When We Are No More
How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Our memory gives the human species a unique evolutionary advantage. Our stories, ideas, and innovations--in a word, our "culture"--can be recorded and passed on to future generations. Our enduring culture and restless curiosity have enabled us to invent powerful information technologies that give us invaluable perspective on our past and define our future. Today, we stand at the very edge of a vast, uncharted digital landscape, where our collective memory is stored in ephemeral bits and bytes and lives in air-conditioned server rooms. What sources will historians turn to in 100, let alone 1,000 years to understand our own time if all of our memory lives in digital codes that may no longer be decipherable?
In When We Are No More Abby Smith Rumsey explores human memory from pre-history to the present to shed light on the grand challenge facing our world--the abundance of information and scarcity of human attention. Tracing the story from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls, to movable type, books, and the birth of the Library of Congress, Rumsey weaves a compelling narrative that explores how humans have dealt with the problem of too much information throughout our history, and indeed how we might begin solve the same problem for our digital future. Serving as a call to consciousness, When We Are No More explains why data storage is not memory; why forgetting is the first step towards remembering; and above all, why memory is about the future, not the past.
"If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create? We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." --Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist at Google, at a press conference in February, 2015.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the current age of information inflation in technologically developed countries and the ever-increasing reliance on digital technologies to store this information, historian Rumsey considers the implications of storing our collective memory and personal archives in a frail medium that requires energy to maintain. Rumsey sees our digital era as "merely the most current installment in the unfolding saga of our desire to know more about the world and ourselves." She traces this saga to four historical moments: the development of writing in Mesopotamia; the Greeks' development of libraries; the Renaissance recovery of ancient writings and development of movable type; and the Enlightenment's linkage between knowledge and progress. Each contributed to a materialistic approach to the world and an "unquenchable appetite for information." Rumsey also draws on contemporary science in the biology of memory, considering how we might cope with the growing abundance of information, specifically in the acts of forgetting and assigning value, and the influence of collective and personal memory on how we respond to future situations. In this context, Rumsey underscores the need to " literacy in the digital age and public policies to ensure investment in long-term institutions capable of securing memory into the future... when we are no more." For anyone skeptical about the increasing reliance on digital media, Rumsey eases concern by revisiting information inflations of the past, simultaneously conveying the importance of the issue to a more general readership.
