Internet publications

Hui Kyong Chun's "The Enduring Ephemeral" reminded me of the professor in my history of writing class last spring quarter. In one of his first lectures, he confidently declared that the invention of writing eventually led to the degeneration of memory in humans. The class stared blankly at him, wondering how the invention of a system that was supposed to help us keep track of important details and records could actually make it harder for us to recall information. After a few minutes of pondering, however, we realized that the constant, reassuring presence of a written record lulls us into a false sense of security that lets us forget even the most basic of details. We can, after all, just look up anything we forget. The advent of the Internet and the subsequent access to digital publications further propagates this notion, as printed or written information was still less accessible and thus more memorable than information that can easily be searched on the Internet from any mobile device. Hui Kyong Chun’s discussion of the temporality and speed of digital media, as well as its impermanence and constant rebirth, really meshed with the professor’s lecture on the history of writing and reinforced the claim that the more accessible something is, the more easily forgotten it is, and thus a work can be forgotten and reintroduced in an instant.