Lina Dib

Anthropology department, 

Rice University

(Estados Unidos)

Human memory is often described as an important facet of an individual’s sense of identity. Yet it is also often characterized as elusive and fallible. For thousands of years people have attempted to capture and to preserve memory through the creation of various recording tools. In his famous article entitled As We May Think published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Vannevar Bush described the concept of the Memex, the prototypical hypermedia machine. 

This device would allow an individual to store all his books, records and communications so that they might be consulted with ease and speed. Directly inspired by Bush’s vision of the Memex, such technologies are currently being developed with the hopes that they will expand and supplement the limits of biological human memory. Today, semantic computers and new wearable sensors allow for the capture, the archival, and the retrieval of rich amounts of autobiographical data. Working prototypes, such as Microsoft’s SenseCam, a badge-sized camera equipped with light sensors, are being tested with patients who suffer memory loss. 

Preprogrammed, and relying on the sensors, the wearable devices determine when to take a picture and record information. New digital recording technologies promise not only to extend human memories but also to enhance them by recording bodily and environmental cues and activities not even perceived by humans, such as one’s pulse, eating habits, and GPS readings. This paper examines the collective discourses and practices of interdisciplinary scientists who convene around the design of devices for memory. 

Drawing on preliminary fieldwork in the UK with researchers developing digital storage spaces and prosthetic memory devices, this paper addresses how diverse scientists are brought together and how different ways of knowing and speaking about memory are tentatively rendered commensurable. 

An inquiry into the notion of simulacra and recording technologies’ effects on – or rather enhancement of – the real, this paper argues that ubiquitous digital recording technologies produce a kind of hyper-reality for the amnesiac subject. The memories of the subject are said to conform to the data. His/her actual memories come second, cued by the captured images. Recorded memories become positive historical facts and scientists debate as to whether or not the user is actually recalling experiences. How does the production of ubiquitous recording devices redefine what counts as remembering, and for whom? To investigate such questions, this paper addresses both the anthropology of the self and the social study of science and technology. The challenge at play in these scientific contexts lies in re-constructing the human around new objects, rather than in defining the biological experience of remembering. In order to examine the ontological transformations that accompany the production of new recording devices, this essay abandons prevailing notions of capture and experience in favor of a theory of language. By reviewing discursive practices around the design of new objects, it considers how these new technologies inform understandings of normal and abnormal memory as well as notions of human disability and enhancement.

About Lina Dib