Quotes
Geert Lovink
Beyond Storage and Retrieval
Some remarks on "Media Memory"
"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."