Comments on OnFiction: Effort after Meaning

Thank you, Viola, for your comment. I don't know o...

2010-01-27T08:02:24.442-05:00

Thank you, Viola, for your comment. I don't know of research on how web technologies affect memory. I imagine that what happens is that as one moves from one site to another, a wider set of cues, or prompts, than usual can come into play. It's a very interesting question.

Thanks for this post. This has generated much thou...

2010-01-27T02:39:07.411-05:00

Thanks for this post. This has generated much thought for a blog post I am writing. I, too, wonder about how the imagination changes when memory is mediated via digital means (video, photo blogs, voice notes, etc.), and I wonder--this is just a random thought--what the implications are for memory and the imagination when the social-network aspect of current Web 2.0 technologies (for instance, the comments section on YouTube) comes into play.

Thanks!

Thank you very much, Tom, for this interesting com...

2010-01-26T17:15:35.826-05:00

Thank you very much, Tom, for this interesting comment. I have much enjoyed Kundera's essay-books including Testaments betrayed, from which you quote. And the social-science question you ask is extremely challenging.

I don't know any research that systematically compares, for instance, people's memory of an interaction in which they took part with an audio or video recording of it. I guess people who make home videos could do this kind of experiment on themselves.

Kundera says that when we remember, "Acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost … but we do not even wonder at this loss." I am afraid I don't react with alarm in the way he implies I should. An idea that is, to me, far more alarming would be to find myself—as I am musing—injected into memories that had all the concreteness of the present. If we were beings of that kind, much more than memory would need to be changed.

So, it seems to me that the idea that artists can enable us to notice, and be able to construct aspects of schemata (Bartlett's word) and hence be able to see and remember pieces of experience seems wonderful, not part of a darker vision. It's something that artists do. It is part of their gift to us.

The novelist Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed, 1...

2010-01-26T11:15:11.041-05:00

The novelist Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed, 1995)provides a view of memory much darker than Bartlett's:

"Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one. I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two. but the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.
And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories which affect the mind deeply like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don’t realize how schematic and meager their content is...

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present—the concreteness of the present—as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet: so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination…(Kundera 1995)

Kundera goes on to say that only the greatest of poets and novelists are able to notice, remember, and use concrete representations of human thoughts and acts. (See also his The Art of the Novel 1988 for a somewhat broader treatment of this theme).

If social science theory is to be more than a collection of superficial or untestable ideas, it must somehow be grounded in such images. A grounded theory could, in turn, could help literary critics become aware of universal patterns and themes in literature. (For a brilliant application of this idea to Freud's dialogues, see Billig, Freudian Repression 1999).

Have there been any studies that check the validity of memories of an event against verbatim records of them?

Tom Scheff