Theoretical Perspectives From Other Disciplines

“To what extent do external objects and processes constitute part of the mind” ⤴️
“For an accessible and cogent overview and history, we highly recommend Michaelian and Sutton (2013), which used the banner term distributed cognition.” ⤴️
”. Another helpful point of entry is Wilson’s (2002) description of six differ- ent views on the term embodied cognition (compare especially views 3 and 4: “we offload cognitive work onto the environment” vs. “the environment is part of the cognitive system”).” ⤴️
”, Clark and Chalmers (1998) proposed the idea of the extended mind: the human mind extends into the world, because parts of the world function as parts of our cognitive systems (extended cognition).” ⤴️
“There has been much debate over whether external objects and processes truly con- stitute part of cognition (the hypothesis of extended cognition, HEC; e.g., Clark, 2010) or are merely being coupled with a cognitive agent (the hypothesis of embed- ded cognition, HEMC; e.g., Adams & Aizawa, 2010; Rupert, 2004). See Menary (2010a, Figure 10.1) for one attempt to reconcile the two views.” ⤴️
“we integrate external objects and processes that complement rather than duplicate our internal abilities.” ⤴️
“Tools enhance thinking (Dennett, 2000), and using them is one way we transform difficult problems into easier ones (Sterelny, 2004).” ⤴️
“Internal and external compo- nents of a cognitive system can “play different roles and have different properties while coupling in collective and complementary contributions to flexible thinking and acting” (Sutton, 2010, p. 194)” ⤴️
“Heersmink (2013) proposed a taxonomy of cognitive artifacts, which he defined as “human-made, physical objects that functionally contribute to performing a cog- nitive task.” He proposed three types of representational cognitive artifacts: iconic (e.g., map), indexical (e.g., compass), and symbolic (e.g., abacus); he also proposed two types of nonrepresentational (ecological) cognitive artifacts: spatial (e.g., car keys placed on the counter) and structural (e.g., shapes in Tetris).” ⤴️
“Heersmink (2015) also outlined possible dimensions of integration, including information flow, reliability, durability, trust, procedural transparency, informational transparency, individualization, and transformation.” ⤴️
“Clowes (2013) provided a thoughtful discussion of the possible effects on humans of transitioning from low-tech external memory to high-tech external mem- ory (which he calls E-Memory), in the context of both the HEC and HEMC philo- sophical views. He pointed out that the answer to the question of whether increased reliance on external memory diminishes us as people depends on whether we think of external memory as part of our selves (HEC) or not (HEMC). The former implies a mere reconfiguration of the cognitive agent, the latter a diminishment.” ⤴️
“Dynamic/dynamical systems theory (see also complex systems, cybernetics) is an approach for understanding a system in which multiple components continuously and simultaneously influence each other over time.” ⤴️
”. For a good introduction to dynamic systems theory in the context of cognition, see Clark (2001, Chapter 7) and van Gelder and Port (1995).” ⤴️
“Across time, a dynamic system moves on trajectories through a space of possible states. The system may converge toward a subset of state space known as an attrac- tor or away from a subset of state space known as a repellor” ⤴️
“s. Components in a system can be joined in causal feedback loops that are positive (e.g., an arms race) or negative (e.g., the relationship between eating and hunger). Broadly, we can conceive of internal and external memory in a nega- tive feedback loop: the more reliable and efficient one component, the less the other component is used. This is only a very basic example of how dynamic systems theory may be useful for studying the interplay of internal and external memory.” ⤴️
“The landscape of one’s internal memory over time may be governed by attractors and repellors. That is, it may be shaped by factors such as what is easy to save and revisit in external memory, what emotions and stories one most wants to preserve, and what the environment readily reminds one of.” ⤴️
“Dynamic systems theory may be useful for the study of external memory in a variety of other ways, for example, formalizing theories to account for distributed cognitive processes” ⤴️
“Heylighen (2016) described the useful concept of stigmergy: a coordination mechanism whereby an action (e.g., writing) leaves a trace in a medium (e.g., paper) which then prompts further action (e.g., more writing). However, both Hutchins (2010) and Clark (1997, 2008) warn that the dynamic systems approach by itself may be inadequate to account for real- world intelligent actions involving humans.” ⤴️
