IMS 5048 The Information Continuum
Topic 5: Memory.
Contents.
1.Definitions of memory.
2.Politics of memory.
3.Cultural artifacts and collective memory.
4.Anthony Giddens: memory, actor and structure.
5.Giddens: storing memory.
6.Relevance of memory to the ICM.
7.Duties of information professionals towards memory.
8.Examples of memory and the ICM:
8.1.Power without glory.
8.2.Bringing them home.
9.Endnotes.
1.Definitions of memory:
Memory is a very pervasive aspect of all of our lives. It is an essential element of our individual and collective identities. Hence there are a multitude of descriptions of it, and these notes are long. All of the memory descriptions in this section relate to the idea of a continuum model of information, and the importance of agency and structure. Memory is a key part of agent/structure.
1.Technical definition.
‘memory:
Internal storage areas in the computer. The term memory identifies data storage that comes in the form of chips, and the word storage is used for memory that exists on tapes or disks. Moreover, the term memory is usually used as a shorthand for physicalmemory, which refers to the actual chips capable of holding data. Some computers also use virtual memory, which expands physical memory onto a hard disk.
Every computer comes with a certain amount of physical memory, usually referred to as main memory or RAM. You can think of main memory as an array of boxes, each of which can hold a single byte of information. A computer that has 1 megabyte of memory, therefore, can hold about 1 million bytes (or characters) of information.
There are different types of computer memory:
RAM(random-access memory): This is the same as main memory. When used by itself, the term RAM refers to readand write memory; that is, you can both write data into RAM and read data from RAM. This is in contrast to ROM, which permits you only to read data. Most RAM is volatile, which means that it requires a steady flow of electricity to maintain its contents. As soon as the power is turned off, whatever data was in RAM is lost.
ROM (read-only memory): Computers almost always contain a small amount of read-only memory that holds instructions for starting up the computer.
2.Oxford English Dictionary:
The OED refers to memory as a function, as an abstract form of knowledge, as a process, as a thing, and as a concrete representation of the abstract recollection or remembrance:
1.the capacity for retaining, perpetuating or reviving a thought of things past.
2.the act of recollection, remembrance.
3.a person or event or thing held in remembrance.
4.in memory of, as a memorial.
5.the length of time over which a recollection extends.
6.legal memory (statute of limitations).
7.a record.
8.an object serving as a memorial, e.g., a memento.
3.General dictionary:
1.the power of retaining and recalling past experience; ‘He had a good memory when he was younger.’ Loss of memory is strongly implied in many definitions.
2.the cognitive processes whereby past experience is remembered; ‘He can do it from memory’; ‘He enjoyed remembering his father.’
3.something that is remembered; ‘Search as he would, that memory was lost.’
4.memory processes; ‘He taught a graduate course on how learning and memory function’.
4.Psychology:
For the psychologist, memory has no substance in its own right. It is an emergent property of the mind, e.g., observation, which requires further development. Like instinct, it might be dormant, until activated.
The meanings given to memory are socially constructed. Memory is so fundamental to thinking and acting, that without it, human society would not operate.
Psychologists have analysed individual memory as comprising general knowledge, information about particular individual experiences, and knowledge of how to do things. They focus on the mental processes of thought, including perception, reasoning, intuition. They have examined the processes associated with individual memory, e.g., the capturing or learning process, the storing and maintaining process, the recalling or reconstructing process. Three different memory entities are associated with these processes -- what is learned or captured, what is stored, and what is retrieved or remembered.
5.Social sciences:
From Durkheim on, sociologists have defined and analysed collective memory. Krippendorf, for example speaks of temporal memory (e.g., folktales, myths, gossip), spatial memory (recorded information) and structural memory (e.g.,
social, legal and organisational structures) as the components of collective memory.
The sociologist Connerton explores how social memory resides in 'incorporating practices' (body language, gestures, postural behaviour, dress), and 'inscribing practices' ('written' records). Anthropologists Teski and Climo have classified memory into five streams for the purposes of ethnographic studies -- remembering, forgetting, reconstructing, metamorphosis (transformation) and vicarious memory. Historian Peter Burke writes about the transmission of memory, exploring the role of oral traditions, written records, images, the commemoration of actions and events, and historical places. Historians have also explored social amnesia as an important aspect of collective memory.
6.Organisational memory:
= current organisational activities which rely on records of information or knowledge of past events in the organisation. The memory is communicated within the broad group, and stored in distributed human, physical and cultural repositories.
Filters control what memory survives and how it operates in an organization:
E.g., an incoming new minister (after an election) is briefed by senior public servants about protocol, policy, values, strategies. Only matters that are regarded as ‘significant’ pass through communication filters.
