Memory and the reading substrate

Adriaan van der Weel

pp. 125-129

in: Sebastian Groes (ed), Memory in the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

From the first celts and arrowheads, technology has been regarded as a welcome servant. Mostly the servant can be trusted, though things do occasionally go wrong. As an all-purpose dogsbody, the digital electronic computer is without doubt the technology of technologies, the servant to outperform all servants. It is invading — or has already invaded — more aspects of our life than any other technology before it, and reaches parts other technologies cannot reach. Its very ubiquity, however, also makes us acutely aware of our dependence on it. Perhaps even more than that other ubiquitous technology, electricity, at times this dependence can make us feel rather uncomfortable, not to say vulnerable. This sense of vulnerability is what inspired the recent exhibition "Memory Palace" in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Porter Gallery.¹ It started from a specially commissioned fictional text by the novelist Hari Kunzru, describing a future world in which all digitally stored information has been lost through an event referred to as "the Withering". In fact, in Kunzru's story, reading, writing and even memory itself are now illegal.