Filed under: music, random | Tags: aging, college, growing up, madeleine, memory, the postal service, the speed of time, time
Give up!
Looking through my music collection today I realized that the album “Give Up” by The Postal Service is fully 7 years old. This means that it has been 7 complete, tumultuous and jarring years since the first time I remember thinking to myself that I was finally old enough. As we were dragging my boxes, my computer and my speaker system up the stairs of the dorm, I could barely hear my parents over the sound of someone playing “Such Great Heights” loudly enough that we could still hear it in my hall, one flight up and all the way across the floor. I had a minifridge, my parents left me there and I didn’t have anyone to answer to. My brothers had left starting 7 years before that and I remember believing I would never get to that point. I think the record was on repeat, or I’m completely conflating the track with my memories, because I swear it was playing when they left, too. I remember this clearly. I was ecstatic, nervous and a little scared but full of joy. (more…)
Filed under: media, technology | Tags: digital indexing, facebook, memory, new york times, photography
My father sent me this article this morning, from the New York Times Magazine about those who grow up not knowing a time before facebook. The author, Peggy Orenstein, seems to place a fundamental divide between those who didn’t grow up with it and those who have–she seems to think that those under the age of 25 have no past (no pre-facebook past, that is) to look back on, that facebook will fundamentally change the way that young people grow up.
Yes, I think to a certain extent, this is true. At least that many don’t really have a truly pre-facebook past to look back on. Yes, we are probably growing up differently than her generation. The pitfalls of being a child, of growing into an adult are different: as Liz Lemon notes, there are way more things for a guy not to call you on now. However, this is not better or worse, only different. The landscape Orenstein lays out is from the perspective of someone who does not accept the technology as a matter of fact, but as a generational quirk, something for the kids, the way many generations seem to view the new:
Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that “home” button. That’s hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?
Fear of technology, of change, is endemic to all gaps between generations–she seems to want to question whether or not the new changes in technology are positive or negative, as if it were possible to simply return to a time before facebook or myspace when no one had any of their photos or information published on the internet. But it’s just the way it is. Since my life straddles the pre- and post-facebook landscape, I can say that it is true, it can be remarkably messy to drag an internet trail behind you, messier than simply being able to leave. A physical absence no longer means true absence, every person who has an iphone in their pocket can be triangulated and tacked-down.
- From Jay Leek and Karin Higgins (no relation) in UC Davis Magazine
It might be harder to escape your past, but this fact might present an opportunity for the consideration of a basic lesson: physically escaping the evidence or location of your past in person does not mean escaping your past. As Orenstein ably observes, Faulkner would love facebook, the haunting evidence of our undead pasts. It reminds us that simply because the past was once hidden, does not mean it was gone. I think my generation and the next will likely have to be more comfortable with their pasts, with seeing records of the radical breaks and cuts that one must make in growing up. We will learn, maybe more than the past generations, that a person is not identical to itself across time. We will learn, maybe, that one doesn’t need to leave their past to make a radical break, to grow up, to continue becoming different.
And to the idea of the entireties of our lives being encoded, digitized and indexed by facebook, google, etc. I think this idea, implicit in the article as a sort of neo-luddite critique rather than an ethical or political one, is reactionary. It reminds me of the articles people wrote when the cassette tape first became a viable commercial medium–terrified that it would kill the radio. If people could record songs whenever they wanted to, what’s to keep them listening to the radio? Or buying records for that matter? To fear or criticize the digitization of lives is a pointless and impossible task. Energy could be better spent fostering a greater critical engagement with the effects, ethics and politics of this digitization, rather than simply raging against change we fear.
The anatomy of a polaroid pack
Digitization cannot replace our memories. To take a picture is not to record a moment, to post on facebook is not to archive that moment. A photograph is not a memory. It is a suspension, a willful suspension. Our lives, in a very real way, exceed our attempts to record them, a photograph or a video is framed, our lives are not. Our sensory, spatial, and temporal experience exceeds any attempt to encode or capture it. This is all to say: our lives, even though they appear to be recorded, are still much richer and noisier, more complex and variegated than any recording would or could ever indicate. And furthermore, there is still a great deal of life lived off the internet, and that can never be put on the internet no matter how much we attempt to record. Our lives will always exceed our recordings of it. A recording is no more than a trace.
The important thing is to examine the ways that this recording affects our memories of real experience. It doesn’t kill or replace our memories, it interacts with them, it operates as a new item introduced into an already complex and dynamic system of remembering. Our memories still work in ways that supplant and alter physical evidence. To remember something is to recreate it. Insofar as memories are never strictly factual, the recording of facts or visual evidence is rather irrelevant to the process of real memory. I agree we should be critical of the system, we should pay attention to it. But people talk about this technology as if it were something that could be changed–this is not the case. They worry, their children live it is as if it were the way it had always been. It will be the same for us and our children, too.
