Techne, Technology, and the Refashioning of Contemporary Memory Kimberly Lacey Wayne State University
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Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2011 Making memory: techne, technology, and the refashioning of contemporary memory Kimberly Lacey Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the Databases and Information Systems Commons, Other Communication Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Lacey, Kimberly, "Making memory: techne, technology, and the refashioning of contemporary memory" (2011). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 246. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. MAKING MEMORY: TECHNE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE REFASHIONING OF CONTEMPORARY MEMORY by KIMBERLY LACEY DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2011 MAJOR: ENGLISH (Composition Studies) Approved by: ____________________________________ Advisor Date ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY KIMBERLY LACEY 2011 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION To Mom and Dad ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Remembering to thank everyone who helped me write a dissertation about memory seems a little too cutesy for my tastes, but I want to be sure to give a few shout- outs to those who, without their encouragement, I could not have made it this far. First, I’d like to thank Richard Marback for his honest and helpful advice at every step of the process. I became a stronger and more confident writer, researcher, and professional because of his help, and I am gratefully indebted to him for that. Jeff Pruchnic also proved to be an inspiration throughout my graduate career. His insane zeal for knowledge set the bar always just beyond my reach, but his enthusiasm has encouraged me to keep reaching. Francie Ranney has shown me by example the awesome power of being a strong woman in academia. Always quick with advice (for anything, really), she has been a great source for everything techne-related and beyond. At all the conference talks where I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Richard Doyle, I couldn’t help but notice the respect he has for others’ curiosity and opinion—a quality I hope to pass along in career. Additionally, I must thank other faculty at Wayne State who have encouraged me to push myself even when I thought this process was impossible. Ellen Barton, Gwen Gorzelsky, and Julie Thompson Klein have been three outstanding mentors. Jim Brown has given me tons of advice as a new faculty member, and has also been an encouraging figure for understanding and participating in the future of open-source academia. Also, many thanks to Ken Jackson for the B+, without which I probably wouldn’t have got my act together as quickly. iii I have been especially lucky to make it through grad school with a fabulous bunch of colleagues and friends. Jared Grogan, Wendy Duprey, Marylou Naumoff, Mike McGinnis, Derek Risse, Clay Walker, Hilary Ward, Jill Darling, Ryan Dillaha, and Conor Shaw-Draves: you are all hilarious and whip smart and I look forward to seeing your work develop throughout our careers. JuLonda Richardson-Randle has been a dear friend, confidant, and inspiration. There are also many people, characters, and things that, unbeknownst to them, I have gotten to know intimately through this journey. Many thanks to WebMD, Shawn and Gus, Patty Griffin, Joni Mitchell, Cory Chisel, Chris Bathgate, Victor Garber, Larry David, The Bluth family, Scotch, Gin, Prozac, Tom Colicchio, S. Epatha Merkerson, Project Runway, Tim Gunn, and Kleenex. My parents, Mark and Audrey Lacey, have been supportive beyond belief, but they should know they are the inspiration for my education. Because neither of them had the opportunity, I grew up always knowing I wanted a career that I loved. They are bursting with pride, and I am excited that they have been in every page of this dissertation. Dad, you can finally (officially) tell people you have a Dr. Daughter. Mom, you kept me roaring—G-TACO-F My brothers and sister-in-law, Greg, Jeff, and Catherine Lacey, have always been quick with a joke but even more encouraging than I can tell you three. And finally, I want to thank my bffff Jeff Cahill for your love, encouragement, and for talking me down from about a million ledges through this whole process. You are my own personal palimpsest. Believe me when I say this—I couldn’t have made it this far without you. I love you, and we are one day closer to Barkley and Jerome! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii List of Figures……………………………………………………………………....