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 Moreexplains 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.
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