Digital Memory Studies by Hoskins Andrew

Author:Hoskins, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Micro-media memories: From storage to transfer

Let us finally clarify the relation between this micro-level of storage practices and so-called social memory. Any talk about maximized computer “memory” capacities still continues an old occidental obsession that culture depends on material storage (historic architectures, libraries, museums). But media analysis indicates that the future cultural emphasis will be rather on permanent transfer. There is already an implosion of storage into processual data flows, a different economy of the archive as dynamic agency online. The notion of immediate data feedback replaces the separation that traditionally made all the archival difference.

With electro-digital archives, there is—in principle—no more delay between memory and the present, but the technical option of immediate feedback, turning every present data into archival entries and vice versa. The economy of timing thus happens in short-circuits. Streaming media and storage become increasingly intertwined. This new type of volatile memory consists of self-learning, adaptive archives, transitive to their respective media formats. In comparison, cognition studies rather abandon with the storage metaphor as well, replacing it by the equation of memory within the system itself (Ackerman and Halverson 2000, 63). With the supremacy of selection and addressability over storage there is no memory in the emphatic sense any more; archival terminology—or rather the archive itself—becomes literally metaphorical—a function of transfer processes.

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