In this session for Digital Geographies we return to some of the ways in which studying technologies, more broadly, asks searching questions about the nature of what it means to be ‘human’.
Earlier in the module we explored the ways that technologies can be understood as prostheses, supports that are ‘added on’ to our biological bodies to enable us to do things we otherwise cannot. This ranges from a hammer to an astronaut’s spacesuit or a VR headset.
Anthropologists, neuroscientists and philosophers alike have all, in their own ways, identified the significance of our prosthetic capacity of ‘externalising’ memory—from cutting notches in wood to writing on paper and then to taking selfies we upload to social media. Our technical capacities not only allow us to physically alter, and indeed entirely rebuild, our environment (for better and for worse – i.e. climate change) they also allow us to record and recall information and ideas outside of our embodied memory.
To study digital media is to study the latest phase of a process that we have been undergoing for over eight millennia; the process of recording and recalling, and indeed sharing, memories external to our bodies. The philosophers Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, amongst others, name this a process of ‘grammatisation’, which is the capturing and codifying of thought as language and recording it materially, and digitally, for recall and sharing.
All of this may seem esoteric and, possibly confusing. The lecture will provide examples and explanations that, I hope, demonstrate that ‘memory’ is an important context for the study of digital media. I argue that many of the ways that we have already been discussing our uses of digital technologies, especially social media, are (implicitly) concerned with memory.
Lecture slides
N.B. For the purposes of the lecture, there are some slides missing from this version – you still have access to all of the information.
Readings
- Elwood, S., & Mitchell, K. (2015). Technology, memory, and collective knowing. Cultural Geographies, 22(1), 147-154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014556062
- Kinsley, S. (2015). Memory programmes: the industrial retention of collective life. Cultural Geographies, 22(1), 155-175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014555658