2,000 words ... at last!

Spike finished her essay on memory and technology today ... at looooooooooooooong last (and just a teensy-weensy bit late).  But it's done and it's a more than decent job.

We've talked about its content quite a bit as Spike read articles, chapters in books and pages on the web.  I reacted instinctively against assertions that new technologies are degrading our human capacity for personal and collective memory.  I thought "bullshit" and "Luddites".  It's always wearing to read cultural Cassandras bemoaning some new fangled thing and the loss of some idealised (never extant) golden age.  I accept that change can be unsettling but just because  technology advances that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to Hell in a handcart (as some guy called Huyssen seemed to suggest).  Get with it man.  We're human.  We forget.  it's part of the condition (a position I was glad to see endorsed by some uber-smart American cultural theorist by the name of Wendy Chun).  God, think how ghastly the alternative could be: to never forget; to remember everything?  No thanks.

Huyssen's wailing conservatism made me think of Derrida For Beginners an excellent introductory text from the late 1980 by the Pluto Press.  It re-told in the inimitable graphic novel style of that series Plato's record of Socrates' discourse on the new technology of writing.  We were going to Hell in a handcart way back then as well.  (It took a user of writing to pass on the mad-Greek's nonsense but I'm sure Socrates and Huyssen would have us skip lightly over that little irony).  I mentioned this to Spike.  I think it helped.

Here he is then, in a translation from The Phaedrus.  A brave, brilliant man it seems.  One who was prepared to die on a point of principle.  But clearly, on some questions, daft as a brush.  Socrates:

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus 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. 
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