The Lost Art of Memory
Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. It makes us feel like we’re moving forward through time, rather than standing still or running in circles. My grandmother and her ancestors knew this all too well. Artful forgetting, editing, and curation allowed them to craft narratives that helped their children understand the past and orient towards the future... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
... See moreWe have never been able to document our lives so thoroughly as we now can with the help of digital tools, yet we feel that time is out of joint and that we've lost the thread of both our personal and collective histories. We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we creat
“if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.” ― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games.
I'm realizing how terrible one's memory truly is. Without documenting life, it's painfully easy to forget so many important moments. This is important because we so often lean on other's memories/stories - autobiographie... See more
But the more fundamental need to take away something tangible from the experience of reading is one of the things driving the return of commonplace books – personal, curated collections of facts, insights, musings, quotes, and research originally invented in 19th century Europe as a way to deal with the information explosion of the Industrial Era.