E.g., internal rules in an organization about use of e-mail and the Internet.
Here is an interesting example of the way that government can avoid accountability for keeping or publicising records when it wants. The information is derived from Bill Blick, Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, 2003-4 Annual Report, Inquiry into concerns raised about the Defence intelligence Organisation by Lt Col Lance Collins, at
Lieutenant Colonel Collins, Australian Defence Force, wrote to the Minister for Defence on 6 December 2000, expressing concerns about the Australian defence intelligence system. The government did nothing.
The letter was leaked to The Bulletin. Collins asserted that in December 1999 the DIO without warning cut access to the Joint Intelligence Support System (JISS), a top-secret computer network maintained by DIO and accessible to other Defence entities. Collins was managing Australian intelligence in East Timor, during the Australian invasion.
When on 20 December 1999, the database became unavailable, Collins sent an e-mail message to DIO saying that inquiries by engineering staff had revealed that the database had been turned off on the orders of the Director, DIO. The message said that, if true, this was of the utmost operational concern.
An enquiry in 2004 by the Inspector-General could not determine conclusively the reasons for the loss of the database feed:
Despite exhaustive searching over a period of months, however, including re-constituting e-mail records from archived material, it was not possible to substantiate [that the system was deliberately turned off]. The material that could be obtained tended to support the claim that technical factors were responsible for the problem.
It might seem surprising to you that the most secure system in a country can lose records so easily. Later on, further evidence came to light. In the Sydney Morning Herald on 11 December 2004, Alan Ramsey wrote ‘The ins and outs of office politics’, at
Remember the Australian army officer who put his career on the line in March when he wrote a scathing letter to John Howard seeking a royal commission into Australia's intelligence agencies? Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins's letter might well have never become public had The Bulletin magazine not published it in full in mid-April, along with a contentious 32-page army report which supported much of what Collins had to say.
Howard responded:
Mr Bill Blick [Australia's then Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security] found that the loss of access resulted from technical problems rather than a deliberate decision. I have attached, for your information, a recent letter from the Chief of the Defence Force, General [Peter] Cosgrove, and the Secretary of the Department of Defence, Mr [Richard] Smith, which again confirms the technical reasons for the outage, and points out that this was the subject of correspondence with you in late 1999.
So said our Prime Minister eight months ago.
Two days ago -- on the last day of the parliamentary year -- the Defence Minister, Robert Hill, released a one-page statement which detailed how Bill Blick's successor, Ian Carnell, ‘subsequently reviewed all files relating to’ Blick's whitewash of Collins's ‘concerns’. Carnell's ‘overall findings’, said Hill, ‘were consistent with those of Mr Blick’.
But Hill added: ‘Mr Carnell did, however, suggest that while Mr Blick's investigations into one of Lt-Col. Collins's claims was comprehensive, it was not exhaustive, as evidence was not obtained from three people with some involvement in the events.’ Carnell suggested he interview the ‘three people’. Hill agreed.
Hill's statement two days ago said, speaking of himself in the third person: ‘Mr Carnell reported to Senator Hill on 30 November [2004]. He found that access to the intelligence database had been deliberately turned off, and that it wasn't as a result of an instruction from the Director of DIO, Frank Lewincamp. He further found there were, at the time, security concerns, including the need to protect further certain categories of intelligence and establish reasonable limitation of the database on what particular groups of users could access, and that the short-term loss of access does not seem to have been a critical deficiency in operational terms.’
Collins had been right. Someone had deliberately switched off the intelligence database. Hill did not tell this to Parliament before it shut down for Christmas.
So who switched off the database, denying its material to army intelligence, and why? Hill did not say.
We may never know.
7.Common sayings:
1.To commit to memory (conscious effort).
2.the art of memory – mnemonics. Plato said that writing weakened the power of the memory. Writing is not true wisdom, he believed, but only something that appears to be wisdom. He also stated that writing could be easily misunderstood. Writing has no means of defending or helping itself, is not sufficiently interactive.
3.to come to mind; flashback (surface consciously but uncontrollably).
4.I almost forgot myself! (letting down your guard; remembering to behave, conforming to the norms).
5.Remembering the status of another person (‘Remember that I’m your boss!’).
6.To break the world record (international, objective, timeless memory).
7.Making, or taking a note of an event (to capture its essence).
8.Something stuck in my memory (permanent, indelible, haunted like a ghost).
9.He’s a living legend; unforgettable; history in the making (notable living person, worthy of long-term esteem).
10.Only a few valued memorabilia (scarce objects that stimulate memory).
11.To live in the past (lacking a real context; remote, nostalgic).
