Review by Choice Review
Rumsey brings a historical lens to analyzing what could be lost in the digital age--namely, people! She is concerned that digital memories could undermine how people understand themselves and how future generations will understand what they once were. The book is rich, personal, and quirky. It presents an engaging glimpse of "collective memory" as practiced through human civilization, discussions of how imagination and a failure to remember operate in the mind, and reflections on new skills and challenges of "digital literacy and citizenship." However, the book incorrectly claims that digital memories are ipso facto less permanent than memories codified on the walls of caves, on tablets, on scrolls, or in books. The vivid memory management issues people bear with personal devices do not scale to global cloud-based computing infrastructures that comprehensively back everything up. Instead, the questions are who will control this data and how can it ever be deleted? Beyond mere permanence, though, is the more daunting challenge (identified by Rumsey) of interpretation--making sense of the vast amounts of current and future digital data. It would indeed be sad if coming generations suffer the meaning-impoverished overload people now experience. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, especially students of the humanities. --John M Carroll, Pennsylvania State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the current age of information inflation in technologically developed countries and the ever-increasing reliance on digital technologies to store this information, historian Rumsey considers the implications of storing our collective memory and personal archives in a frail medium that requires energy to maintain. Rumsey sees our digital era as "merely the most current installment in the unfolding saga of our desire to know more about the world and ourselves." She traces this saga to four historical moments: the development of writing in Mesopotamia; the Greeks' development of libraries; the Renaissance recovery of ancient writings and development of movable type; and the Enlightenment's linkage between knowledge and progress. Each contributed to a materialistic approach to the world and an "unquenchable appetite for information." Rumsey also draws on contemporary science in the biology of memory, considering how we might cope with the growing abundance of information, specifically in the acts of forgetting and assigning value, and the influence of collective and personal memory on how we respond to future situations. In this context, Rumsey underscores the need to "[retool] literacy in the digital age and [update] public policies to ensure investment in long-term institutions capable of securing memory into the future... when we are no more." For anyone skeptical about the increasing reliance on digital media, Rumsey eases concern by revisiting information inflations of the past, simultaneously conveying the importance of the issue to a more general readership. Agent: John Taylor Williams, Kneerim, Williams & Bloom. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
"Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile, limitless in scope yet inherently unstable," writes Rumsey (history, Harvard Univ.). Humanity's choice of knowledge over reverence in the Garden of Eden set in motion a long and imperfect history of preserving memory and organizing big data by whatever means available, which is documented in this short but meaty treatise on cultural preservation in the digital age. The author marshals evidence of memory-keeping from across history, including the Sumerian cuneiform, ancient Greek mnemonics, -Gutenberg's printing press, Thomas Jefferson's personal library, and the science of materialism, which proves that through geology "nature is the ultimate archives." Rumsey advocates for public institutions to act as stewards for valuable digital assets, citing the Internet Archive and Twitter's partnership with the Library of Congress as models for nonprofits providing the digital infrastructure and reliable access that private companies can't supply. By bolstering digital literacy and fostering in ourselves a "moral imagination" that machines lack, claims Rumsey, we can prevent the cultural amnesia that will otherwise befall our data-saturated world. VERDICT This fascinating multidisciplinary tour is relevant to all readers, especially educators, social scientists, and cultural gatekeepers.-Chad Comello, Morton Grove P.L., IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An analysis of the significance of cultural memory and a warning about its fragility in the digital era. "This is a little book about a big idea," writes Rumsey, who specializes in information technologies, digital collecting and curation, and issues of intellectual property. The book is densely written, compressing the entirety of human documentation into less than 200 pages and suggesting what could happen amid the rapidity of cyber change that finds new versions overwriting old, even rendering old files unreadable and anachronistic in the span of a few years. We live in an era of data overload under private control, with our most personal information subject to the safeguarding of Facebook and Google, perhaps more available to data miners than to those whose lives it details. Rumsey warns that "it will be hard to avoid collective amnesia in the digital age" if we continue to entrust data preservation and control to private stewardship rather than the library model that is more open and comprehensive. Over the arc of human history, as far back as Socrates, there has been concern that recording memories might lead to a loss of personal memory. As recording on rock and clay gave way to papyrus, parchment, and paper, the records could proliferate but in a less durable form. Even by the Renaissance, there were concerns of the information overload of printwhat to value, what was true. It was a selection process that cyber data makes all the more difficult. There is exponentially too much, and it is all too fragile. "The old paradigm of memory was to transfer the contents of our minds into a stable, long-lasting object and then preserve the object," writes the author. "If we could preserve the object, we could preserve our knowledge. This does not work anymore." Though the author's analysis stops short of cultural apocalypse, it does show how radically things have changed and why this is cause for concern. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
