PUBLIC MARKS with tag memoire

Murmur Study is a work-in-progress that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook Status Updates. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and indexed digitally by corporations. While the future of these archives are still to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal expression should give us pause.

>Click Opera stores information that I no longer have in my brain; when I connect to this information, I have a way to remember.

This, you can't know and that is the irony. There are things which are still in our brain but we don't remember how to access them. Then suddenly one day, they come back to the surface.

What is happening with the external storage is not the storage by itself, but the search functionality on this external storage. I can have thousand of photos, but if there are not slightly organized (no dates into it for example), there are just a useless pile of bits. The fact that they contained structured information help when we need to access them with tools.

A simple creation date of the file can achieve that. We relate the date to memories of places. Either in your brain or somewhere on the external storage if you write the list of things you have done.

“Can you remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot? What you were doing when you heard the news?” For my parents’ generation, the assassination of JFK was such a major event that nearly everyone of their age can answer these questions with “Yes”. A moment in history that is anchored to collective feelings of shock, loss and mourning.