12.Meme complex: coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins. An idea which is a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them, much as viruses do. ‘Meme complex' denotes a group of mutually-supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion or strong faith. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans, cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. See: See also: River out of Eden.
2.The politics of memory.
In many respects, information professionals bear grave responsibility as prescribers of historical consciousness. Collective memories are all around us in the language, actions and material culture of our everyday life, in the forms of
tourist sites, memorials, local history museums, public and private records. But it is in all knowledge storehouses where we find state papers, business records, letters, diaries, visual images and a plethora of items representative of our material culture -- furniture, tools, textiles, toys. Through selection of items from the written, visual and material objects that circulate in our society, public collecting institutions attribute a social value to specific objects and thus prescribe our historical consciousness. Certain items are privileged over others, as years pass (Darian-Smith & Hamilton, 1994, p 4).
Consider this speech in China, in 1996 by Terry Cook, of the National Archives of Canada. (Archives in the post-custodial world: interaction of archival theory and practice since the publication of the Dutch Manual in 1898. XIII International Congress on Archives, Beijing 1996, Third Plenary Session, Principal Paper, p 1):
In the year 1596, the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci
presented his Chinese hosts with a plan to build a 'memory palace'. His proposal was really for an elaborate mnemonic device to facilitate the accurate categorization and memorization of information. Ricci's palace had hundreds of buildings, thousands of rooms, and many thousands of closets and furnishings . . . His palace architecture was deliberately carefully designed so that its structure would reflect the many divisions and sub-divisions of human knowledge.
Now, exactly four hundred years after Matteo Ricci, I also stand before my Chinese hosts, and humbly assert that we, the assembled archivists of the world, are still building memory palaces. Our memory palaces are not artificial (and impossible) schema to organize all human knowledge, such as Matteo Ricci proposed, but rather organic realities that contain the recorded memories of the world. The National Archivist of Canada and ICA President Jean-Pierre Wallot has written that we are 'building living memory for the history of our present'. Mirroring Matteo Ricci's architectural imagery, Wallot refers to the resulting archives as our 'houses of memory'. He asserts that this 'building' work is a 'heavy burden' on archivists, for the results contain 'the keys to the collective memory' of nations and peoples.
Archivists thereby also hold the keys to that personal and societal well-being that comes from experiencing continuity with the past, a sense of roots, of belonging, of identity. . . Yet such societal or collective memory has not been formed haphazardly throughout history . . . Historians in a post-modernist milieu are now looking very carefully at the processes over time that have determined what was worth remembering and, as important, what perforce was forgotten. French scholar Jacques Le Goff refers to the politics of archival memory: since ancient times, those in power decided who was allowed to speak and who was forced into silence, even among archival holdings. American historian Gerda Lerner convincingly traces from the Middle Ages to this century the exclusion of women from society's memory tools and institutions, including archives. African archivists are now questioning whether classic archival concepts that emerged from the written culture of Europe are appropriate for preserving the memories of Third World peoples whose culture is oral. All these acts of societal remembering, in other words, have momentous implications. As novelist Milan Kundera reminds us, 'the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting'. But whose memory? And who determines the struggle?
We are not immune in Australia from our own form of political redesign of our past at the moment. A struggle is occurring about historical identity. Professor Marilyn Lake writes about ‘The Howard history of Australia’ in The Age on 20 August 2005, p 9:
Those who control the past, we are told, also control the future. John Howard's efforts to militarise Australian historical memory certainly prepare the way for future wars, but there is surely more at stake in this frenzy of war commemoration. Power works productively and the Prime Minister has used his power to outflank his enemies in the History Wars, by choosing to fight his battles on his own terms. In war commemoration, John Howard is producing a new version of national history.
Foreign battlefields have displaced frontier wars as sites of memory. Who cares whether Aboriginal people were dispossessed by British settlement or that colonial history was marred by massacres? Real Australian history begins with Gallipoli, when Australian men joined the first Australian Imperial Force to fight overseas -- not so much, it seems, for God and Empire as old memorials still somewhat embarrassingly insist -- but for modern Australian freedom. And the men kept fighting for freedom during World War II, in Malaysia, Korea and Vietnam, in the Gulf and now in Iraq. This is history according to Howard and it is getting a lot of air-play.
Not so long ago it was the Returned and Services League that took responsibility for the military tradition and inculcated its virtues, but as an organisation it was -- rightly -- more concerned with veterans' welfare than propagating history lessons. In the new century, the Prime Minister has taken on the role of leading impresario in the theatre of war commemoration, presiding recently -- during VP Day celebrations -- over what was described as the largest air pageant in this country.