Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

We discuss the nature of new media (and other digital media) that, due to its dependence of a methodology to be outputted correctly, usually through a software interpretation and a hardware medium, has the same fragility and possible ephemerality of human memory as understood through Bergson’s proposal. The inwards of computers (considering it any kind of computers, as PCs, smartphones, etc), being it software or hardware, even though possibly thoroughly documented is somehow out of reach of most users. Most of us have no idea how the devices which we use for work and pleasure function. What is more worrying is that we know that sometimes they do fail and yet we still trust great part of our lives on it. For Bergson, human memory is evoked in duration as a way to recall the past. As duration is a flow, each iteration of remembrance is possibly different than the one before. Digital information, including new media, is popularly known as something composed by zeros and ones, as if completely precise, immutable and replicable as argued by Manovich. But the information that when read and interpreted is shown as the content of the media, has to be correctly understood by software and show throughout some kind of hardware (screens, speakers, lights, etc). We argue that since new media has so many layers from code to media, can be as fragile as evoked human memory in duration. What is the consequence of trusting our memories in such a delicate medium?