I have been doing quite a bit of reading and thinking about how technology has changed the nature of personal memory, and created a new type of collective memory that lies beyond direct, first-hand experience.

While personal photographs and videos have in many ways come to be the shorthand for, or even the editor of, our personal histories and memories, broadcast media has allowed distant events to become part of our memories and histories in a way that wasn’t possible until recently.

We can all remember personal experiences of, and reactions to, traumatic world events that have become part of our own memories, no matter how physically separated we were from them at the time. Being able to witness these events in real time, and to watch them replayed at will, or against our will but hammered at us by traditional media sources, has caused our visceral responses to disembodied experiences to become a secondary type of embodied memory.

Compassion fatigue cannot withstand every shocking image or event. The question of what gets recorded, disseminated, and therefore collectively remembered, is largely invisible to us, even though we know that there are systems of wealth and power that make these decisions.

In many ways, new media is returning us to the ancient tradition of oral narrative without the necessity of verbal or face-to-face transmission. The most significant means of transmitting culture and history before print was oral transmission, which like new media, is variable, interactive and individualized by the process and performative aspects of speaking.

New technologies and media are restoring the power of the individual over what information gets disseminated, in real time, to whom, and in what form. Not only can anyone with access to the technology contribute, but the personal and performative aspects of narration and information are returning to the individual. Youtube is a lot more interesting to me than most of what’s on tv.

It’s a little scary to think how easy it would be for someone to “pull the plug”.

And thinking about power, it’s also scary to think how much we rely on energy for all of this, and what the political and environmental implications of this growing dependency are. Discussions in the arena of new media don’t seem to include the consideration of things like the half-life of nuclear waste.

So there’s power, and then there’s power to consider.