"When you call upon dormant memories, you change them in the process. You remember the most recent version of your memory + whatever present lens you’re using at the time of recall. In other words, how I changed since I left shaped how I remembered what I once experienced."

Some months ago, I watched…Nostalgia for the Light. It’s about the astronomy done in the Atacama desert …The film juxtaposes the work of scientists in the desert who look to the sky for answers, with old women just miles away who look to the ground for answers, searching for the bones of relatives assassinated by the Pinochet regime and buried in the desert. The film is about the connection between the past and the future, ground and sky. It’s also about memory.

In the film, director and narrator Patricio Guzman says, “Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none, don’t live anywhere.”"

[via: http://bobulate.com/post/21563251336/ ]

"Amber Case, cyberanthropologist and CEO of Geoloqi, agreed: “The human brain is wired to adapt to what the environment around it requires for survival. Today and in the future it will not be as important to internalize information but to elastically be able to take multiple sources of information in, synthesize them, and make rapid decisions.”

She added, “Memories are becoming hyperlinks to information triggered by keywords and URLs. We are becoming ‘persistent paleontologists’ of our own external memories, as our brains are storing the keywords to get back to those memories and not the full memories themselves.”"

"We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us…"

[Update: Response by Alan Jacobs: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/18029873515/participating-in-cultural-life-is-not-something ]

[Update 2: Lengthy response, take-down: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/12/0212/022212.html ]

[Chaser: http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/02/twitter-nprs-morning-edition-and-dreams-of-flatland/ ]

[Cross-posted by Alexis Madrigal: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/we-the-web-kids/253382/ ]

"Archive Team is a loose collectives of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it's lost forever. Along the way, we've gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we've gotten the message out: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

This website is intended to be an offloading point and information depot for a number of archiving projects, all related to saving websites or data that is in danger of being lost. Besides serving as a hub for team-based pulling down and mirroring of data, this site will provide advice on managing your own data and rescuing it from the brink of destruction."

"Robert Sapolsky, a Neuroscience Professor at Stanford University, relates how porous the boundary can be between two distinct selves, and how maybe this is a perfectly healthy phenomenon."

"Nostalgia is the admixture of sentiment and sorrow that we feel as we begin to see how a memory fades; it is provoked by the sudden awareness of the rate of decay of a memory, and is as bittersweet as the last encounter with someone dying."<br />
<br />
"If so, you might express the situation thusly: a memory induces nostalgia when it is X% decayed. You might then note that for different people, or for people at different stages of their lives, this number X varies; it might reflect not a static number but a relative proportion of time elapsed in one’s life to time elapsed since the memory in question; given their personal habits of memory, people might fall into separate categories, categories about which the field of existential mathematics would presumably have much to assert."<br />
<br />
[See the comments too.]

Great set of education memories from Junot Diaz, George Saunders, Pico Iyer, Caterina Fake, Zaha Hadid, Wes Anderson, Robert Storr, Gay Talese,  Michael Bloomberg, and others.

Blogged here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/10342422896/special-class-from-the-vaults

"But one look at the Mac & you could tell something was different. The white screen alone seemed revolutionary, after years of reading green text on a black background. And there were typefaces! I had been obsessed with typography since my grade-school years; here was a computer that treated fonts as an art, not just a clump of pixels. The then-revolutionary graphic interface made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.<br />
<br />
Before long I was creating page layouts for student-run philosophy journals; I designed research tools using the visionary Hypercard application…<br />
<br />
Looking back now, I realize that beneath all those surface obsessions, a theme was running through my interests like an underground river, & it didn't fully surface until my mid-20s: the sense that the most fertile and engaging space in our culture lay at the intersection between new technology and the humanities."

Harris: "I think that’s something stories can do—prepare their way of finding meaning in this madness and bringing some order to the chaos.<br />
<br />
…creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact.<br />
<br />
…Cow Bird is basically a storytelling platform that people can use to tell stories online using photos, sound maps, timelines, videos, and casts of characters. It’s geared towards long-form narrative…when many different people tell stories, the system automatically finds connections between them and weaves them together into a kind of meta-story…The platform automatically analyzes all the text in your memory, figures out your cast of characters, and connects it to previous stories.<br />
<br />
…one of the pieces of this system I’ve been building is that to tell the story you have to dedicate it to somebody, which creates a gift economy of stories."

