Oral narrative culture, writing culture, printing culture, audio-visual culture and electronic information culture all record and rewrite history in a unique way. Compared with these memory communication media, digitization is anti narrative. What impact will the third form of digital retention, which tends to be permanent, have on collective memory?
On the one hand, digitization equates "technology" with "science", conceals the power structure with a neutral and objective appearance, and promotes digital technology to the point of absolute authority with the help of faith-based exhibition of natural science discourse since modern times. All things that do not enter or cannot enter the digital community are excluded from the community, and their fate is either actively or passively integrated or abandoned.
On the other hand, when industrial norms go deep and comprehensively into data collection, algorithm design and collective thinking, it is difficult to imagine that cultural identity may go beyond this inhuman logic. Digital writing has become a violent inscription of modernity myth. Of course, the violence here is in the sense of exclusivity.
The ultimate goal of dataism is to build a complex human society into a single data processing system. The individual is just a neuron in the deep neural network. Its role is to generate different information flows and process different levels of information. It is conceivable that the future of this kind of datalism will make the whole world subject to technical authority. Whoever controls and uses data will master all the power of discourse construction, and who will determine the output style and communication content of collective memory. The diversity of experience and reality and cultural diversity no longer exist. They are replaced by the network shared memory filtered by the stratospheric value filter.
Moreover, from the performance characteristics of data, it is a non reflective existence: it can not show any negativity and transcendence. Rigid algorithmic logic is obviously not enough to formulate rules for a flexible, rich and changing human society, and the world cannot be recursively restored to simple computability. This control over the rhythm of memory is the material for writing the relationship between the past and the future, which determines the imagination space of the community.
Digital technology does form a unique way of memory in the digital age, but this memory is expressed as a unitary memory after encoding all real existence into data and reconstructing and assigning values through algorithms. Powerful digital power and digital technology logic are solidifying historical memory and eliminating the ability of forgetting. How will the digital society with data as the material and algorithm as the framework realize diversified and development prospects? The future of datalism, which keeps numbers indefinitely, is obviously not a desirable result. Therefore, when digital technology continues to become an important force to form, explain and promote history, it is essential to restore the reflective characteristics of humanistic criticism. If we say that in the digital age, forgetting should still be possible in the development of people and society, then how and in what way is forgetting more worthy of thinking, because it is still digital technology that determines the forgotten content and conditions. Whether there is a third possibility between never forgetting with the help of technology and forgetting with the help of technology is becoming a question in the new digital age.
Published on June 24, 2021