Echoes through history: On Week 5’s Bolter reading
Writing is the mechanism I will use to preserve and pass on my experiences of life.
Bolter sees writing as a mechanism for ‘collective memory, for preserving and passing on the human experience’. I found this quite touching, this idea of literary traditions handed down from generation to generation like some beautiful family heirloom or non life threatening birth defect. Writing of course serves as one of the best means we have to communicate and understand each other, but also it seems to be something we use to validate our lives in the eyes of future peeps.
My uncle flies helicopters in the Kimberly, during his amazing career he has discovered beautiful places no one has visited for thousands of years. Imagine entering one of these places and finding a drawing on a rock wall. Hundreds or even thousands of years ago I think someone set out to create something that would be his or her echo through history. They summoned whatever technology of extension was available to them, in indigenous culture’s case, art, and set out to make their physical mark on not just a wall but perhaps history itself. A rock wall was their archive, and on it they wished to show future cultures their heritage and beliefs.
I see writing as exactly the same thing. As a literate society, it is our culture’s best shot at showing future societies what we’re made of.
In this blog I’ve posted before about the way the explosion of different channels/technologies of extension has scrambled the way we communicate and receive information. This is a great thing because everything is much more democratised and empowering for audiences ie. lolz we don’t have to own a multi national media conglomerate to set the world wide agenda and draw attention to atrocities media outlets may not get around to caring about.
However, it also kind of sucks because there is alot more information to wade through in order to find the good stuff (which I think Vannevar Bush is on about, see my discussion of being a PR kid). Our archive may seem a touch trivial to future cultures….
Our entry in the tomes of history be pretty much-
1. An obsession with ill tempered cats
2. A need to document our every move and bowel movement through a status update
3. A culture of thigh gaps and ‘thinspiration’
Because if you look at the content of most of the world’s communication through the most accessible and effective technology of extension of all time, the internet, this very scarily might be our echo through history!
As a writer, not a photographer, physicist or artist, I believe Writing is the best means I have at representing reality. I admit that I will never come close to capturing the ongoing ‘flux of impressions’ Virginia Woolf so beautifully describes in ‘Modern Novels’, as even Virginia admitted she would never be able to (though ‘Orlando’ is the closest thing I’ve ever read to the reality of love) but it is the perfect way for me to initiate my own ‘echo’ through history. It could be through a cherished message I sent to someone’s future great great grandfather proclaiming ‘I <3 u, mrry me cuz #YOLO’, it could be through my future best seller ‘Navigating Love in the Digital Age: How to propose via iMessage’… It may even be in the form of a blog about my intensions to do these things….
Writing is the mechanism I will use to preserve and pass on my experiences of life.
PS. Know that I have no intention to propose to anyone via text message, I was using it as an academic metaphor duhhhh.