Notes

internet users en masse being siloed by unnecessarily proprietary platforms and non-interoperable data formats

freedom of movement in ‘fediverse’ and similar ecosystems

internet platforms as compared to physically isolated locations

boundaries, entrance, mediated communications

affiliations, groupings, territory

metaphors for these spaces

Mentions

“Since the introduction of timeline, one might see Facebook as a passport to participating in the most prevalent form of capturing, mediating, and archiving personal life accounts.”

“Facebook locks the subject into a specific techno-economic regime of navigation through mediated memories. There is a contract and transaction written into every passport. In return for the right to freely cross borders, the authority has right to control this mobility, while acquiring insight into the subject’s personal information.” -> ⤴️

Mentions

Smolicki problematizes the haunting canon of the Memex as fitting new technologies onto its metaphor ‘tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage’ and ‘reproduces[s] the logic of progressivism’ (Smolicki, 2017)

“According to Wendy Chun (2008), Memex has become a disproportionally “canonized” model not only for an automated memory supplement, but for digital technology, personal archiving, and the internet in general. Consequently, it has long been contaminating currents of media scholarship in relation to digital computing and memory, both in terms of determining the genealogy of historical media discourse, as well as the development of practical inventions. The perpetual invocation of Memex as a material and conceptual foundation for our contemporary personal computers and digital memory practices not only conserves the progressivist reading of the history of media technologies (by projecting media as continuously transforming toward more seamless, immediate, automated, and invisible aids for the general improvement of our everyday lives), but also tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage.” (Smolicki, 2017)

its a good thing you can't Google your memories

and, increasingly, you kinda CAN Google your memories. This is not desirable for numerous data privacy reasons already without engaging in any more specific niches of philosophy or techno-politics

the topic of ‘search’ is already complex, the topic of memory recall is already complex, lets not hand over this power to a single tech conglomerate for a start, and then we can discuss the issues of associative memory, indexing, second brains and lossy data capture

Mentions

“the “googlization” of everyday life, memories are seen as “fixed entities patiently awaiting their retrieval from the shelves of the mental library” (van Dijck, 2005, p.327).” ⤴️
Black Mirror episode ‘The Entire History of You’ is based on a similar concept