{"id":4839,"date":"2012-12-10T14:14:56","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T14:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=4839"},"modified":"2012-12-10T14:14:56","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T14:14:56","slug":"memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

We keep books because they are personal souvenirs of the past – physical reminders of the feelings we had while reading them.\u00a0 The same goes for concert programs and tickets for sporting events, which many people keep. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As more of our life goes online, we risk losing such souvenirs.\u00a0 Only the online record itself may provide a long-term reminder of something, or someone.
\nOn the other hand, the web makes it vastly easier to bring to wide attention something or someone who should be remembered.\u00a0 In the early days of photography, photographers recorded memorable events, such as weddings and Presidential inaugurations. \u00a0Susan Sontag noticed that something changed as photography ceased to be only done by professionals and became a democratic pastime: the relationship between events and photographs switched. \u00a0Now events were memorable (and remembered) precisely because they had been photographed.\u00a0\u00a0 The web is effecting the same reversal, I believe.
\nI can record a person<\/a> of great influence on my life, who would otherwise be entirely forgotten to history, or people whom I never met, but whose words and actions have affected mine, for example, the activist-poets Vadim Delone<\/a>, or Robert Southwell<\/a>.\u00a0 I can record people who think differently to the verbal paradigm which so dominates contemporary western culture – the\u00a0 matherati<\/a>, say, or musical thinkers<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 I can even use the Web to find and trace the genealogy<\/a> of some of my own musical thinking, say, and then record for posterity these cross-generational networks of connections.\u00a0 Since so much of written history is by definition written by people au fait<\/em> with language-based thought, it is particularly important that minority, non-language thinkers are not forgotten. (Many more people know, for instance, of the writers of Japanese haiku poetry in the Edo period than do of the ordinary people who solved temple geometry problems, the Sangaku<\/a>.)
\nThe souvenirs I mention above are mostly personal, perhaps of little interest to anyone else. \u00a0The same became true of photographs, early in their adoption. \u00a0The Web also lets us record for posterity events and people of much wider significance. \u00a0 Perhaps the best recent example I know is Normblog’s admirable and riveting series of Holocaust stories, Figures from a Dark Time<\/a>.\u00a0 Apparently not everyone agrees that this series is worth doing.\u00a0 Let me add my strong opinion that this recording is both necessary and important, and we should all be very grateful for Norm’s efforts.\u00a0 After 9\/11, the New York Times<\/em> published short obituaries of every person killed in the attack.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Although it may be too late, we should be aiming for the same in remembering the Holocaust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We keep books because they are personal souvenirs of the past – physical reminders of the feelings we had while reading them.\u00a0 The same goes for concert programs and tickets for sporting events, which many people keep. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As more of our life goes online, we risk losing such souvenirs.\u00a0 Only the online record itself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heroes","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2012","m12","d10","h14"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}