15-20 Minute Paper
John Hunter
Comparative Humanities Program
Bucknell University
Biography
John Hunter was educated at Toronto (BA) and Duke (PhD) and began his career teaching early modern literature at the University of Toronto. Since joining the Comparative Humanities Program at Bucknell, his teaching and research have moved on to analyze the intersections between the humanities and neuroscience and the transformations of memory in digital culture.
Abstract
This paper is about the convergence of two recent trends, one technological and one cinematic, and its implications for the future. One of the most salient marketing claims for networked digital devices (cell phones, laptops, iPads, etc.) is that they effectively expand and improve our memory, thereby allegedly freeing us to do more creative things with this newly-‐liberated mental capacity. The limit case of this is “lifelogging,” the process of recording every document, conversation, and encounter in our lives through cameras and digital scanners. This will not only allow us to record the fullest version of ourselves, but also (Microsoft claims) to speak with the dead. This claim of digital immortality is being made in complete sincerity (and, one might add, naiveté).
The second trend is the epidemic of reboots, resurrections, and revivals in mainstream cinema. From James Bond to Jason Bourne to Spider Man, Batman, and the Walking Dead, genres and franchises are enacting and thematizing the act of resurrection. This paper argues that these two phenomena are related and that this cinematic trope is (among other things) an expression of our culture’s distrust and disavowal of the “improved” memory that digital technology promises.
In order to properly understand how digital technology is constraining and transforming memory, we need to stop believing the patently‐false claim that it is a simple prosthesis for it and start investigating it the complexity and potential destructiveness that cinema has already manifested.