Too many writers write for other people. They write for lovers or lost hope or for an unknown, future, audience they hope will like them — when they should really only be writing for themselves. Every writer is the core of their confounding world. We are the center of our Panopticonic lives.
Continue reading → Writing for Yourself: You are the Center of the Panopticon
Are you familiar with the medical condition Pure Alexia without Agraphia? Don’t worry if you’ve never heard about it before, or if you have no idea what it means. Few know the perils of that condition, so it can be a good thing you haven’t had to learn about it yet.
Continue reading → Linguistic Blindfolding: Pure Alexia without Agraphia
How do we know what we know? Do we gain memory directly through experience or through the experience of others? Is remembering something enough ownership of an idea to give it resonance beyond our own mind? How do we know what to search for when we don’t yet know what we don’t know?
Continue reading → Knowing What to Look for and Where to Look for It
There’s been a lot of humming chatter lately about the reported ability magnets have on influencing morality stored in the brain. We have always claimed the mind is a machine and memory is but a cog in the process of grinding us into definition, and this new magnet research causes concern for the unwitting, easy, malleability of who we believe we are forged to be in situ.
Are we forever at the end of the Know-It-All? You know the sort of person I’m describing, right? The kind who always know the right answer to everything when asked and, if not asked, will offer up blind bits of trivia on their own accord from the dark recesses of history while simultaneously adding living citations and quotes from books, politicians and serving up sharp shards of microinformation that only encyclopedia writers need to know.
I have often wondered why so many people take so many photographs and digital images. It’s as if they’re obsessed with the recording and the creation of false memory.
To live is to remember; and how we choose to consecrate our memories is what gives texture and context to our lives as the Panopticon becomes public. Google is good at creating the instant now for future recall, but The Wayback Machine is the granddaddy of soliciting who used to be. Today we have — Memento — a new contender for scrapbooking our online lives. So who is the king of our remembering? Wayback or Memento?
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