On 'Memory' by Bernard Stieglar

Terms used: 

• Hypomnesis - Making technical of memory (exteriorisation of memory) 
• Anamnesis - Recollection, especially of a recent event 
• Mnemotechniques (individual exteriorisations of memory functions)
• Mnemotechnologies (large scale technological systems or networks that organize memories)

Stieglar's 'Memory'  is a challenging essay to analyse which in some ways makes it the embodiment of the very thing Stieglar is discussing.

The first evidence of mnemotechniques can be seen in lithic tools - these stone tools that were the first examples of reproducing, modifying, even controlling memory and knowledge. With the later advent of alphabetisation, these mnemotechniques not only provided a method of retaining and sharing memory and knowledge but also began to evolve.

The shift from mnemotechnique to mnemotechnology allows societies to access and understand the knowledge and memory on which they are founded - and thus to continue developing. However, as these externalized technologies of consciousness become more complex, the less an individual needs to internalize knowledge as memory.  The increased use of these technologies - and by consequence the decrease in internalized memory -  has led to a more proletariat and industrialized society.  This in turn has led to disindividuation. We lose our ability to participate in collective individuation.

The newest (perhaps) grammatization - the participative economy  no longer requires this disindividuation to exist. By no longer enclosing hypomnesic memory in industrialization and imposing the ensuing producer/consumer opposition, the Internet is allowing - in fact requires - receivers to be at the same time senders. Technologies of consciousness are no longer confined to a tool accessible only to us but have evolved. Our computers, our phones, our social media feeds provide a milieu in which we share, consume, create, annex consciousness constantly. 

On 'Technology & Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph' by James Carey

SOURCE DOCUMENT: James Carey, "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph," Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (London: Routledge, 1988), 201-230.

In Carey's essay Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph, he examines the role played by the telegraph in shaping not just modern communication but modern life. It may be tempting to think of the telegraph as an archaic, perhaps even innocent, technology of little consequence but as Carey points out this is a disservice not only to the significance of the telegraph in technological terms but also to the ideology it influenced.

The telegraph not only gave birth to one of the first and most enduring industrial monopolies - Western Union (the company still operates today and continued to send telegrams until 2006) - but was also the first product of the electrical goods industry and by extrapolation of the science and engineering industries (Carey, 202). Carey notes the impact the telegraph had on language, knowledge, and structures of awareness at all levels and draws a parallel with the modern day computer. While both technologies were created for the somewhat innocuous pastime of playing chess (Carey, 202), the long-term implications of both on knowledge - both positive and negative - were immediately and actively debated.

For Carey,

       "the innovation of the telegraph can stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history and determined, even to this day, he major lines of development of  American communications" (Carey, 203)

In the separation of communication from transportation  - thus allowing communication a certain control over physical processes - the telegraph established a model that has been echoed in almost all communication developments since. Carey goes on to explain that because communication was no longer confined or constrained by geographic frameworks, the very identity of both communication and transportation was irreversibly altered. It became an agency for the alteration of ideas (Carey, 204).

This change in ideas and identity brought with it changes in most social structures from legality to management to scientific rationales. Again we see echoes of these changes in the responses and reactions to new digital technologies. Alongside these changes were the changes to the way business took place. It was no longer necessary for two people to be face to face in order for a transaction to be negotiated or completed; they did not even need to be in the same country. It wasn't business however that drove the spread of the technology in question but religion since it provided a new method of spreading God's word and advancing the possibility of salvation to heathen and God fearer alike.  It would not be too difficult to find a similar modern occurrence in digital media, in particular social media.

It shouldn't be thought that the telegraph was met with unanimous acceptance any more than digital media and technologies have been. Dissenting voices however became a part of the success of the telegraph since it offered a social unity in a time of essential disharmony. This ability to draw together and on oppositional forces continues to be visible in modern communication. Carey points that the linking of people globally through improved communication was and continues to be heralded as realizing the 'Universal Brotherhood of Universal man' (Carey 208). Despite the temptation to dismiss this idea as overly and overtly religious rhetoric, it needs to be recognized that the systematic technological development heralded by the telegraph brought with it a development of justifying ideologies.

According to Carey the telegraph change the nature of journalism and story telling - moving from a traditional use of the symbolic to a pared back, leaner type of literary language that was confined not just to news reporting but was seen in the fictional work of the likes of Hemingway (unsurprising given his role as a war correspondent). Carey seems somewhat disappointed in the change but it would be interesting, I suspect to compare contemporary 'journalistic styles' and mediums if for no other reason than to see the correlation with the underlying driving ideologies of these styles.

Journalism wasn't the only area impacted by the new technology and its emerging ideology. The provision to selectively control and transmit information offered by the telegraph led to entrepreneurial development with some significant businesses beginning in the telegraph operator's shack  as well as to the business of credit, the expansion of merchandising, and the development of modern gambling (Carey, 213).

Carey draws a parallel between the development of the watch and its impact on workers - life becomes controlled by time - and the telegraph's impact on wider  communities. The former coordinated the industrial factory; the latter the industrial nation (Carey, 229). This coordination and control continues today in the form of digital technologies  - and it is in these echoes that we really see the relationship between technology and ideology.