…….vi Chapter One: Re-Membering Memory: Beyond Mere Storage…………………………...1 Chapter Two: Techne Three Ways………………………………………………………35 Chapter Three: Techne-monics and Digital Archives……………………………………85 Chapter Four: Memory Manipulation…………………………………………………..118 Chapter Five: Reply All: Networks, Memory, Forgetting……………………………...163 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..185 References………………………………………………………………………………194 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………211 Autobiographical Statement…………………………………………………………….213 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1. The Wayback Machine, Search Results, amazon.com………………….….185 Figure 3.2. archive.org homepage………………………………………………………185 Figure 3.3. Yahoo! on December 20, 1996……………………………………………..186 Figure 3.4. Yahoo! on June 15, 2010…………………………………………………...186 Figure 3.5. eBay on October 22, 2002………………………………………………….187 Figure 3.6. eBay on June 16, 2010……………………………………………………...187 Figure 3.7. Amazon on October 13, 1999………………………………………………188 Figure 3.8. Amazon on June 16, 2010………………………………………………….188 Figure 3.9. The September 11 Digital Archive Homepage…………………………….189 Figure 3.10. Satan in the Smoke………………………………………………………...189 Figure 3.11. “In seat 3B on American Airlines 313 at LaGuardia Airport, NY”………190 Figure 3.12. “Riegel Apt.”……………………………………………………………...190 Figure 3.13. “just prior to the plane impact with the South tower”…………………….191 Figure 3.14. “From the terrace of my highrise apartment in Union City, NJ”…………191 Figure 3.15. “April 2001 i misse u 2 girls u stil in my heart”…………………………..191 Figure 3.16. “Bee_Towers”…………………………………………………………….192 Figure 3.17. “Flight 93 Crash Site”…………………………………………………….192 Figure 3.18. “Pentagon 2”………………………………………………………………192 Figure 3.19. “Lubbock, Texas”…………………………………………………………193 Figure 3.20. The Soweto ’76 Live Demo Homepage…………………………………..193 vi 1 Chapter One Re-membering Memory: Beyond Mere Storage Forget about the memory you are used to. This idea is not as radical as you might think. I’m not suggesting that you purge your hard drives, forget the lifetime worth of memories you have in your mind, or even weed through your photo albums and discard the images you haven’t looked at in years. Instead, memory needs to be rethought. On the surface, digital memory resembles ancient Greek mental storehouses of memory due to the remarkable potential for storing everything. By looking a bit deeper, I suggest that digital memory is much more than excess storage. Digital memory is a flexible memory—we can store what we want, in the ways we want, the quantity we want, and the quality we want. Because of this flexibility, it is my aim to suggest that memory, one of the five canons of rhetoric, needs to be reworked in relation to interactive technologies. By reworked I do not mean restarted, but rather graciously revamped. At the outset of the book Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media, Collin Gifford Brooke anticipates a struggle between old(er) constructions of rhetoric and new(er) forms of media. His solution is a compromise— new media must react to and learn from rhetoric in a similar fashion that rhetoric must respond to technologies. Like Brooke, in this chapter I present some of the ways rhetorical memory is responding to newer media. Contemporary rhetoric must refigure the idea of memory away from storage (which might be difficult since the notion of digital memory is so often storage based) and into one of production. To accomplish this task, in this chapter I suggest some of the possibilities for rethinking digital, rhetorical memory. Although massive server space is capable of storing literally everything we 2 want, contemporary rhetoric should not limit the role of memory by viewing it as an updated and unending ‘storehouse.’ Additionally, the concept of memory must also escape the remembered-or-forgotten binary. Rather, contemporary rhetoric needs to rethink the new roles memory inhabits by looking at the ways digital memory is created, shared, reproduced, and utilized. By moving digital memory away from the trope of storage, I argue that digital memory must be reconceived as a creative and productive concept instead. In Lingua Fracta, Brooke draws on the concern about the limits of criticism and suggests two pathways that English departments create when trying to understand texts. Criticism, Brooke argues, entails “evaluating work that has been done, rather than focusing on invention—on what might still be done with new media” (Brooke 10, emphasis in original). The difference between “has been” and “might still” points to what I am recognizing as the distinction between digital memory as storage and digital