Análisis de la Vulnerabilidad

A history of technologies of memory is in many ways a history of memory and record- keeping itself. Draaisma (2000) shows how human understanding and metaphors of memory have been inextricably linked to technologies of the time. One might even consider the ars memorativa (the art of memory) (Yates, 1966) – a set of mnemonic and rhetorical systems from classical times – as a technology of sorts. The development of such technologies has always been provocative. Plato famously critiqued one of the earliest technologies of memory, writing, as it would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory” (Plato,

Phaedrus, 275a).

However, in contemporary scholarship in socio-cultural and memory studies,

technologies of memory tend to focus on the emergence of digital technologies, which document and create records of everyday life through their use.

“Technologies of memory, while they might include memorials, souvenirs, bodies and other objects, are increasingly visual technologies of mass and mediated forms – photographs, films, television shows and digital images.” (Sturken, 2008, p.75) Records are both produced and remembered through these technologies. Scholars in particular note the rapid development, and distributed nature of such technologies, allowing anyone to record their life in previously unimaginable detail.

“A visible shift in memory in recent years has been the increasing availability, sophistication, capacity and portability of consumer, professional and enterprise level capture/record technologies – they are smaller, lighter, wireless-internet enabled, have a longer battery life and are cheaper. We need never be not recording. The result is an explosion in type, format and sheer amount of data being gathered.” (Van House and Churchill, 2008, p.300)

Contemporary memory practices are also seen as entirely interwoven with ‘new media’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2002; Manovich, 2001). Recording is achieved in the course of everyday life as people increasingly communicate online through a diversity of media

and platforms. Brown and Hoskins (2010) propose a “new memory ecology which is ‘imbricated’ in digital recording technologies and media” (p.96). Mediation (van Dijck, 2007) or ‘mediatisation’ of memory (Hoskins, 2009a) now connotes first and foremost the recording of everyday life through digital interaction.

Hoskins distinguished this new mediated memory as “pervasive, accessible, disposable, distributed, promiscuous” (Hoskins, 2011, p.19). Odom et al.’s (2014) characterisation of ‘digital possessions’ as placeless, spaceless and formless resembles this description. Placeless – they can be accessed from nearly anywhere and are present in multiple places at once; spaceless – they do not take up physical space; and formless – they can be reproduced, the copy resembles the original, and can be easily altered and reconstituted. These descriptions suggest something more than just the sheer volume of recording available; these records are materially different, and afford new orientations to, and practices of, remembering.

Schwarz, (2014) summarises four broad perspectives on this new ‘digital materiality’ of memory. The ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins, 2011) emphasises the networked nature of digital media – that the structure of networks (e.g. social networks, databases) and their always on, constant connectivity shapes a unique accessibility and set of relations

between elements of the past. Nothing is really archival if it can be brought to the present at the click of a button. Secondly, scholars propose a ‘world without forgetting’ (Garde- Hansen et al., 2009; Mayer-Schönberger, 2011) where forgetting and putting the past to rest is increasingly difficult as technologies and institutions save everything by default. This is seen as particularly problematic as “objectified representations of the past”, for example, records of instant messaging chats “transform regimes of truth” (Schwarz, 2014, p.9). However, despite this sense of being trapped by the past, a third thesis of flexible memory (Dijck, 2007; Hoskins, 2009b) suggests that the scope for digital manipulation (especially of photographs) and its uncertain, unarchived place makes digital memory potentially less fixed and stable than previous records.

None of these theories are mutually exclusive. However, Schwarz adds a further notable characteristic of digital memory – that as a result of its place in a database, it can be non- narrative. Representations of the past can be dredged up, and assembled by hazard and in many different formations, for example, in a routine search of one’s email inbox. An

important consequence of this uncertain and dynamic location of digital media is that their encounter is less predictable, and not always initiated intentionally, or by a human. Schwarz suggests such relations are ‘neighbourly’ – with all the potential tensions that metaphor could imply.

My thesis, like Schwarz, puts stock in each of these perspectives. While they each have different central matters of concern, together they present a compelling case that the scope and distributed, networked nature of new technologies is something of a paradigm shift, especially for the study of collective remembering. Nonetheless, avoiding

technological determinism, Brown and Hoskins (2010) remind us that the cultural practices or schemata, surrounding these technologies remains instrumental in how remembering is achieved and to what ends. Further, despite its prevalence, digital

memory has not entirely displaced more traditional technologies of memory, or the role of physical objects. Indeed, the flexible memory thesis suggests that the fixity of non-digital records remains distinctly valuable. In most cases, multiple representations of the past co- exist. Neither should we rush to assumptions that the fundamental purposes and qualities of, and approaches to, remembering that Middleton and Brown (2005) unpack are somehow superseded by the sophistication or pervasiveness of technologies and of memory. Rather, they form another layer of the ‘organised settings’ which offer structures within which remembering can be satisfactorily achieved.

The quantified records that are of interest in this thesis are a new technology of memory, and share the digital materiality of new media. Now, however, I wish to consider a history of work, primarily in HCI, which considers how people directly interact with

technologies of memory.