“PIM “refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain and retrieve information for every- day use” (Jones & Bruce, 2005).” ⤴️
“We recommend the following as overall refer- ences: Bergman and Whittaker (2016), Jones (2007, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2015), Jones and Teevan (2007), Marshall (2008a, 2008b), and Whittaker (2011).” ⤴️
“PIM also addresses the challenges of managing multiple information forms or types, just as we have discussed low-tech versus high-tech external mem- ory. Jones (2007) proposed a personal space of information: an amorphous set of information that a person can access (or should be able to access) and that is per- sonal in one or more of the following ways: is possessed by the person, is about them, is directed toward them, is sent by them, was experienced by them but no longer possessed by them (e.g., library books), and/or is relevant to them.” ⤴️
“Note that this conception includes both episodic and semantic forms of external memory. Note also that there are several other dimensions implicit in this concep- tion: who or what created the information (e.g., oneself, another person, or an auto- mated process; cf. Hertel, 1993; and reality monitoring notions from Johnson & Raye, 1981), who is the intended audience of the information, and who or what is the subject of the information.” ⤴️
“Jones (2007) furthermore proposed that people engage in three major types of PIM activities: keeping, finding/refinding, and meta-level activities.” ⤴️
“By our inter- pretation, keeping is the encoding of information into external memory. Finding is the retrieval of new information from external memory. Refinding is the retrieval of previously encountered information from external memory, and this activity may be guided by some internal memory of the previous encounter (e.g., approximately when and where the information was last encountered). Meta-level activities per- formed on a personal space of information include organizing (e.g., using a folder structure or file tagging scheme), maintaining (e.g., backing up files, updating file” ⤴️
“formats, synching information across devices), managing privacy and the inbound and outbound flow of information, and evaluating the efficacy of one’s own PIM activities.” ⤴️
“Jones saw the purpose of PIM activities as mapping between needs (i.e., goals) and information.” ⤴️
“Whittaker (2011) offered an alternative framework of PIM activities, based on a curation life cycle: keeping, management, and exploitation. He saw exploitation as specifically applied to personal information that one has already kept, whereas Jones’s conception of finding/refinding could also apply to public information.” ⤴️
“finding information in external memory appears to often be a multistep process (Jones & Ross, 2007; Lansdale, 1988; Teevan, Capra, & Quiñones, 2007): remembering to look (a challenge that is sometimes met by leaving piles of information as visible reminders), recalling enough about the desired information to initiate navigation or search (e.g., a general location such as the purple filing cabinet or a search term like “wedding photos”), and then recognizing the desired information among candidates returned by the recall-directed search. These last two steps are similar to the generate-recognize strategy for internal memory retrieval (Watkins & Gardiner, 1979).” ⤴️
“With external memory retrieval, the recall and recognize steps may need to be repeated in itera- tions, for example, if the initial search returned too many or too few results” ⤴️
“sometimes we simply browse external memory to reminisce, rather than trying to find something specific.” ⤴️
“Keeping (i.e., encoding) is also a multifaceted activity, involving decisions about whether some new piece of information is worth saving for the future (a signal detection task; Jones, 2004) and decisions about where and how to keep it. Such decisions are difficult because they require us to predict the needs and contexts of our future selves (cf. Bjork, 1994; Mäntylä & Nilsson, 1988; Rhodes, 2016; Tullis & Benjamin, 2015) and to weigh the costs of keeping too much (interfering with retrieval of relevant information, distraction) against the costs of keeping too little (not having information we end up needing). Whittaker (2011) provided an excel- lent review of research on keeping practices for several information formats, includ- ing paper, email, contacts, webpages, and photos. He also pointed out several factors that influence our keeping decisions, such as uniqueness (privately made items vs. publicly available), whether an item is actionable or not, and loss aversion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).” ⤴️
