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· · · · · · A E C F O R U M - "M E M E S I S" · · · · ·
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Beyond Storage and Retrieval
Some remarks on 'Media Memory'
by Geert Lovink
*
The supposively neutral and scientific 'meme' discours poses the
question how 'information' travels trough time. There is the
preassumption of an imaginative future, which will no longer be able to
cope with the output of all the data, produced in our present (cq. our
ancesters past). In this vitalist information theory, 'memes' are
urged to compete with each other in a dramatized struggle over life and
death, in favour of the attention of the coming race of superiour info-
navigators, the 'post humans'. Appearantly, the Future can not decide
itself, what to remember and what to forget. It is the task of the
current computer experts, to decide over the 'past of the future' and
let neo-Darwinist programs do the selection, before others will do. But
who will set the rules and parameters for the competition called 'The
Survival of the Fittest Information'?
The media culture at the fin de millennium is obsessed with the
Storage Question. Which information will we, planet Earth, take with us
into the next century? This storage panic is even overshadowed by the
even greater fear for 'information overload'. Today's fight over the
hearts of the people (and tomorrow's history) can only be won with a
deep knowledge of the 'attention span' of the user-masses, out there.
Mediocre homepages, outmoded advertisement, boring databases and third
class imagery are considered 'dead information'. What makes slumbering
'content' interesting and 'alive' seems to be the amount of 'visitors',
their communication inside a particular context and their actual
interaction with a specific cloud of data. All other stored materials,
on-line or not, with or without fancy design or the latest software,
are presumed non-existing, and will be in the future. That's the
hardcore logic of this digital age: attract users, or get toasted.
The first generation of specialists still considers the computer as a
logical, mathematical 'number crunching machine'. The computation tool
is seen as a product from both World War Two and the Cold War and its
military pre-history is still present in all current machines. Storage
and retrieval in this context are merely commands, not social
processes with possible historical implications. The architecture of
the hardware is determinating the software. Autonomous processes and
the appearance of large numbers of users inside computer networks
therefor do not exist as such for these pioneer-programmers. Dr.
Frankenstein and the T-1000 remain what they are, namely popular
myths, produced by the mass-entertainment business. The same can be
said about New Age cyberculture and all Internet hype. Hardcore
computer knowledge is still shared by a small amount of programmers
(and hackers) and so is their philosophy (Turing) and archeology of the
computer, which goes back to late mediaval times (Lullus).
In the past decades, these owners of the engineer knowledge, have (or
have not) learned to deal with the inherent 'instrumental rationality'
of the computer and all related automation processes. The mainly
academic community focused, at best, on topics like privacy, social
responsibility in labour/capital relations, links with military-
industrial-complex, etc. But not with the computer as a medium. The
self-evident, almost unconcious relation we nowadays make between the
computer, its unavoidable merger with television and 'the media' seems
alien to the enigeneers, hackers and programmers of the first hour.
Virtual Reality still is in the first place a technology used for
scientific visualization, not for entertainment. The gap between
computer research and development and the 'networks for the masses' is
as big as allways, despite the 'digital revolution'.
'Media Memory' as a part of the Ars Electronica 96 Festival, poses the
question how we will make the connection between 'collective memory'
and the new media. In the year '50 plus 1' after the victory over
fascism in 1945, the Holocaust still is the prime test case how media
and memory should relate to each other (also, historically of course,
Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the inventention of the computer are deeply
interwoven). James Young, in his book on the history and meaning of
Holocaust memorials, 'The Texture of Memory', prefers to call it
'collected memory'. "The society's memory might be regarded as an
aggregate collection of it's members' many, often competing memories.
If societies remember, it is only insofar as their institutions and
rituals organize, shape, even inspire their constituents' mememories.
For a society's memory cannot exist outside of those people who do the
remembering - even if such memory happens to be at the society's
bidding, in its name." Media memory, in this context, could be the way
in which society actively uses the stored information about the past.
With Young we could speak of an "art of public memory" in which large,
inactive archives will play an important role in the future, as
extensions of the existing sites of memory.
Media memory is embedded in the way people are using machines, it is an
active process of contructing the past, not a mere technical one, which
can be reduced to 'storage' and 'retrieval'. For Young the sites of
memory range from "archive to museums, parades to moments of silence,
memorial gardens to resistance monuments, ruins to commemorative fast
days, national malls to a family's Jahrzeit candle." And how will the
memory of Holocaust within cyberspace look like, how will it relate to
the existing museums, archives, films and tv-programs, libraries,
education in schools and the hugh variety of artworks, as descibed in
James Youngs book? This organization of 'collected memory' goes beyond
the now often discussed ways the brain functions and the myths about
'uploading', as Hans Moravec describes it. Media memory asks about the
role of the machines in the social process of remembering and the
contribution of technology in the everyday life dialogue with the past,
how to combine the passive 'storage' with active ways of 'memory'. This
goes even beyond the quest for a virtual architecture and the design of
large on-line systems which will give us access to historical
information. Specially in the relation to fascism, media memory, being
self-reflexive, should also deal with 'instrumental rationality' and
the role of the ordinary, task-oriented engineers of cyberspace.
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