The End of Ephemera

Note – I wrote this in the wee hours last night but couldn’t post it due to DNS issues with my web site (again – Grrrr!). I think that it might read like something weakly formed in the wee hours, and I thought about deleting it, but that would be contrary to the spirit of what I wrote. Second thoughts be damned – it’s time to hit “Publish” and let my weakly formed notions be forever frozen in existence!

I was just listening to the latest EdTech Posse Podcast. Alec mentioned that his daughter, age 4, doesn’t get radio or any media that can’t be tivo-ized (I think that’s his neologism). My own kids are the same way – if they’re in the middle of a particularly gripping episode of Go, Diego, Go when it’s time for supper, they just pause the show then come back to it afterwards.

It occurs to me that ephemeral media are becoming – well, they’re becoming ephemeral; that is, they are quickly flitting out of existence with no trace of their being other than our memories of them. I think McLuhan pointed out that some media have the effect of freezing what was ephemera – the written word freezes speech, the photograph freezes a moment in time – and digital media have extended our ability to do that. Tivo and other digital video recording technology allow us to pause a moment in time. Podcasts, at least the ones I tend to listen to, freeze and archive a conversation. In some cases they freeze radio. Earlier this evening, I was dropping in to an online class which was also recorded and archived. I can go back and re-experience that class any time, although I can’t interact with it anymore. What previously would have existed but briefly is affixed in time like a butterfly stuck in a collection.

I wonder what this does to our sense of memory. Not just our ability to remember, but our actual relationship to the concept of remembering things that have gone by. We seem to live in our past which we have frozen in place by use of our media. If we have photographs, how does that alter our conceptualization of remembering someone. I don’t have to remember my daughter as she grows up because I can, in a sense, re-live it by looking through the pictures. The past no longer fades into non-existence because I can bring so much of it with me.

It just occurs to me that writing in a blog freezes my thoughts in time (and in public view). This is truly a double edged sword. Not only can dumping my neural ephemera into this out-board brain give me a better opportunity to review my ideas over the passage of time, but it also forces me to be confronted with my less well formed ideas instead of being freely allowed to confabulate them out of existence.