“people tend to keep more information than they use, especially with digital technology (photos: Whittaker, Bergman, & Clough, 2010; email: Dabbish, Kraut, Fussell, & Kiesler, 2005).” ⤴️
“Whether such “overkeeping” is a bad thing depends” ⤴️
“on one’s view of the purpose of external memory (the two first authors of this book enjoy disagreeing about this).” ⤴️
“r” ⤴️
”. Reasons for keeping found by Marshall and Bly (2005) were useful future reference, remind- ers for action, evoking internal episodic memories, and sharing. Reasons for keep- ing found by Kaye et al. (2006) were finding information later, building a legacy, sharing resources, insuring against loss, and identity construction. Note that we may sometimes keep information without the intention of specifically searching for it again, but rather as mementos which may incidentally remind us of an experience if we ever happen to come across them” ⤴️
“Whatever the intentions at the time of encoding information to external memory, the organization used will impact any future retrieval attempts. For external mem- ory, encoding is much easier than retrieval.” ⤴️
“In human history, the development of new external memory technologies, from cuneiform tablets to digital libraries, has followed a pattern: an explosion of encoded information followed by belated scram- bling efforts to improve organization and facilitate retrieval (Blair, 2010; Rumsey, 2016; Taylor & Joudrey, 2008, pp. 67–88; Thompson, 2013, pp. 115–146; Whittaker et al., 2010).” ⤴️
“external memory does not inherently forget, which would act as a check on the volume of information amassed (Locke, 2000; Mayer-Schönberger, 2011). Thus, organization is crucial.” ⤴️
“Organization practices vary across individuals, task characteristics, and information formats (Gwizdka & Chignell, 2007; Malone, 1983). Often organization efforts are only made at the time of encoding; we rarely take the time to overhaul our entire organizational systems, unless prompted by extrinsic events such as a move or a new job (Whittaker, 2011, p. 17). People do not seek to optimize their external memory tools but rather are more likely to satisfice (Simon, 1956)—that is, to adjust their system so it is just good enough to meet their short-term goals.” ⤴️
“Two common organization strategies implemented at encoding are filing and pil- ing (Malone, 1983). Filing is the placing of items into a carefully constructed hier- archical folder structure. This can assist retrieval by providing a coherent well-labeled structure to navigate, which can work well for specific projects (e.g., planning a wedding), but less so for general future reference. Filing requires upfront effort and is vexed by the problem that we are generally not good at using labels consistently (Lansdale, 1988). This is in part due to the ambiguity of language (Dumais & Landauer, 1983), and in part due to the fact that items can be classified in multiple ways, and we may not use the same classification or keyword labels at the time of encoding and the time of retrieval.” ⤴️
“The multidimensional representations of internal memory (Rosch, 1978) can be difficult to implement in external memory.” ⤴️
“As opposed to filing, piling is the placing of similar items into piles that have no deeper structure. These piles, especially physical ones, require less upfront effort than filing and can have the advantage of keeping information visible and exploiting our internal memory for spatial location (Lansdale, 1991). However, this comes at the cost of eventual clutter and visual distraction.” ⤴️
“bels used in external memory are typically a reflection of the user’s categories in internal memory (Jones & Ross, 2007).” ⤴️
“New technological tools may automate some of the burden of keeping and orga- nizing (e.g., automatic keyword generation or face recognition for photos), but hav- ing to manually handle those very burdens promotes our internal memory representations of our external memory stores (Jones & Ross, 2007). External mem- ory systems that actively engage the human user could circumvent this fault (e.g., Catarci, Dong, Halevy, & Poggi, 2007; Jones, 1986).” ⤴️
“he way the information is displayed can facilitate or impede our use of it. Research on visualization is thus also important for external memory.” ⤴️