It’s not simply better or worse, necessarily, just different. Not a thing to worry about, though certainly something we should be paying attention to.
Filed under: human, media, politics, technology | Tags: ethics, facial recognition, google, memex, memory, mylifebits, politics, radiolab, slate, technology review
The MIT technology review has posted this article about the new wave of facial recognition software, which, as they succinctly state, is cool but creepy.
In their attempt to make index all information and make it universally available, Google has made another jump: they can now recognize your face in pictures. This brings up a whole new debate regarding the ethics of photography: it is not only the famous who will have to deal with their likeness being used without their explicit permission. Google, while you are tagging photos using their Picassa software, asks you for the real names and email addresses of those in your photographs. This database, as the article points out, is not stored on your computer, but on Google’s servers. Read–this is the same place they store your search history, your documents, which news stories you read, etc… Google may, in fact, someday soon have a nearly comprehensive database of each of us who use Google with photos, email addresses, addresses, pictures of your house (their map software’s “street level” option).
Now, I do not mean to be alarmist, but in light of the serious discussion that attended the birth of the camera and the ongoing discussion of the ethics of photography, should there not be more attention paid to this company that is not-so-quietly indexing our lives? This is no new idea, the indexing of our lives, but whereas it was originally posited as an option by people such as Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project (which creates a searchable database of everything he has ever seen, read, heard, etc…), this indexing is being placed on us from the outside, by our friends who may not be aware that they are indexing our faces, names, and addresses for Google. We all use Google and find it incredibly helpful, but this just seems ridiculous that this is passing over in a relatively uncontested manner.
As for the relationship of this tagging and indexing to human memory: I remember a radiolab (fantastic radio show, by the way) episode in which they discuss the scientific discovery of the physical mechanism used by the brain to store memories. The first step after this was to figure out how to erase them. So, they discuss erasing the memories of soldiers with PTSD–an encouraging idea. It also includes a discussion of the way that a memory is a recreation of your brain-state during the original event. When will we start using free Google software to index our memories? As opposed to Gordon Bell’s project, in which everything is stored on one’s own computer, we will be storing it on Google’s servers. The novelty of it will probably convince us to use it, and likely with little caution: we will use it to remember what we were supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but it will also remember things we may not want it to, like time spent privately with a loved one. Or maybe we do want it to remember that.
In a less ethical and more personal domain: do we really want everything remembered for us this way? Though the nuances of memory can often be frustrating, it is important to remember that to recall a memory is, in a way, to recreate the event. The recalling of a memory actually changes the memory each time it is recalled. I honestly wonder if the undiscriminating indexing of the events of our lives would be detrimental to the processes and mechanisms of our memories, of our own self-creation, of the fictionalizing of the self, for better or worse. Call it the literature of the memory: without it we would have no Proust, Nabokov, etc. etc. etc. etc. Though, it could be argued that there is a part of this mechanism that would escape indexing, I think the remainder in this equation is hardly enough to justify the subtraction of the powers and poetry of our own memories. Maybe I’m a neo-luddite, but I doubt it.
As a result of all these issues, and following the debacle exceedingly well laid out in this Slate Magazine discussion blog regarding Facebook’s “Terms of Use,” (which are not really terms of use), the not-so-distant discussion of the near-impossibility of deleting a Facebook account and your information from its server, and recent controversy surrounding internet-announced (and sometimes carried out) suicides, I think that these are ethical issues that deserve quite a bit more legal, philosophical, and political attention.
I wonder what happens when not only does The Memex nearly become a reality in terms of a consumer product, but also our likenesses and information are stored by a giant American Corporation (we already see just how little accountability American corporations have). What is to stop Google from selling this information without our knowledge? This is quite a bit of political and social power they are storing on their servers, and it seems their ability to index will only grow.
What part of our lives do we want to keep for ourselves? It will only get easier from here on in to index everything about ourselves. Will it someday be seen as daring and/or backwards to refuse the assistance of the internet and computer databases in indexing our lives? Is it daring or backwards to keep yourself to yourself?
Where is our sense of caution? Has it been overwhelmed by our magpie-like fascination with shiny objects and new technologies? Who do we want to be in relation to this new technology? I would like to call for a more stringent system of ethics in response to these developments. The prospects are too terrifying if we fail to act.
Again, the Onion is strangely prescient on this point.
