Memory: Thucydides and the shallows
The ancients understood the centrality of human memory in cultivating wisdom. The purpose of knowledge, for them, was to change both the individual and society to move them closer to virtue. They knew the danger of externalizing memory, but technology moved forward anyway. And now we find ourselves in the "shallows", where the digital logic takes over, and memory fails.
- Thucydides recounting Pericles' funeral oration
- Socrates' worry that writing would erode our ability to remember
- Anecdote about Augustine reading silently
- Aristotle: "experience is formed of many memories" (HF 131)
- The physical is what contains our memory (HF 188)
- Meanwhile, I can't remember my wife's phone number
- How tools work: extend, eliminate, retrieve, reverse (GTC 104, HF 73)
- "Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made personal memory inadequate" (McLuhan 174)
- Sparkism: worship of knowledge (HF 88)
- Anecdote in Understanding Media about the chinese guy (McLuhan 63)
- Studies about data entry, hyperlinks (Shallows)
- "The internet is therefore a new kind of collective memory, selecting for what is disposable and preserving it indefinitely - it is a machine for producing what is forgettable by rendering it unforgettable." (Barba-Kay, 36)
- "Our tools formally shape us in a way unlike and incomparable to the instrumental way we shape them" (HF 140)
When Theuth came to show King Thamus his inventions - arithmetic, calculation, geometry, astronomy, draughts, and dice - he gave special attention to the invention of letters, saying that it would make the Egyptians wiser, and give them better memories. But Thamus wisely replied:
O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
| This story is related to us in Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates identifies not only the idea that written media erode the writer's ability to remember, leaving only the appearance of wisdom, but also the inability of the inventor of a thing to understand its implications. Maybe this is because they rely too heavily on their own inventions.
| In any case, the suspicion of communication technology illustrated by this anecdote isn't mere curmudgeonliness, but rather an appreciation for the role memory serves in forming us. As Aristotle says in his Metaphysics:
Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. And experience seems pretty much like science and art, but really science and art come to men through experience.
[https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html]
To the extent that we fail to train our memory, we also fail to experience the world, living instead inside the sophistry of our own minds - flattering ourselves that we are wise, while having no real substance.
For Aristotle, the purpose of knowledge was to cultivate wisdom, virtue, and ultimately "eudamonia", or human flourishing. And this could not be done in isolation; virtue and happiness depend on a framework of community life for the completion of the individual. This community - or polis - is not something that arises naturally. It must be intentionally built by people in posession of the very virtues it is intended to protect and encourage.
| Elaborate on why memory matters, what does it get us, in a positive sense?
Theuth had a point when he called letters an "an elixir of memory"; writing is the only reason we still have access to Plato's own dialogues. The medium of the written word allowed Plato to extend himself across space and time, greatly magnifying his influence on Western civilization.
This is just how technology works. In Marshall McLuhan's Laws of Media, he lays out four ways in which a new technology affects the society that adopts it, which he calls the "Tetrad of Media Effects":
- What does the medium enhance?
- What does the medium make obsolete?
- What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
- What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects]
Normally, a new technology is evaluated primarily by what new abilities it confers to the user, leaving the other three aspects unexplored, only to be realized years down the road when the consequences of its adoption are manifest.
To apply this to the written word, we can see that King Thamus correctly identified the danger in adopting letters: that they "will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls". In other words, the written word has made memory obsolete (at least partially).
To fill out the final two points of the Tetrad, the written word also "retrieved" earlier forms of visual language, such as engravings on stone or tablets, and "reversed" into the extremes of censorship in the instances where books have been confiscated or destroyed.
The problem with the written word is not just that it causes our faculties to atrophy through disuse. It also actively alienates our memories from our minds by placing them elsewhere. Whatever the benefits of written media for durability, transmissibility, or convenient retrieval, when we write something down it is less likely to live on in us.
Part of this effect has to do with the inadequacy of our memory to fit as much as can be written down - this became increasingly true as written media progressed to its printed and digital forms. As McLuhan says, "print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made personal memory inadequate". [McLuhan 174]
But another facet of the decreasing ability of literate humans to remember is due to the natural response of humans to take the path of least resistance by choosing - consciously or subconsciously - not to remember. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, the very act of writing something down (or entering it into a computer) makes us less likely to remember it:
[Studies from the shallows]
Because we have gone through the process of expressing an idea in what we think is a durable medium, we no longer consider that information of crucial importance and are more likely to let it pass from our minds.
This effect is seen at scale in the internet, which increasingly defines our waking hours. At work, we answer emails, write reports, and fill out forms, while in our free time we consume some tiny percentage of the 6 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every second.
[https://photutorial.com/how-many-videos-on-youtube/]
Because of the inadequacy of memory in the face of this onslaught of information, we lose the ability to sort the precious from the disposable. This in turn leads to the tendency to hoard every scrap of information we come across, just in case. As Anton Barba-Kay puts it,
The internet is therefore a new kind of collective memory, selecting for what is disposable and preserving it indefinitely - it is a machine for producing what is forgettable by rendering it unforgettable. [Barba-Kay, 36]
This costs us very little, and increasingly less as storage technology progresses. So instead of being dismayed by the vanity of this project, we celebrate it by calling it "big data" and attempting to derive "insights" from it through analysis. This in turn leads to a fetishization of data as such, and ever-increasing attempts to collect it from whatever sources are at our disposal. This in turn leads to more complex analysis machines (which we aspirationally call "intelligence"), which produce yet more content.
The implication is that we believe information - in whatever form - can save us.
Sparkism: worship of knowledge (HF 88)