“en more challenges arise when curating personal archives for the very long term (for an excellent overview, see Marshall, 2008a, 2008b). Marshall (2011) pointed out that most people take an approach of “benign neglect” to personal archiving, which may be sufficient for small volumes of low-tech external memory (e.g., books on a shelf, photos in a box), but is less so for large volumes and for high-tech external memory. This is in part because of the insidious challenges of digital preservation (e.g., hardware and software obsolescence, media degradation; see Anbu & Chibambo, 2009; Borgman, 2000, pp. 202–205; Kuny, 1998; Oliver & Harvey, 2016).” ⤴️
“no” ⤴️
“t only do people forget particular items that they’ve saved; they also forget entire categories of saved material or places that they’ve stored treasured items (Bruce, Jones, & Dumais 2004; Marshall & Bly 2005; Whittaker & Sidner 1996).” ⤴️
(Marshall, 2007, pp 64-65)
“nformation fragmentation. The totality of one’s personal archive is distributed across physical and electronic stores, multiple devices or locations, and multiple information forms or organization schemes (Jones, 2007; Weinberger, 2007).” ⤴️
“Information fragmentation makes it harder to find specific information when we need it and harder to consolidate information. The problem can be compounded when we fail to remember that (or find where) we have already saved something, and thus we save it again in a different place.” ⤴️
“For a review of social issues with PIM, see Lutters, Ackerman, and Zhou (2007) and Jones (2013).” ⤴️
“Lifelogging is the automatic recording of many aspects of everyday experience and may include data from wearable cameras and biological sensors (” ⤴️
I’m actively ignoring this kind of data capture - overly quantitative focus and little instrumental value to outweigh ethical and practical considerations
“Whereas the field of personal information management deals with personal external memory, library and information science (LIS) deals more with public external memory (e.g., libraries, archives, museum collections, the Internet).” ⤴️
“White (1992) actually used the term “external memory” as a unifying concept for the field of LIS (see Hartel, 2012 for a helpful review). White defined external mem- ory as “the creation, organization and use of messages or performances stored in durable media other than the memories of living persons” (p. 250).” ⤴️
“LIS is more concerned with formal actions taken by professionals, such as acquisition and cataloging, rather than everyday actions.” ⤴️
“For external memory stores such as libraries, encoding is much more closely tied to explicit organizational processes than is the case with internal memory” ⤴️
“Metadata is a useful concept for the interplay of internal and external memory. In order to use external memory, we must retain inter- nal representations of some metadata about external memory records. For example, we do not have to remember the complete contents of a research article we have read, only a rough idea of what it was about and enough information to be able to find it again (e.g., perhaps an author’s name, or a fragment of the title, or which folder we might have saved the PDF in). The concept of source memory is essen- tially memory for metadata.” ⤴️
”. Case and Given (2016, pp. 79–96) reviewed work on people’s motivations for seeking infor- mation (e.g., seeking answers, reducing uncertainty, and making sense). Case and Given (2016, pp. 141–176) also gave detailed descriptions of several models of information-seeking behavior. For example, Krikelas (1983) proposed a model in which an information seeker with an immediate information need can choose between internal memory, social external memory, and technological external mem- ory. Kuhlthau (1991) proposed a model accounting for the feelings, thoughts, and actions a person has at different stages of the information search process. Similar approaches have also been adopted by some cognitive scientists (cf. “information foraging”: Fu, 2012; Fu & Pirolli, 2007). Information seeking does not always con- sist of targeted search. Just as we may browse through our old photos or social media posts for aimless reminiscing, we may also browse or scan public external memory and encounter information serendipitously (Case & Given, 2016, pp. 105– 107; Toms, 1999). When engaging in such behavior, we are in a state analogous to what Tulving (1983, pp. 169–171) called “retrieval mode,” a state of mind in which one is prepared to remember. Studies of how and why people seek information can be beneficial to the design of external memory tools such as digital libraries (e.g., Borgman et al., 2005).” ⤴️
“Media is external memory” ⤴️
“Beck (2018) sought psycho- logical insights into why we seem to forget so much from the books, movies, and TV shows we consume” ⤴️
