Week 4 – Technology replacing memory?

This week’s lecture and readings focused on memory and perception, and also cognitive function. What I found most interesting was the reading by Bernard Stiegler. The fundamental question is whether technology is replacing our memory? A really interesting conversation came up within our tutorial group where we discussed our increasing reliance on technology to ‘remember’. We all know that feeling where you’ve spent ages trying to get the angle right, the lighting, the focus that you in fact miss out on the moment at hand. We’re so focused on capturing the moment incase we forget that we don’t actually ‘remember’ in the first place. During the NYE fireworks last year my friend was so focused on capturing the best video of the fireworks that she completely forgot to enjoy the experience. She was basically watching the fireworks through the screen of her phone. Well what difference does that make to watching it live on TV? Not much, I say. Afterwards she said she was definitely not going to be filming the fireworks next year because she didn’t get to enjoy the fireworks.

At that point I realised that this is something we are all guilty of. Our constant reliance on technology to remember for us that it takes away from our ability to fully experience a certain situation. This takes us back to Plato’s fear that the alphabet would ruin our ability to remember, and that we would lose the memory function in our brain. Again drawing on my own experience I find this to be true. When I was still in primary school, before there were smartphones, I used to remember all the important phone numbers (my best friend’s home number, now nobody uses the home phone…) in my head and be able to recall them. How many of you still do this? Honestly speaking I can only remember one phone number off the top of my head and that’s my dad’s.

There are countless other things that we now rely on technology to remember for us. Birthdays. Who needs to remember when Facebook can remind you? No need to remember when a TV show is on, apps like Zeebox will remind you! Is there really anything that we remember using solely our own memory? I draw from a quote I found interesting in the reading by Stiegler:

“We exteriorize in contemporary mnemotechnical equipment more and more cognitive functions, and correlatively we are losing more and more knowledge which is then delegated to equipment, but also to service industries which can network them, control them, formalize them, model them, and perhaps destroy them – for these knowledges, escaping our grasp, induce an “obsolescence of the human”, who finds itself more and more at a loss, and interiorly empty.

Is Facebook not just another format for a diary? To help us remember? As Wendy Chun says the ontology of digital media is defined by memory, from content to purpose, from hardware to software. It certainly is a huge aspect of it, as well as of course being a communicative tool. But the reason we upload photos and albums on there is in part to log our daily lives and in utilising sites such as Facebook in this way we are in fact servicing these industries and enabling them to persist and survive. If Facebook were to be deleted one day, would all our memories disappear with it? Are we now just empty shells that rely on exterior technologies to not only remember for us but become knowledge? These thoughts are perplexing, and the more questions I ask the more questions I have.

Stiegler points out, “the more improved the automobile becomes, the less we know how to drive – the GPS system assisting the driver in his driving will replace him altogether : it will teleguide the vehicle by a system of automatic driving –: we lose our sensori-motor schema formalized by the system as it becomes automatic.” But at the same time, I can understand Chun’s point that a machine alone cannot turn “an information explosion into a knowledge explosion”. There needs to be a constant interaction with human knowledge as even computer memory can be ephemeral.

Week 3 – Media Ecologies

This week’s topic of metacommunication and media ecology really challenged me to reflect on my own communicative processes and look for specific patterns of relation within them. Bateson’s theory of metacommunication suggests that there is a higher level of context to the supposed linear state of communication. Specifically, he refers to ‘redundancy’ as a pattern and the difference in communication that arises from different mediums. This prompted me to think about how differently I communicate to people through email versus text messages or face to face conversation.

The medium carries with it specific pre-conditioned connotations that we inadvertently adhere to. This is as Neil Postman says, ‘an environment is a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling and behaving’. 

The language and format of an email is fundamentally different to the informal approach taken through text messages. Bateson says that every communication involves a rich pattern of a whole bunch of events and this rich pattern, which tells us about the full nature of the communication taking place is the ‘real’ communication. He suggests that there is more ‘redundancy’ in face to face communication than email, which is true, but emoticons in text messages help to counteract this.

This takes us to the second element of this week’s theories and that is media ecology. I guess what we mean by media ecologies is instead of seeing media as something that exists on its own, it should be seen as an environment that thrives on constant interaction. Traditionally we would see the media as an isolated element, singled out as its own entity. But media ecologies focuses on the interaction and interplay of a whole bunch of different elements, including human and non-human interactions.

From the readings, Milberry describes media ecology as ‘a theory about the complex interplay between humans, technology, media and the environment with the aim of increasing awareness of mutual effects’. Its about the connections that change everything that connect.

References

Bateson, Gregory (2000) ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind Chicago: Chicago University Press: 177-183 (sections 1-11).

Media Ecology Association ‘What is Media Ecology’ <http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/>

Milberry, Kate (n.d.) ‘Media Ecology’, Oxford Bibliographies, <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0054.xml#>

Week 2 – Ideas about media and communication

This weeks readings were by Murphie and Potts which were quite extensive though I found extremely interesting. The readings explored the different approaches so far by various thinkers and their approach to the relationship between media and culture. There were a lot of conflicting views in the reading and different theorists critiquing each other. The one I most agreed with was the cultural materialism approach which takes into account the social and cultural context in which a technology is introduced.

I don’t believe that technology exists as an isolated entity that is free from social or cultural impact. An excellent example of this is the idea that not all inventions will become successful, and a lot of that success is pinned upon this idea of being ‘the right place at the right time’ kind of notion. Hence, the arguments made by McLuhan that ‘the medium is the message’ or the idea that ‘technology is neutral’ is perhaps invalid.

A technology emerges as a response to a specific set of cultural and social needs that Winston calls ‘supervening social necessities’ in reference to the diverse social forces that affect the process of innovation. Immediately the advent of social media sites such as Facebook came to mind. After watching the movie ‘The Social Network’ and discovering why Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook it shed light on this perspective. It’s creation was a response to the social need of teenagers for constant affirmation from their peers and essentially a popularity contest. If we look at Twitter it was a combination of the properties inherent in the technology itself and the need for instant news updates that made it so successful.

Yes, these technologies themselves shape culture, but the culture that already existed (the constant need to be up-to-date and stay ‘connected) has an impact on the technology produced i.e. Hashtags that people can ‘follow’.

References

Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John (2003) ‘Theoretical Frameworks’ in Culture and Technology London: Palgrave Macmillan: 11-38