So this week I’ve been thinking a lot about memory in its relation to media. Of course, media are commonly seen as tools to help us remember. By nature, many media serve the function of archiving information for later use, and therefore allow us to research into a certain topic and recall things we may not have remembered. This could be something like looking up the definition of a word you’ve forgotten in the dictionary to going through Facebook photos from last night to try and piece together your antics.
But many some, such as Kyong Chun (2011), argue that in this digital age, information pops up so frequently, in such vast volumes, that the information found in digital mediums becomes fleeting, ephemeral, and damages the possibility of properly remembering information.
As soon as I read this I thought of the new app that everyone is talking about, Spritz. Spritz is an app that allows users to read any written text at incredible speeds, potentially 600-1000 words a minute, thanks to the help of rapid sequential visual presentation. Or, in other terms, the words of the text appear on the screen one at a time, and the next word pops up in a matter of milliseconds where the previous word was, so our eyes don’t have to move (Paul, 2014).
This to me is an incredible example of ephemeral information in the digital age. It’s a huge shift from the traditional written word, where you can read through at your own pace, and perhaps go back to information you didn’t quite grasp before, to a new written word that is fleeting, and places an emphasis on speed rather than memory. Spritz has indeed received criticism in this area: “When we read really fast — especially in complex or difficult material — our understanding of the text suffers,” Paul, 2014.
I disagreed with Kyong Chun’s point that the digital age has made information too fleeting to enhance memory: although there is such a vast array of information on the internet and other digital archives, it’s not as if there aren’t ways to sort through it all. Search engines allow us to do advanced searches and recall whatever we would like, to an extent. However, this app makes me see her point. An app that turns such a deliberate, often slow, and engaged practice into an ephemeral sequence of words that you can’t even backtrack with if you didn’t comprehend something could be seriously debilitating to the concept of memory. If this technology becomes commonplace, and news organisations begin to present their stories in the format, or authors publish books exclusively in this format, who knows what could happen? If the text is not actually stored elsewhere, and it is exclusively in the mind of the person who read it at the rate of 600-1000 words a minute, this would indeed make the information ephemeral.
REFERENCES:
Kyong Chun, WH, 2011, ‘The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory,’ Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, University of California Press, Berkeley, 184-203
Murphy Paul, A, 2014, ‘The Problem with the speed reading app that everyone is talking about,’ The Week, March 19, 2014, accessed March 26, 2014, http://theweek.com/article/index/258243/the-problem-with-that-speed-reading-app-everyones-talking-about
Media Musings 