember? And, of course, how have the answers to all of these questions evolved along with the development of technology from the written word to the external hard drive?
On that last note, I wonder if our choice to call a computer’s capacity to store data “memory” has not in turn affected how we think of our own memory. I’m especially thinking of a flash drive that we hold in hand and equate with stored memory. In this device I keep my pictures, my documents, my videos, my memories — memory, or a certain conception of it, is objectified, reified. Is memory merely mental storage? Or has this metaphor atrophied our understanding of memory?
Of course, metaphors for memory are nothing new. I’m beginning to explore some of these ideas with Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting
From Tamara Plakins Thornton’s Handwriting in America: A Cultural History
To reconstruct the colonial world of handwriting, we must also attend to its setting within the world of the printing press. Here the eighteenth century is especially critical . . . print underwent a qualitative change, now defining a medium that was characteristically abstract, impersonal, and, it was sometimes feared, duplicitous. The quantitative growth of printing edged out the use of script in many instances, but the qualitative change in print lent new meaning to handwriting, providing script with a symbolic function even as it diminshed its practical utility. If print entailed self-negation, then by contrast script would entail the explicit presentation of self. The printed page might be “void of all characters,” but the handwritten one would present the self to its readers . . .
And,
Where print was defined by dissociation from the hand, script took its definition from its relationship to the hand. Where print was impersonal, script emanated from the person in as intimate a manner as possible. Where print was opaque, even duplicitous, script was transparent and sincere . . . . handwriting functioned as a medium of the self.
Diminished practical utility = heightened symbolic function
Might this be a useful formula for understanding what can happen when a new technology displaces an old one? Plug in e-readers and books, for example.
On another note, would there have been a “self” needing to present itself to begin with apart from print? So another principle: an older technology may be appropriated to address/redress conditions arising from a newer technology.
L.M. Sacasas 