Friday, July 01, 2005

Mnemotechny (3)

Gary Wolf indicated that Ted's habit of recording everything exemplifies a lifelong fight against encroaching amnesia.

Some however, embrace forgetfulness. In Eliseo Subiela's Last Images of the Shipwreck, Claudio (played by the late Hugo Soto) is attempting to un-learn his vocabulary one word a day - every time he encounters the film's chief protagonist Roberto, his contributions to their conversations are fractured by the growing number of deletions.

Should cultural memory really be any more universal and complete than individual human memory? (Borges' Funes the Memorious embodies the curse of 'perfect information'.)

Perhaps techno-utopians misunderstand the role of recollection in the web of connections that is knowledge? "Information is where you find it" says Ted, but if you could literally find it everywhere, how would you start to look? Any would-be docuverse would have to accommodate the fact that human knowledge comprises symbols to an even greater extent than it comprises data.

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