”, van Dijck (2007) proposed the idea of “mediated memories” as both acts and objects that simultaneously mediate between the past and the future (time axis) and between individuals and the collective (iden- tity axis).” ⤴️
“nfluences the way we imagine and inscribe our selves in relation to the culture at large.” (p. 52). C” ⤴️
van Dijck 2007, [the Internet]
“Culture informs our decisions about what to make records of and how” ⤴️
“mutual shaping (bidirectional causality) of mind and media (i.e., internal and external memory).” ⤴️
“She emphasized morphibility, multimodality, and connectivity. See also Wertsch (1998a, 1998b) for ideas on mediated action.” ⤴️
“Hayles (2012) took the perspective of contemporary technogenesis—that humans and technology have coevolved—in analyzing how the shift from print to digital media has changed reading, scholarship, and teaching, due to the different affor- dances and constraints of the two forms of external memory. Changes in our built environment lead to changes in cognitive processes (e.g., attentional habits), which then lead to further changes in the environment, and so on (cf. continuous reciprocal causation, Clark, 2008). F” ⤴️
“Hayles argued that the information-intensive” ⤴️
“nvironment provided by digital media, particularly text, has led to a shift from deep reading to hyper reading.” ⤴️
“Kuhn (2000, p. 187) offered several insights on what she called “memory texts” (e.g., memoirs) and also noted that external memories are encoded and retrieved in a social and cultural con- text.” ⤴️
“Rider (1995, p. 75) noted that in forms of literary criticism such as poststructuralism and reader- response, “the memory of the reader is as important in the process of interpretation as the memory of the writer is in the creation of the text.”” ⤴️
“perhaps printed language made human thought more linear (Ong, 1982, Chapter 4).” ⤴️
“McLuhan (1964) proposed a differentiation between “cool” media that were low in definition and thus required greater human participation to extract their information, and “hot” media that were high in definition and thus required less such participatio” ⤴️
“impoverished external cues require greater retrieval effort, which yields enhanced internal memory to the extent that such retrieval efforts are successful (Finley, Benjamin, Hays, Bjork, & Kornell, 2011; Mettler, Massey, & Kellman, 2016; Slamecka & Graf, 1978).” ⤴️
“a related disciplinary lens is semiotics, the study of how meaning is made from signs (see Chandler, 2017; Eco, 1976).” ⤴️
“Photographs are a pervasive and powerful form of external memory. I” ⤴️
”. For a helpful history of ama- teur photography, see Holland (2015). For perspectives by photography theorists on the interplay of photography and memory, see Cross and Peck (2010) and Bate (2010).” ⤴️
“van Dijck (2007, pp. 98–121, 2008). She noted that photos can serve sev- eral purposes: material keepsakes, experience facilitation, identity formation, and communication.” ⤴️
“Frohlich (2004, pp. 43–46, Figure 3.5), extending earlier work by Barthes (1981), proposed a diamond framework for understanding the memory and social effects of domestic photography. The corners of the diamond correspond to four entities: the photographer (and/or others present at the time of capture but not in the photo), the photograph itself, the subject of the photo, and the audience viewing the photo (not present at the time of capture). The framework included six possible interactions between those four entities.” ⤴️
“This framework encom- passes both internal memory and external memory (social and technological),” ⤴️
“7). Using sociology and anthropology approaches, these works have often highlighted how the photos serve to construct and commu- nicate family history and identity. The contents of family photo albums tend to underrepresent negative experiences (” ⤴️
”. For a synthesis of theoretical perspectives on family photo albums, see Sandbye (2014).” ⤴️
“People are taking many more photos and sharing more (Duggan, 2013). T” ⤴️
“Lux, Kogler, and del Fabro (2010) suggested two dimensions for people’s motivations in taking digital photos: functional versus affective, and social versus individual. L” ⤴️
“Van House (2011) argued that with the shift to digital, personal photography is becoming more public and transitory and more for communication than memory. Reasons for taking photos that van House documented include mem- ory, relationships, self-representation, and expressiveness.” ⤴️
“see Dharap (2016)” ⤴️
“For research on photo storage, organization, and retrieval practices in the twenty-first century, see Whittaker, Bergman, and Clough (2010) and Keightley and Pickering (2014)” ⤴️
“Photos can also serve as mementos: objects kept as reminders of a person or event (related terms: keepsakes, memorabilia, souvenirs, objets d’art, objets trou- vés).” ⤴️
