I’ve written recently about the change from analogue to digital thinking (June 29th 2010 -An Analogue Brain in a digital world >) which prompted me to think about how our memories also work and how Analogue Memory and Digital Memory interact and affect community in a digital world.
- Image via Wikipedia
Human Memory
Human memory is reconstructive, incomplete, selective, regenerative and interpretative.
It’s reconstructive in that we relive the experiences temporally (i.e. in time order) reconstructing events as we go. When we sing songs we often use the last line to trigger the memory of the next line. That suggests that we store some things in a strict order with the need for entry points to get the memory to flow.
It’s incomplete because just as we have the capacity to rememebr we also have the capacity to forget. We tend to forget the negative and reinforce the positive, Generally none of us recall pain with the same vivid agony as when we suffer it, and from an evolutionary point of view you can see why.
It’s selective because if we remembered every detail even the human brain would run out of space. Most things don’t matter, (No they really don’t – stop worrying so much!) so we can forget them.
It’s regenerative because when we know we have forgotten something we can often regenerate the memory – although we may be remembering a pastiche of similar things that seem to fit. Often these regenerative memories are so real that we’l defend them as a truth when they are totally fabrications.
It’s interpretative because we apply our emotional and environmental filters to it as we recall it. Someone we know slightly as an caring, intelligent, expert, will have those labels because or al of our experiences of them and what others say. When they do something out of character, our memories adapt that recollection and interpret the behaviour we see in our model of them.
- Image via Wikipedia
Machine Memory
Machine Memory is complete or corrupted, absent, never reconstructed, never interpreted.
It’s complete because it is stored in files which have a start and an end, when something goes wrong with the file, in most situations it’s lost completely (although some data may be recovered later the normal approach just says ‘error’, something our brains don’t do).
Machines can’t easily interpret a memory in a different situation to the exact circumstances to which the data refers. Computers can be programmed to appear to interpret some similar situations we haven’t yet built interpretative routines that cope with any environment and situation and allow interpretation of the new data from a context that’s in files on hard disks so as to cope and react to new situations in a millisecond.
Outsourcing Memory
In Three degrees of Separation (Jan 7th 2009) I talked of how we are increasingly outsourcing our memories to social networks. I think the trend to doing this has accelerated since then. How does that trend affect community?
In Connectors: the power behind the power (Dec 8th 2009) I commented that:
we need a consistency and persistency of message as people get to know us, to like us, and to follow us.
To do that we need an outstanding memory and having a body of reference knowledge to our prior conversations that’s unfailing and complete is an exceptional resource. Connectors bind community, so all in all I think this is a benefit of machine memory over human memory. I rely on it.
In Social Media – Disaggregation (April 21st 2009) I recognised that the growth in the numbers of Social Networks was fragmenting the conversation across many platforms. There’s been a trend to linking through streams and feeds but those only work in the moment. The water in a stream moves on, get’s mixed, and evaporated and precipitated, quickly you can’t find the water you saw, just more of similar water. So it is with our outsourced memories, they are spread out, and hard to retrieve, increasingly we need an index or retrieval system that is as complicated as the messages it seeks to retrieve. In that context the social cohesion created by a few Social Networks can quickly break down for those working across many.
The final comment I’d make about committing our human memories to machine when we outsource them is that the negative never fades, our mistakes are always available on instant recall, complete an unadulterated. For those seeking to disturb community that creates an opportunity. Communities that don’t learn to tolerate and accommodate the unchanging nature of machine memory will be ripped apart in time by those who seek to use the past to change the present, through consistently returning to infallible recall of fallibilities.
Communities gain strength when they choose to ignore the machine memory that they intrinsically know would have been collectively forgotten.
That’s the sign of a strong community in a digital world.
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