Rumsey, Abby Smith. Where We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future. Bloomsbury Press, 2016.
- Rumsey, Abby Smith. Digital Deluge: The problem of Replacing Books with Code. September/October, 2017, Accessed January 30 2017, http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/10/03/in-the-magazine/the-data-deluge.html.
Abby Rumsey examines the history of memory from way before modern times all the way to the creation of the computer chip. She makes us appreciate that each of us has a role to play in setting what we want remembered about ourselves – ‘when we are no more.’ And today, that means much more than an epitaph on a tombstone.
The invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web has generating an outpouring of information to such an extent that we are living in a time where humans are ‘scrambling to catch up with their inventions.’ The carrying capacity’ of our memory systems are falling dramatically behind.
Rumsey’s focus on the future of memory in the digital age came from seriously thinking about “How would people feel that distinctive visceral connection with people from the past if the past had no undeniable physical presence?”
This thinking drives thought to “what can we afford to lose?” He examines the growing body of shared knowledge about how decisions were made in the past as different technologies were made to hold knowledge.
Rumsey discusses what it means in the age of ‘things’ digital, what it means to keep or ‘forget’ knowledge. For to her, “…data is not knowledge and data storage is not memory...facts are only incidental to memory…. It is the ability for information to be useful both now and in the future that counts.”
In discussing culture and history, Rumsey talks about the impact of discovering “deep time – the billions of years that elapsed before humankind and even life itself came along.” Since the time of Darwin and the drive forward in materialism, this means as Rumsey puts it:
That the cumulative knowledge and know-how of humanity, the collective memory that constitutes the entire repertoire of knowledge we need to understand ourselves and the world, is dependent on our careful stewardship. If we lose we cannot regain it through divine revelation. Building the memory system that will “ensure the future access of digital information leaves all memory of our time – at risk.
What Rumsey is doing in this work is preparing the reader to realize that “memory is not about the past, it is about the future.” Rumsey makes the impactful correlation between memory and imagination. In the digital world of today, enabling technologies are an extraordinary aid to the imagination. – And therefore, to the ability to predict based on ‘incomplete information.’ If we lose our cultural identity, Rumsey sees that as “as devastating as the loss of cultural identity”.
Literacy and being able to make informed choices about how to spend our time, cries out for useful digital filters. In the end, the author says over time we need to develop the skill to manage and “take responsibility for our digital memory machines so that “they to outlive us … like books.”