“Importantly, mementos are often symbolic, in that their full meaning relies on the internal memory of their owners (e.g., the story of the object’s origin) and is not apparent to others. Petrelli, Bowen, and Whittaker (2014) considered the quality of physical versus digital mementos.” ⤴️
“compulsive hoarding; Steketee, Frost, & Kyrios, 2003” ⤴️
“One use of photos in the service of memory is scrapbooking: making albums that combine photos with annotation, decoration, and other materials (” ⤴️
“Phillips (2016) discussed scrapbooks as tools for autobio- graphical memory. Good (2013) drew parallels between social media and the archi- val and social functions of traditional physical scrapbooking.” ⤴️
“for many people photos heavily influence their internal episodic memories. Why do photos seem to become internal memories? Perhaps because they introduce a new internal memory trace every time we view them, whereas the original experi- ence left only one trace. Or perhaps viewing a photo alters the original trace.” ⤴️
“Collective memory4 concerns a higher and more emergent level of analysis: memory distributed across people, par- ticularly shared memories of a group’s history that are important to the group’s identity. Note that these memories can extend to events that the individuals did not personally experience, such as the founding moments of a country (cf. postmemory, Hirsch, 1997, p. 22).” ⤴️
“Danziger (2008, pp. 264–274) attributed psychology’s tardiness to the topic to its intellectual heritage of individualism. F” ⤴️
“Dudai (2002) argued for three components to collective memory: a shared body of knowledge, an attribute (a schematic narrative of a group of people), and a process (e.g., disputing and reshaping interpretations of the past). Abel et al. (2017) reviewed theory and data for each of those three components, including collaborative remem- bering, which can be thought of as a process of collective memory. Collaborative remembering is when people in a small group work to remember something together,” ⤴️
“4 Synonyms for collective memory include public memory, cultural memory, social memory, and popular memory.” ⤴️
“often by discussion” ⤴️
“From a sociological point of view, Olick (1999) articulated two competing con- cepts of collective memory: individualist versus collectivist. He wrote, “two radi- cally different concepts of culture are involved here, one that sees culture as a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds versus one that sees culture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society.” Hirst and Manier (2008) argued for reconciling these two approaches, which they saw as ends of a continuum.” ⤴️
“n epidemiological approach too, as “the transmission of a memory across a network of community members and social resources” (cf. memes, memetics; Blackmore, 1999; Dawkins, 2016; Distin, 2005; Lake, 1998; Shifman, 2013). Reese and Fivush (2008) provided a helpful review of the influential view of philosopher and sociologist Halbwachs (1925/1992), who held that an individual’s memories are necessarily reconstructed in a social context.” ⤴️
”. Le Goff (1992, p. xi) wrote that “memory is the raw material of history.” Historiography can be seen as the study of external memory that has been used to record history.” ⤴️
“echnological external memory in the form of monuments, memorials, media, cultural symbols, and cultural practices such as holidays and festivals. For example, Zelizer (1995) discussed the materiality of collective mem- ory: “visual records stabilize the transient nature of memory itself, which, not unlike reality, is subject to continued reconstruction.” L” ⤴️
”. Anthropologists have studied how different forms of external memory serve collective memory, such as narrative text versus ritual bodily performances (Connerton, 1989)” ⤴️
“ecorded law (external memory) can serve as collective memory, see Havel (2005).” ⤴️
“Pickering and Keightley (2016) discussed the dialectical between individual and collective memory and the implications that has for meth- odologies of studying memory at different spatial and temporal scales.” ⤴️
“Remembering is often a social process. Weldon (2000), writing from a cognitive psychology perspective, helpfully analyzed the different ways that remembering can be conceptualized as a social process, reviewing the ideas of Durkheim, Halbwachs, Bartlett, Vygotsky, and Hutchins. She also described different approaches to conducting research on memory as a social process: social cognition; sociocultural influences; small groups as information-processing systems; the indi- vidual, group, and society as an information-processing system; activities as units of analysis (a la Vygotsky); group-level behaviors and knowledge (collective mem- ory); and social network analysi” ⤴️
