Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Introduction

In Charles Baxter's essay, "Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age", he took us through a series of content about information and how shame and forgetting plays within it. He started with this brother Tom, who remembered everything but couldn't process information and ended his essay with him. Baxter's purpose of this essay is to show us the importances of memory, not just any memory but our own. Surrounded by technology and relying on information as our own memory, it reduces and limits our own personal memory, experience. Over time, we can forget our own personal memory, experience in place of new information. Which will take away our purpose of life, which is to live and experience it. It is like we are turning into computers ourselves. By relying on information as our memory, we must be careful when we use it, otherwise it can lead to shame, and will follow by more forgetting. But forgetting is not always a bad thing, when we are dealing with our own memory, experience. We can choose to forget the things in our past that could be traumatize to our present live and hope that it will helps us live a normal life. Information itself is not everything there is to life, most of it is trash, but it does offer us something to live by. But most importantly, we must learn to value our own memory, experience and not let information alter it.

Quotes
"He was always giving something away...but it was also a request; please remember me; after all, I remember you." p. 143

"Your memory, can now in casual conversation refer to your computer's memory rather than your own." p. 145

"Remembering data and remembering an experience are two very different activities. It is possible that the quantity of data we are supposed to remember has reduced our capacity to remember or even to have experiences." p. 146

"In the information age, forgetfulness is a sign of debility and incompetence." p. 147

"Against a shame that you cannot bear, your mind detaches itself from its own memory and sails off in the direction of a psychic Lake-of-the-Woods." p. 157

2 comments:

  1. ur intro is quite legible, and easy to follow, i like __"we must learn to value our own memory, experience and not let information alter it." best

    ReplyDelete
  2. Explicit intepretaion, losing the ability to remember experience seems like losing the basic skills like eating and sleeping that once we premierly depend on for living.

    ReplyDelete