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Our memory gives the human species a unique evolutionary advantage. Our stories, ideas, and innovations--in a word, our "culture"--can be recorded and passed on to future generations. Our enduring culture and restless curiosity have enabled us to invent powerful information technologies that give us invaluable perspective on our past and define our future. Today, we stand at the very edge of a vast, uncharted digital landscape, where our collective memory is stored in ephemeral bits and bytes and lives in air-conditioned server rooms. What sources will historians turn to in 100, let alone 1,000 years to understand our own time if all of our memory lives in digital codes that may no longer be decipherable?
In When We Are No More Abby Smith Rumsey explores human memory from pre-history to the present to shed light on the grand challenge facing our world--the abundance of information and scarcity of human attention. Tracing the story from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls, to movable type, books, and the birth of the Library of Congress, Rumsey weaves a compelling narrative that explores how humans have dealt with the problem of too much information throughout our history, and indeed how we might begin solve the same problem for our digital future. Serving as a call to consciousness, When We Are No More explains why data storage is not memory; why forgetting is the first step towards remembering; and above all, why memory is about the future, not the past.
"If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create? We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." --Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist at Google, at a press conference in February, 2015.
- Sales Rank: #465867 in eBooks
- Published on: 2016-03-01
- Released on: 2016-03-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"[A] wide-ranging rumination on cultural memory . . . Rumsey draws a powerful analogy to underscore memory’s materiality." ―Washington Post Book World
"The goal of When We Are No More . . . is to challenge us to consider more seriously how the consequences of our current data deluge will influence society moving forward. In that, Rumsey succeeds admirably." ―Science
"[An] erudite treatise on how the digitization of archival technology makes it all too easy to rewrite our cultural past." ―Nature
"For anyone skeptical about the increasing reliance on digital media, Rumsey eases concern by revisiting information inflations of the past, simultaneously conveying the importance of the issue to a more general readership." ―Publishers Weekly
"This book presents a fascinating view into how the mind’s memory functions and all the external devices that complement this aspect of consciousness." ―San Francisco Book Review
"Rumsey takes us on a lucid and deeply thought-provoking journey into what makes the human species unique--the capacity to create external memory. This book will change how you think about our collective store of knowledge, and its future." ―Paul Saffo, Consulting Professor, Stanford University School of Engineering
"What Oliver Sacks did for the physical mind, Abby Smith Rumsey is doing for our evolving digital mind--making the history and complexity of our collective memory vital to everyone." ―Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive
"One of the paradoxes of our time is that we live with so much information at our fingertips that we can barely remember anything. How future generations will recall the things that we did and said--if they recall us at all--is the subject of this deeply absorbing book. With the grace and clarity that come from years of reflection, Abby Smith Rumsey illuminates a serious set of problems at the heart of our endlessly self-Googling culture." ―Ted Widmer, former Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University
"This book is a thoughtful and urgent call to action that is essential reading for all who care about diversity, sustainability, and the advancement of knowledge. Digital memory presents a new challenge; Rumsey provides inspiring insights into the ways in which past challenges have been met and offers a compelling argument to drive the development of new ideas and solutions to this looming threat of inestimable loss." ―Sarah E. Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian
"'Thoughts that come on doves' feet steer the world,' said Nietzsche. Abby Smith Rumsey’s welcome new book on the importance of digital memory to our shared past--and still more, our shared future--wears its learning and its lessons lightly. But make no mistake. It is a manifesto that comes on doves’ feet, and it comes at a critical juncture, as we begin to envision the memory systems that will be in place ‘when we are no more.’" ―Max Marmor, President, Samuel H. Kress Foundation
"As pixels fly by on our multiplying screens, Rumsey reminds us that we have unwittingly committed our modern forms of expression to formats that are all too fragile, dependent on hardware and software that quickly become dated and unusable. With a kaleidoscopic view of history--from Sumerian tablets to the libraries of Montaigne and Jefferson--and a critical analysis of how our minds use recorded information, she warns us that without devoting more attention to digital preservation we will end up with a cultural disorder akin to Alzheimer's, where we live in a troubling, constant present, with little ability to imagine the future. Ensuring perpetual access to our shared culture is one of the most pressing issues of our digital age, and this compelling, important book is a call and plan for doing so." ―Dan Cohen, Founding Director, Digital Public Library of America
"Abby Smith Rumsey’s excellent When We Are No More takes a . . . long view of our contemporary anxieties over knowledge preservation . . . Her book is especially good at charting the changing shape of the institutions to which we have entrusted (or outsourced) our collective memory." ―Wall Street Journal
"In a fascinating, out-of-the-box rumination on the digital age, Abby Smith Rumsey worries that the information monopolists of our day - Google and Facebook - might end up fostering a monoculture not unlike the Christian rulers and Islamic caliphate that purged pagan texts from the Great Library of Alexandria in ancient times." - WorldPost
About the Author
Abby Smith Rumsey is a historian who writes about how ideas and information technologies shape perceptions of history, of time, and of personal and cultural identity. Trained at Harvard as a Russian scholar, she has worked in Soviet-era archives, spent a decade at the Library of Congress, and has consulted on digital collecting and curation, intellectual property issues, and the economics of digital information for a variety of universities and the National Science Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A historical account, not a strategy for preserving knowledge.