“ix dimensions: encoding versus retrieval, shared versus unshared experiences, intentionally versus accidentally shared experiences, distinct versus similar unshared experiences across people, retrieval done by an individual versus a group, and the degree of collaboration in group retrieval.” ⤴️
Barnier, Sutton, Harris and Wilson (2008)
“A majority of our participants agreed that social media helps them remember experiences (Q89) and that technology helps them collaboratively remember (Q90). T” ⤴️
“Another technological arena for collective memory is Wikipedia, where page views and edits can illuminate the retrieval and contestation of historical events (Ferron & Massa, 2014; García-Gavilanes, Mollgaard, Tsvetkova, & Yasseri, 2017; Luyt, 2016). For a review of research on Wikipedia as the “sum of all human knowledge,” see Mesgari, Okoli, Mehdi, Nielsen, and Lanamäki (2015). Collective memory can also be seen in social (or crowdsourced) classification of data, such as descriptive collaborative tagging of images (e.g., flickr.com), scholarly articles (e.g., citeulike. org), or books (e.g., librarything.com or goodreads.com). See also folksonomies (Mathes, 2004; Vander Wal, 2007). Technology can play a role in shaping collective memory, as in systems that combine automation with social tagging (Raimond, Ferne, Smethurst, & Adams, 2014), or when social media algorithms determine what content to show people (Sauter, 2017; Talusan, 2017).” ⤴️
“Donald (1991, 1993, 2001) argued for the possibility of social external memory predating even language, in the form of mimetics (the ability to mime or reenact complex gestures for representa- tional purposes),” ⤴️
“Social external memory has been with us for a very long time. When did technological external memory emerge?” ⤴️
“D’Errico (1995, 1998) described a theoretical framework and methodology for identifying marked objects that served as artificial memory systems, which he defined as “devices specifically conceived to record, store, and recover information outside the physical body” (2001). The earliest of these were simply lines engraved on fragments of bone, ant- ler, or ivory. What information did these artifacts carry? Likely, counts of some- thing” ⤴️
“Bednarik (1994) notes: “The symbolic productions of human beings are almost without exception extremely ephemeral.” This holds true to an even greater degree today in the information age (Anbu & Chibambo, 2009; Borgman, 2000, pp. 202– 205; Kuny, 1998; Oliver & Harvey, 2016)” ⤴️
“he BBC Domesday Project in 1986 compiled cultural information to be preserved for posterity on laserdiscs, but this record was nearly unrecoverable a mere 16 years later due to obsolescence of software and hardware, not to mention copyright issues (Darlington, Finney, & Pearce, 2003). Meanwhile, the original paper Domesday Book, a census of England” ⤴️
“completed in the year 1086 C.E., has been carefully preserved for over 900 years and requires no special equipment to read.” ⤴️
“Ancient Peruvians devel- oped a system of knots tied in cords, quipus (or khipus), to provide an external memory aid for their history and bureaucracy (Tylor, 1870, pp. 156–160; Locke, 1912). A single quipu consisted of knots tied on a series of small cords attached to one large cord. Different types of knots could represent numerical values, and the order and color of the small cords could represent different categories of objects (e.g., types of livestock in a herd or types of soldiers in an army). However, only specially trained officers could decode these cues to retrieve the information. Prayer beads have been a widespread form of external memory used for centuries by many religions to guide adherents in the recitation of prayer cycles. Evidence of religious use of beads dates back at least as far as Hindu sculptures from 185 B.C.E. (Dubin, 2009, pp. 79–92). The beads do not encode the actual contents of the prayers, but rather form a scaffold of reminders to guide internal memory. Beads are held in one or two hands, and the fingers are passed over the beads as the prayer cycle progresses. Many prayer cycles include repetitions of certain segments. The feel of a particular bead cues adherents to move on to the next part of the prayer cycle. Thus the beads alleviate the need to keep internal track of the number of rep- etitions, freeing adherents to either clear their mind or focus on the content of the prayers.” ⤴️
Patterns and rhythms encoded, lots of things we want to remember follow patterns and rhythms in this way. Same as a topic grouping??
