Abstract
If the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the mid-1990s described a trend called ‘archive fever’ – understood as the increased interest in the explorational and critical approach to archives – then the digital age has led to unprecedented overheating of the whole archival system. Due to all-encompassing digital technologies, we live in a moment of creating a giant archive of humankind that radically questions our cultural, legal, and ethical capability of managing it. In this new framework, what counts the most is the unstoppable, intertwined, and even frenetic flow of past and present events, which subsequently challenge categories like private and public, virtual and real, and preserved and lost. Western culture, determined by digital technologies, has created ‘a paradoxical archive of the non-archive’ (p. 69). In his new book Remember Me: Memory and Forgetting in the Digital Age, David Sisto shows that the revolution has already arrived.
The main theme of his book is the investigation of a dialectical pair of concepts – memory and forgetting. However, the Italian philosopher is far from accepting them as simply antagonistic, and he draws an ethically and philosophically complex picture of their reciprocal relationships and influences. Interestingly, in his previous book Online Afterlives: Immortality, Memory and Grief in Digital Culture, Sisto (2020) explores how digital technologies have changed the way we understand the concept of immortality in the 21st century. He also touches upon memory-related topics but the matter is so complex and ambiguous that, as Sisto had rightly assumed, it deserves separate reflection. Thus, in his current work, not only does he provide a range of new contexts and examples regarding remembering and forgetting, but he also organises them in a commendably coherent and logical way, carefully guiding his readers through this treacherous terrain.
In Chapter 1, Sisto provides an informative collage of technologies that started back in the late 1970s, the development of which led us gradually to the present prevalence of social media networks. While recalling ground-breaking inventions like the first successful communication via the Arpanet network in 1983 and the advent of the HTML protocol in 1991, he simultaneously reconstructs the socio-cultural background, arguing that the idea of an interconnected world occupied the minds of numerous writers, philosophers and sociologists much earlier. Interestingly, Sisto draws heavily from his cultural background, attaching to the main narrative more local threads. For example, he presents the Italian novel The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria, which tells the story of a giant library in which citizens collect their authentic memories. With good reason, Sisto calls the library ‘Facebook in 1977’ (p. 13), tracing the similarities and highlighting the problems that may (and did!) come with the advent of digital technologies. This example, like a few others in the book, proves that the imagination of thinkers from different cultural contexts has gravitated for decades towards the same dream of ‘connective generations’ (p. 23), which has never been only American-based.
Chapter 1 may also serve as an example of a well-designed academic dramaturgy with an ‘ethical suspense’. In the beginning, Sisto displays social networks as promising and liberating (exactly as they were seen at that time), through their more technologically and ethically gloomy periods to their current status, where they are severely assessed as ‘digital unconsciousness’ or even a ‘new dark age’. One of many reasons for this disenchantment – as Sisto notes – is that we are overwhelmed by an inconceivable amount of data. To make this ‘tsunami of bytes’ even more tangible, Sisto puts them into statistics: 511,200 tweets every minute throughout the world, one billion users visit YouTube monthly, and audio and video material have increased by 300 hours every minute on the same platform (pp. 33–36). If those numbers make an impression, it must be said that it is just a beginning. Technological capacity has increased significantly over the last two decades, but, as Sisto firmly stresses, the same is not true of our perception and ways of processing and managing those data.
In Chapter 2, Sisto shows how platforms like Facebook have become, simultaneously, tools for creating a personal biography and a collective history of humankind. It is an unprecedented situation that macro and micro perspectives meld together, conveying in one flow historical events and news about users’ Saturday meals. Future historians might treat it as a detailed representation of an entire civilisation, but Sisto warns that digital archives comprising ‘a colossal amount of schizophrenic words, images, and videos’ (p. 52) do not constitute coherent and reliable narratives. Discussing the phenomenon of a day-to-day life recording, Sisto refers to researchers like Sherry Turkle, Manfred Spitzer, and Byung-Chul Han, who have discussed in detail the numerous negative effects of intense digital activity on our relationships and mental health. But Sisto does not stick only to this view, arguing that there is a tendency in the literature to underestimate some beneficial effects of online autobiographical activity (p. 58). By choosing a case study of cancer bloggers, Sisto suggests that narrating and sharing personal stories might be a tool for social and cultural emancipation and social media becomes a place where ill, non-normative, distorted bodies are no longer taboo. Likes, comments, and shares – as Sisto argues – may compensate for the daily suffering (p. 62), and it might be a new way to bring illness back to the public sphere, without any filters.
Central to Chapter 3 is a relatively new phenomenon called digital immortality. One of the first to match the idea of total recall with immortality in the digital realm was Gordon Bell, an engineer and researcher at Microsoft Research, who, in 1990, started an experiment called MyLifeBits. The project aimed to create an automated store of the documents, pictures, and sounds that Bell produced or experienced in his life, to be accessed with speed and ease. A couple of years later Bell published a book with Jim Gemmell (2009) called Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, where they anticipated the future in which recording and preserving will be the dominant human desire. Today, as Sisto points out, not only memories but even dreams are considered as valuable material for future colossal collections, proving that Bell and Gemmel’s intuition was right. Digital immortality is presented by its proponents (including Bell and Gemmell) as a point of arrival on the way towards total recall with a truly liberatory impact. In this view, death might be understood only as a transfer to the digital world. To that end, Sisto also mentions various transhumanistic efforts to pursue different immortalisation strategies, with mind uploading (a hypothetical concept of transferring the human brain onto a computer) as the leading one. However, less optimistic effects of that revolution – as Sisto vigilantly enumerates – are, among others, losing present moments, the inability of abstract thoughts, or even insomnia.
In his philosophical approach, Sisto does not rely on any shortcuts in valuing things. As with the cancer bloggers, in the case of digital immortality, he encourages a more subversive way of thinking. He asks the following: Do we really need those oceans of images, videos, sounds? Do we want to stick in the past? Why not try to simply enjoy the benefits of our ‘onlife’ here, in the present? (p. 124) And finally, what about the right, or even a joy, to be forgotten?
Remember Me is a well-organised work, packed with insights. It is an excellent place to start a journey into discovering and understanding the digitally mediated process of preserving and/or obliterating memories. As a handy guide for philosophical reflection, it also contributes to the field of digital death education, providing a set of practical questions that every social network user should consider. This call, included in the last part of the book, to make a conscious decision regarding one’s digital activity, is one of the valuable take-home messages for both academic and non-professional audiences.