The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 148-171

  Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249343023     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/595632     Document Type: Review

References (58)

1. See Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)
2. and John Markoff, "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense," New York Times, 12 Nov. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/ 12web.html?ex=1320987600&en= 254d697964cedc62&ei=5088
3. www.fibreculture.org/, and www.beap.org/dac/
4. For more on the mid- to late-1990s utopian vision of the internet, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
5. See David Lieberman, Peter Johnson, and Gary Levin, "NBC Universal Plans Cost Cuts, Layoffs," USA Today, 20 Oct. 2006, www.usatoday.com/money/ media/2006-10-19-nbc-x.htm
6. See Michael Arrington, "85% of College Students Use FaceBook," TechCrunch, 7 Sept. 2005, www.techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-students- use-facebook/
7. and Ryan Lizza, "The YouTube Election," New York Times, 20 Aug. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/ weekinreview/20lizza.html?ex= 1313726400&en=a605fabfcb81eebf&ei=5088& partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
8. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)
9. and Peter Lunenfeld, "Interview with Peter Lunenfeld," interview by Geert Lovink, 31 July 2000, www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime- l-0008/msg00008.html
10. See William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York, 2003).
11. Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Amsterdam, 2003), p. 12.
12. See McKenzie Wark, "The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual [Version 3.0]," in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York, 2006), pp. 265-76.
13. Paul Virilio, "Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!" CTheory, www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=72
14. Virilio, "The Visual Crash," in Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (exhibition catalog, Center for Art and Media, 12 Oct. 2001-24 Feb. 2002), p. 112;
15. see Virilio, "Red Alert in Cyberspace!" www.watsoninstitute. org/infopeace/vy2k/red-alert.cfm
16. Manovich, "New Media from Borges to HTML," in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Monfort (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 13.
17. If the validity of the scientific method rests on (hypothetical) experimental reproducibility, the validity of a humanities-based critique depends on access to cited documents. The fact that criticism still happens reveals the extent to which both humanities and scientific scholarship itself depends on a "virtual witnessing." For more on the importance of virtual witnessing to the scientific method, see Steven Shapiro and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1989)
18. and Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995).
19. Lovink, My First Recession, pp. 15, 42.
20. Wark, "Robot Journalists and the Ironies of Tactical Media," www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0205/msg00093.html
21. Most influentially, Raymond Williams has theorized television in terms of flow in his Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London, 1974)
22. and Jane Feuer analyzed the ideology of liveness and the relationship between flow and segmentation in "The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology," in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches - An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, Md., 1983), pp. 12-22.
23. Manovich, in The Language of New Media, for instance, makes parallels between new media and film, virtually ignoring TV altogether.
24. For TV and the ideology of liveness, see Feuer's "The Concept of Live Television."
25. For more on the differences and similarities between TV and the internet, see Chun, "Why Cyberspace," Control and Freedom, pp. 37-76.
26. The move from calculator to computer is also the move from mere machine to human-emulator; the term computer was first resisted by IBM because computers were initially human. To call a machine a computer was to imply job redundancy; see Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York, 1996), p. 115.
27. See John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, in The Origins of Digital Computers, ed. Brian Randell (Berlin, 1973), p. 357.
28. Lizza, "The YouTube Election."
29. For more on this ideal and its incapacity to explain public behavior, see Keenan, "Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)," PMLA 117 (Jan. 2002): 104-16.
30. See Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly (July 1945): www.theatlantic .com/doc/194507/bush; hereafter abbreviated "A."
31. See Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" (1962), www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/ augmentinghumanintellect/ ah162index.html
32. and Ted Nelson, Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow's Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education, and Freedom (Sausalito, Calif., 1981).
33. See Manovich, "New Media from Borges to HTML."
34. Indeed, Bush deliberately contrasts the memex to expensive digital computers in his " Memex Revisited," in New Media, Old Media, pp. 85-95.
35. Bush, "Memex Revisited," p. 85.
36. This is Foucault's description of traditional history in his The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1982).
37. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, introduction to "As We May Think," in The New Media Reader, p. 35.
38. See Jann Sapp, "The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel," in Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, ed. H. E. Le Grand (Dordrecht, 1990), pp. 137-66.
39. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996).
40. See Chun, "Code as Media" (unpublished paper).
41. See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 223.
42. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," in McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 21.
43. Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Go to Statement Considered Harmful," in Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering, ed. Manfred Broy and Ernst Denert (Berlin, 2002), p. 352.
44. Von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (1958; New Haven, Conn., 2000), p. 61.
45. For more on the brain as an analog simulator, see Alain Berthoz, The Brain's Sense of Movement, trans. Giselle Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
46. See Arthur W. Burks, Herman H. Goldstine, and von Neumann, Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument (Princeton, N.J., 1947), p. 6.
47. Von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain, p. 36.
48. This notion of memory as static files is linked to von Neumann's suspicion, perhaps drawn from psychoanalysis, that memories never die. McCulloch's paper "Why the Mind Is in the Head" followed von Neumann's "General and Logical Theory of Automata" at the same Hixon symposium; in it, McCulloch writes: I see an argument that one might make against the view that memory in any form actually resides in the neurons. It is a negative argument, and far from cogent. How reasonable is it? This is the argument: There is a good deal of evidence that memory is static, unerasable, resulting from an irreversible change. (This is of course the very opposite of a "reverberating," dynamic, erasable memory.) Isn't there some physical evidence for this? If this is correct, then no memory, once acquired, can be truly forgotten. Once a memory-storage place is occupied, it is occupied forever, the memory capacity that it represents is lost; it will never be possible to store anything else there. What appears as forgetting is then not true forgetting, but merely the removal of that particular memory-storage region from a condition of rapid and easy availability to one of lower availability. It is not like the destruction of a system of files, but rather like the removal of a filing cabinet into the cellar. Indeed, this process in many cases seems to be reversible. Various situations may bring the "filing cabinet" up from the "cellar" and make it rapidly and easily available again. [McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind, pp. 92-93]
49. Von Neumann's move to files is intriguing, especially given the importance of files - and of disposing files - to modern bureaucracy and state power. For more on this, see Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, Calif., 2008).
50. See von Neumann, "The General and Logical Theory of Automata," Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory, ed. William Aspray and Arthur Burks (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 421.
51. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966), pp. 6-7.
52. See Michael R. Williams, A History of Computing Technology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1977), pp. 306-16.
53. See Wolfgang Ernst, "Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?" in New Media, Old Media, p. 118. Although this is certainly true for CRT screens, it is not necessarily true for LCD screens, which operate more like blinds that allow certain portions of light through or not.
54. See Jeffrey Toobin, "SCOTUS Watch," in "The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2005, www.newyorker.com/talk/content/ articles/051121ta-talk-toobin
55. This is because there are no shelves, no fixed relation between what is storable and the place they are stored. As Harriet Bradley has argued, the internet breaks the bond between location and storage; if before "only what has been stored can be located," now "memory is no longer located in specific sites" (Harriet Bradley, "The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and Found," History of the Human Sciences 12, no. 2 [1999]: 113).
56. www.archive.org/about/about.php
57. See Ernst, "Dis/continuities," p. 119.
58. See Virilio, "The Visual Crash" and "Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!"