“Cuneiform tablets served as inventories of goods for trade, and these visual lists alleviated internal memory burdens from those oversee- ing trade. The tablets also eventually forced their creators to grapple with informa- tion infrastructure in order to house and organize the tablets to facilitate retrieval of their information (Rumsey, 2016, pp. 21ff)” ⤴️
“An alphabet was key in allowing exter- nal memory to express limitless ideas using a small number of symbols. Furthermore, a phonemic alphabet exploits the cognitive processes used for spoken language.” ⤴️
“By Plato’s account, Socrates said of writing: it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. (Plato 370 B.C.E./1995, pp. 274c–d)” ⤴️
“Socrates also pointed out that you cannot interact with written words like you can with a speaker, because written words have no intelligence or agency of their own; this mirrors our criticism of the overextension of the transactive memory frame- work. Socrates was right about people memorizing less and that does to some extent come with a cost (e.g., less information in internal memory to use for making effi- cient and creative connections). But what he failed to appreciate was how much more internal memory can do when acting in concert with external memory, how much more total information we can access, especially semantic.” ⤴️
“For a stimulating edited volume on evolutionary perspectives on technological change, see Ziman (2003). Issues include the possibilities of punctuated equilibrium (i.e., long periods of stability interspersed with short periods of rapid change) and of technological evolution being Lamarckian (i.e., inheritance of acquired traits) rather than Darwinian.” ⤴️
“Draaisma (2000) traced the history of ideas and metaphors about memory, which have always been tied to changing societal values and prac- tices, as well as changing technology (e.g., wax tablets, books, phonographs, photo- graphs, computers, holograms).” ⤴️
“We also see that internal and external memory have always been interdependent. This is evidenced by the fact that we can no longer decipher many ancient forms of external memory” ⤴️
“The forms of external memory have also been shaped by the needs of internal memory. Danziger (2008, pp. 72–78) described innovations in written language that appeared during the period when cultural values shifted from auditory recitation in Roman times to silent visual memorization in medieval times. These medieval innovations included spaces between words, colored and embellished first letters of paragraphs, titles for chapters, and even bizarre creatures drawn in the margins (drolleries), all in order to help make the text more memorable.” ⤴️
“the role of external memory expanded with the printing press around 1440 C.E. and the growth in literacy in subsequent centuries. McLuhan (1964, p. 174) remarked that “print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal mem- ory inadequate.” ⤴️
“the rise of “commonplace books” during the European Renaissance (Harvard University Library, n.d.). These were small hand- written notebooks in which people compiled collections of significant or useful pas- sages that they heard or read elsewhere. The commonplace books helped people organize and retrieve external memory for later contemplation or for use in compos- ing their own writing. This new form of external memory arose as an early form of personal information management to help people deal with the burgeoning amount of knowledge available to them. The commonplace book was also part of a fascinat- ing long history of note-taking, detailed by Blair (2010).” ⤴️
“Only a subset of material culture is designed for cognitive affordances such as memory. Donald (2001, p. 305) stated that technological external memory, or symbolic technology, can be considered an extension of material culture “designed specifically to help us think, remember, and represent reality.” In the introduction to a book on material memories, Kwint (1999) proposed that objects of material culture may serve memory in three ways: they can be represented in internal memory, they can cue internal memory, and they can form records of information beyond what is contained in internal memory.” ⤴️
”, Kwint states that “evocation implies an open dialogue between the object, the maker and the consumer in constructing meaning.” In a similar vein, Wertsch (1998a, 1998b) advocated for mediated action as a unit of analysis, by which he meant the interaction between humans and cultural tools such as external memory.” ⤴️
“excellent edited volume combining anthropology, archaeology, and philosophy of mind (extended mind and distributed cognition), see Malafouris and Renfrew (2010).” ⤴️
“Science and technology studies (STS) is a relevant field covering how new technology is integrated into society (e.g., van House, 2011).” ⤴️
“Some adaptation of methods may be necessary, especially as we become more and more integrated with our technology.” ⤴️
“For an introduction to Thad Starner and Steve Mann, pioneers of wearable computing to augment human cognition, see P. Miller (2012).” ⤴️
“digital anthropology (Horst & Miller, 2012; Wesch, 2008), digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016), cyber-anthropology (Budka & Kremser, 2004; Libin & Libin, 2005), and cyborg anthropology (Case, 2014; Haraway, 2006).” ⤴️