High on Technology ~~~ Low on Memory
Cultural Crisis in Dark City and The Matrix
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8894725 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Blackmore (0000-0002-9411-0440, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 13-54 |
| Publication date | 2004-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-s034-01-02 |
| OpenAlex | W4244968858 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was arti- ficial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great,Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. ~~~ Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. ~~~ T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Sluicing down our throats, washing through our minds (Eliot's chambers of the sea), the culture's dataflow surges into us momently, flushing out what we might have remembered, with the output from the socius' memory factory. The deciphering of history, a gratingly slow process of negotiation and disagreement, is replaced by a media blitz on events. All we want to know about massive cultural memory haemorrhages like the Shoah and D-Day can be squeezed into three-hour media bursts, convincing because of their technical brilliance, their ability to elicit emotions and to cre- ate in the viewer the conviction that the truth has been determined and can now be shelved~~~we are at last done with those crises. What with the dataflow are thoughts about who we've been and wanted to be, as a culture, as a society, as a people, in the face of problems of technology, faith, and memory. Anxious for optimal throughput, obeying the urgent pressure of the machine to upgrade to higher processor speeds with greater RAM, we have left ourselves little time to reflect, even less to reconsider, and instead leap from event to event, frantically memorializing (if not remembering) what the past means ~~~ a world war, the death of a celebrity, or the death of the child of a revered president all carry the same valence.l
Art · Cultural memory · Epistemology · Exposition (narrative · Literature · Nothing · Psychoanalysis · Sequence (biology · Sociology · Anthropology · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |