Thamus/Theuth

From our reading for tomorrow. "There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing." (Jamais Cascio)

Cascio was onto something, and that something has since manifested itself into what is known as lifelogging. Rachel Leow, a historian at Cambridge wrote an interesting blog on the subject. I'll share some snippets, but you can read the full thing (it's not long at all) right here.


"...People have been experimenting with lifelogging, going around with audiovisual cameras slung around their necks like slack nooses, recording every minute of their lives. ...Total documentation of a life; total recollection. ...Privacy and legal issues aside (a whole other can of worms)...on one hand it's a perfectly logical progression from flickr, blogging, vblogging, del.icio.us-ing, the endless meta-documentation that is happening in furious magnitude around us every day. On the other hand...what if the meta-documentation burgeons to the size of the documentation itself? What if e.g. my RSS feedreader aggregates the feeds from every single webpage on the internet and thus becomes the size of the internet itself -- what would be the point?

"...When the map is exactly the same size as the mapped -- when it will take us exactly as much time to 'recall' our lives as it does to live them -- when the sculpture is indistinguishable from the woman -- which is real, which is valuable, which is true? ...If we are precisely what we represent, is there anything left of ourselves; is there a self at all?

"...Faced with an infinite archive, how does one organize the search and selection of documents? Indeed, as with the internet and an internet-sized RSS, what would be the point? Lifelogging would turn history's heartbeat into a flatline -- every moment democratically equal to the next; white noise as valuable as Beethoven, and the damnable problem of historical selection amplified thousandfold...."


In Phaedrus, Plato told a story about the introduction of literacy in Egypt. Theuth, an old God, takes his new invention, literacy, to the King, Thamus. Theuth explains that his characters -- writing -- will make people wiser and give them more memory. Thamus argues that it will have the opposite effect. That it won't enable greater memory, but give the semblance of memory; literacy will only enable reminiscence, not memory.

A lot of people see a parallel between the development of literacy and the development of information technology. I think most of us would agree that writing and widespread literacy brought us out of the dark ages (of orality). But I'm not certain that technology, and with it, the capability of total recollection, will have the same effect. Which is to say that I'm simultaneously terrified and in awe of technology for the reasons explained by Rachel above, in probably the same way that people initially felt about writing. In other words, I'm more of a Thamus than a Theuth. How about you?