By Mandrake
I was expecting more "solutions" to this important issue.
A lot of the text goes back in history to show the evolution on how we recorded events.
A relatively small portion is dedicated to 'today'.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
I thought the article brought up some interesting ideas and that her new book would be good for discussion
By J. Nolt
I selected "When We Are No More" for a librarians' book group this summer after reading Rumsey's article, "The Risk of Digital Oblivion" in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought the article brought up some interesting ideas and that her new book would be good for discussion. It was, although not quite in the ways I'd hoped.
The organization is not what I expected; it takes what appear to be random and erratic tangents into anecdotes about historical figures that are never tied back into the main themes. In particular, Thomas Jefferson makes numerous appearances, but no one in our group could figure out why by the end of the book.
While I respect Rumsey's efforts to take a cross-disciplinary approach, I am not confident in her expertise in most of the fields she touches on. She makes sweeping states to support her conclusions (often in combination with the use of the royal "we") some of which are questionable, and some of which are factually inaccurate. As an example of a questionable statement, she informs us "today we see books as natural facts. We do not see them as memory machines with lives of their own, though that is exactly what they are." (p. 177). Whoever her "we" is, it often excludes me. In an example of factual inaccuracy, she states that "the moral is that in Nature, more is better than less" (p. 162) to support her argument that data should be stored redundantly. Life uses a plethora of evolutionary strategies; our own species is a case against her point of "more is better than less" since we spend extensive resources raising, protecting, and teaching our comparatively few offspring.
Rumsey is also dismissive of the technical underpinnings of her arguments: "Solving search across so much information will also be nontrivial, as computer engineers are fond of saying. But these are technical matters, no matter how complicated" (p. 167). She seems to be making the assumption that all technical matters are inherently solvable, which is not an assumption I am comfortable making.
"Memory is about the future, not the past", states the jacket, and so she reiterates throughout the text. It's an argument I was very curious to see explored, and yet no clearer on the idea by the end then at the beginning. In fact, we spent most of our discussion time trying to follow the logical leaps and conceptual hops Rumsey makes throughout the text. Several people mentioned that it seemed like the book was rushed to press, and that it needed a good editor.
One person attempting to integrate as many disciplines and concepts as Rumsey tackles is a Herculean task, and she is not Hercules. Perhaps this very interesting idea for a book would be better explored in a series of essays by individual subject matter experts. "When We Are No More" touches on a lot of interesting ideas, concepts, and fields, but does not connect them into a cohesive whole.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A Look in the Mirror: Remembering and Forgetting
By Jeff La Deur
As a concert pianist, I deal with the ephemeral nature of 'data' every day. Some of my most treasured possessions are the old scores I study, passed down from several generations of teachers and students. The scores are already an approximation of the composer's expression, a necessary comprise made in order to render one's imaginative creation in a form accessible to others. Something essential is lost in translation, but it is better than the alternative of never receiving the message at all. This is true for all manuscripts- they are a shell of the original inspiration. And yet, to hold the thing itself brings a sense of wonder- in fact, multiple senses: the smell of old paper, the faded pencil marks, the very real fragility of it in your hands.
We have lost that sense of wonder for the information we possess, partly due to its wild abundance, but also to our diminishing capacity to receive it.
When We Are No More is written in the artistic spirit of many of the subjects addressed therein, provoking timely, ethical questions rather than offering what could only be superficial solutions. Artists tend to be embrace the ambiguity of such complexities, leaning into the gap rather than hurrying to patch it up. Reading this with the expectation of a nail in the coffin answer to everything is sophomoric and short sighted.
This book necessarily spends time setting up the call to action by exploring how we got to where we are. It is written in a way that is approachable, engaging, and ultimately, musical. I have enjoyed it thoroughly and am looking forward to rereading it, not only for the substance of its content, but the beauty of its eloquence.
Jeff LaDeur
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