the aggregations of memory

When you are not acting like yourself . . .that's an everyday thing for everyone, but it can be a bit sinister . . .It's like the opposite of Unite

We remember by rebuilding the past. Aggregating fragments of feeling and sensation. Images, words, intensities. The past is already distributed and we have no choice but to engage in acts of forensic reconstruction. Our lifestreams are more like a delta (the Mississippi or the Mekong) than a river.

Burial's music may not mean that much to you if you've never heard 2step or jungle. For me it feels sodden in longing for musics that eschewed the retro pleasures of the past. A paradox of futurist nostalgia. He's assembled elements of the past (beats, vocals) that feel dislocated - undead divas, a gnostic rave severed from the flesh.

Burial provides clues for the future of memory. Memories has always been tied to things in the world - landscapes, artifacts, people. And we've struggled to create collective memories that will outlast our little lives: of myths & stories, of sacred places, of uniting events, of books & machines. The digital traces of our lives (that so vex us in terms of control & privacy) are part of that stew. They will be subject to interpretation & reinterpretation - not always in a manner constructive or positive.

Perhaps someone else will reconstruct my life from its myriad traces. Creating nostalgia for an identity who never existed.

Memory & links

Memory is sometimes thought of a filing system. However all our memories appear to be connected with each other. Many techniques that aim to improve recall do so by establishing connections between new items to be remembered and those we know well already. I'm a bit unconvinced by most metaphors between the brain and the internet but this one interests me. It implies that our techniques for memory retrieval are a little Googlesque. It's the links that matter, baby. It triggers a fantasy of sentient memes trying to optimize their rankings in our brains so they are made to stick. It's all about the connections.

We tend to forget that remembering is an act of reconstruction. The file does not come out of the system in one piece. We must rebuild events from fragments. Depending on context, we may view fragments is a positive or negative light. These multiple, continuous reconstructions contrast with our image of our lives as a single, autobiographical thread. Instead there's a collage (tapestry seems rather too ordered) of small pieces, loosely joined. A world held together by emotional tags. OurStory is an interesting experiment but I would prefer an "OurStories", something mashed and multiple, consistently inconsistent. Social software as Rashomon. What would you tag?

My mind is a blank

Writing is a relatively new technology. Oral cultures are reliant on the memories of their members. Whilst there might be a division of memorial labour in such societies, everyone must remember somethings. If only one person remembers something then when they are gone, it is forgotten.

I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable.

Forgetting can be embarrassing. And it can also be soothing. Ever since I read Funes the Memorious, I have been convinced that forgetting has its uses as well its perils. Funes is forced to live in a world without abstraction because he can remember every detail. The possibility of a world without gaps, of a perfect record of information is not comforting for Borges. The Library of Babel is a very disturbing place indeed. A model of information overload.

My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

We worry a lot about organisational forgetting. Records must be kept (and if they aren't then expensive litigation might ensue). However one way of dealing with information overload is forgetting old stuff (as well as ignoring new stuff). So most organisations have delegated the act of remembering to Record Management & associated systems.

Is this an efficient move? And is it an effective one?