"We talked about “Cultural Relations”…in which the school would rearrange the class schedule for an entire week while students led forums on issues like racism & sexism. The students led the forums. Adults were instructed to sit at their desks & stay out of the way.<br />
<br />
The result, of course, was mayhem. It was the same every year, with some of the discussions spiraling out of control, hordes of students skipping out to grab coffee…attendance counts hopelessly inaccurate. The administration had lost control of the school.<br />
<br />
But when you talk to alumni from that era, many will tell you that Cultural Relations was a life-changing experience. Because amid all the chaos, there were still moments when black kids, white kids, Asian kids, Latino kids, gay and lesbian kids, kids who had been abused, rich kids and poor kids . . . they engaged each other in authentic conversations about their lives and their experiences. These conversations were raw and unfiltered. They were real…"

"Some days you and I didn’t make it to school. Some days you and I would begin to walk and begin to think about school and begin to think about not being there that day. On those days you and I would cross the street to the left. We would not continue straight to Map Ball. We would go left to mother’s house. With luck mother would be at work by now.<br />
<br />
You and I would lie on the couch in the living room and thank god that you weren’t where you weren’t. Sun in a living room at 7:20 in the morning is a very wonderful thing. Few people get to see it (except babies etc). Most teenagers never get to see it. I suspect they are the ones that need to see it the most.<br />
<br />
You and I would be in that living room in that sun and we would turn on Turner Classic Movies…<br />
<br />
There were other things that were the same too.<br />
<br />
You and I decided that these mucho meloncholy mornings were no good. And so you and I bid adieu to high school Feb of Junior Year. It is was a mucho ducho great decision."

"This little correspondence cracked like lightning in my head. I mean, it’s no big deal; it’s a small thing, it’s a letter, they were both in Michigan, it makes perfect sense. And yet, and yet: Clifton Wharton, president of Michigan State University, and Marguerite Hart, librarian of Troy—a tangible thread connected them. And as soon as you realize that, you can’t help but imagine the other threads, the other connections, that all together make a net, woven before you were born, before you were even dreamed of—a net to catch you, support you, lift you up. Libraries and universities, books and free spaces—all for us, all of us, the children of Troy everywhere.<br />
<br />
What fortune. Born at the right time."<br />
<br />
[…]<br />
<br />
"And it’s not the librarian laughing and crying at the same time here; it’s me. Every time I’ve read these letters, it’s me."

"I had time to be angry at the euphemism before I collapsed over a life raft box staring at the gulls hanging in the air outside the wheelhouse. I felt incredibly cold. I had time to think, oxygen ending, that I would remember this scene for the rest of my life and so far it has held true. It has never become a memory, it’s still a flashback with the smell and feel intact of the motion of the boat, its gentle heavings like part of my own body, seeing the birds’ wings making minute adjustments. Sea birds are very large, they follow the boat. There was heavy fog and I could only see us, our boat, and then dark sea and white foam."

"Peter del Tredici, a senior research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, argues the wildlife that surrounds us every day often has an “image problem:” it goes unnoticed, unattended, and unvalued. “There is no denying the fact that many — if not most — of the plants … suffer from image problems associated with the label ‘weeds,’ or, to use a more recent term, ‘invasive species.’ From the plant’s perspective, ‘invasiveness’ is just another word for successful reproduction — the ultimate goal of all organisms, including humans…. The term is a value judgment that humans apply to plants we do not like, not a biological characteristic.”"

"Half of balance is just believing you have it…A man needs a playground, otherwise he’ll wither away…The good classes feel like they teach you the opposite of what they promised…You forget what it’s like to be light, nimble, & open, & those qualities are important for someone on a quest, even if they leave you vulnerable…Every kind of work must disfigure you in some way…Does criticism come from the opposite place that teaches you how to enjoy life?…both of them were stretching the truth a little bit, just so they could tell the truth about how they felt to one another. There was a beauty to that: lying to be wholly honest…Isn’t it good to be a little dissatisfied? Who would ever do anything if they believed everything was already good enough?…if you shine a light bright enough, maybe the world wouldn’t stop being a mess, but at least maybe you could be lucky enough see a small, glittering, beautiful little piece of it."