When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

by Abby Smith Rumsey

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620408032
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Abby Smith Rumsey is a historian who writes about how ideas and information technologies shape perceptions of history, of time, and of personal and cultural identity. Trained at Harvard as a Russian scholar, she has worked in Soviet-era archives, spent a decade at the Library of Congress, and has consulted on digital collecting and curation, intellectual property issues, and the economics of digital information for a variety of universities and the National Science Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Where We Come From

Chapter 1 Memory on Display 3

Chapter 2 How Curiosity Created Culture 15

Chapter 3 What the Greeks Thought: From Accounting to Aesthetics 30

Chapter 4 Where Dead People Talk 48

Chapter 5 The Dream of the Universal Library 64

Part 2 Where We Are

Chapter 6 Materialism: The World Is Very Old and Knows Everything 85

Chapter 7 The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting 108

Chapter 8 Imagination: Memory in the Future Tense 126

Chapter 9 Mastering Memory in the Digital Age 137

Part 3 Where We Are Going

Chapter 10 By Memory of Ourselves 157

Acknowledgments 179

Notes 181

Selected Sources 201

Illustration Credits 217

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

02/22/2016
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. Agent: John Taylor Williams, Kneerim, Williams & Bloom. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] wide-ranging rumination on cultural memory . . . Rumsey draws a powerful analogy to underscore memory’s materiality." —Washington Post Book World

"The goal of When We Are No More . . . is to challenge us to consider more seriously how the consequences of our current data deluge will influence society moving forward. In that, Rumsey succeeds admirably." —Science

"[An] erudite treatise on how the digitization of archival technology makes it all too easy to rewrite our cultural past." —Nature

"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." —Publishers Weekly

"This book presents a fascinating view into how the mind’s memory functions and all the external devices that complement this aspect of consciousness." —San Francisco Book Review

"Rumsey takes us on a lucid and deeply thought-provoking journey into what makes the human species unique—the capacity to create external memory. This book will change how you think about our collective store of knowledge, and its future." —Paul Saffo, Consulting Professor, Stanford University School of Engineering

"What Oliver Sacks did for the physical mind, Abby Smith Rumsey is doing for our evolving digital mind—making the history and complexity of our collective memory vital to everyone." —Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive

"One of the paradoxes of our time is that we live with so much information at our fingertips that we can barely remember anything. How future generations will recall the things that we did and said—if they recall us at all—is the subject of this deeply absorbing book. With the grace and clarity that come from years of reflection, Abby Smith Rumsey illuminates a serious set of problems at the heart of our endlessly self-Googling culture." —Ted Widmer, former Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

"This book is a thoughtful and urgent call to action that is essential reading for all who care about diversity, sustainability, and the advancement of knowledge. Digital memory presents a new challenge; Rumsey provides inspiring insights into the ways in which past challenges have been met and offers a compelling argument to drive the development of new ideas and solutions to this looming threat of inestimable loss." —Sarah E. Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian

"'Thoughts that come on doves' feet steer the world,' said Nietzsche. Abby Smith Rumsey’s welcome new book on the importance of digital memory to our shared past—and still more, our shared future—wears its learning and its lessons lightly. But make no mistake. It is a manifesto that comes on doves’ feet, and it comes at a critical juncture, as we begin to envision the memory systems that will be in place ‘when we are no more.’" —Max Marmor, President, Samuel H. Kress Foundation

"As pixels fly by on our multiplying screens, Rumsey reminds us that we have unwittingly committed our modern forms of expression to formats that are all too fragile, dependent on hardware and software that quickly become dated and unusable. With a kaleidoscopic view of history—from Sumerian tablets to the libraries of Montaigne and Jefferson—and a critical analysis of how our minds use recorded information, she warns us that without devoting more attention to digital preservation we will end up with a cultural disorder akin to Alzheimer's, where we live in a troubling, constant present, with little ability to imagine the future. Ensuring perpetual access to our shared culture is one of the most pressing issues of our digital age, and this compelling, important book is a call and plan for doing so." —Dan Cohen, Founding Director, Digital Public Library of America

"Abby Smith Rumsey’s excellent When We Are No More takes a . . . long view of our contemporary anxieties over knowledge preservation . . . Her book is especially good at charting the changing shape of the institutions to which we have entrusted (or outsourced) our collective memory." —Wall Street Journal

"In a fascinating, out-of-the-box rumination on the digital age, Abby Smith Rumsey worries that the information monopolists of our day - Google and Facebook - might end up fostering a monoculture not unlike the Christian rulers and Islamic caliphate that purged pagan texts from the Great Library of Alexandria in ancient times." - WorldPost

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2016
"Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile, limitless in scope yet inherently unstable," writes Rumsey (history, Harvard Univ.). Humanity's choice of knowledge over reverence in the Garden of Eden set in motion a long and imperfect history of preserving memory and organizing big data by whatever means available, which is documented in this short but meaty treatise on cultural preservation in the digital age. The author marshals evidence of memory-keeping from across history, including the Sumerian cuneiform, ancient Greek mnemonics, Gutenberg's printing press, Thomas Jefferson's personal library, and the science of materialism, which proves that through geology "nature is the ultimate archives." Rumsey advocates for public institutions to act as stewards for valuable digital assets, citing the Internet Archive and Twitter's partnership with the Library of Congress as models for nonprofits providing the digital infrastructure and reliable access that private companies can't supply. By bolstering digital literacy and fostering in ourselves a "moral imagination" that machines lack, claims Rumsey, we can prevent the cultural amnesia that will otherwise befall our data-saturated world. VERDICT This fascinating multidisciplinary tour is relevant to all readers, especially educators, social scientists, and cultural gatekeepers.—Chad Comello, Morton Grove P.L., IL

Library Journal

2015-12-09
An analysis of the significance of cultural memory and a warning about its fragility in the digital era. "This is a little book about a big idea," writes Rumsey, who specializes in information technologies, digital collecting and curation, and issues of intellectual property. The book is densely written, compressing the entirety of human documentation into less than 200 pages and suggesting what could happen amid the rapidity of cyber change that finds new versions overwriting old, even rendering old files unreadable and anachronistic in the span of a few years. We live in an era of data overload under private control, with our most personal information subject to the safeguarding of Facebook and Google, perhaps more available to data miners than to those whose lives it details. Rumsey warns that "it will be hard to avoid collective amnesia in the digital age" if we continue to entrust data preservation and control to private stewardship rather than the library model that is more open and comprehensive. Over the arc of human history, as far back as Socrates, there has been concern that recording memories might lead to a loss of personal memory. As recording on rock and clay gave way to papyrus, parchment, and paper, the records could proliferate but in a less durable form. Even by the Renaissance, there were concerns of the information overload of print—what to value, what was true. It was a selection process that cyber data makes all the more difficult. There is exponentially too much, and it is all too fragile. "The old paradigm of memory was to transfer the contents of our minds into a stable, long-lasting object and then preserve the object," writes the author. "If we could preserve the object, we could preserve our knowledge. This does not work anymore." Though the author's analysis stops short of cultural apocalypse, it does show how radically things have changed and why this is cause for concern.

Kirkus Reviews