Saturday, October 27, 2007

The Mnemotechnosphere

Warning: this post is philosophical. If you're not into thinking (if you want to see a stark example of the sad state of our country, read the comments below the video), please spare yourself the effort. Like all philosophy, much of this exploration has already been said, but My Ego has the ability to make up new words to describe phenomenological nuances thereof, so its new enough to share. Maybe.

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The Mnemotechnosphere

My Ego sure is surrounded by technology. Digi cams, DVD turntables, videocameras, and My Ego's soon-to-be iPhone (once v2 is released, of course) surround My Ego like thoughts surround the mind, dancing hither and thither, sometimes alone, often in unison. It increasingly seems as though this mind-dance is literally manifesting itself into the world; the subject slowly mutates into an object (Nurture becomes Nature, but more on that later...), blurring the line between the meta and the physical.

What is all this tech doing to My Ego? How is My Ego affected (therefore effected) by the endless sea of pixels and mountains of iRacks? It seems to My Ego that memory is becoming externalized; our thoughts, memories, and desires are being exported from our minds, hearts, and souls, and downloaded into our various devices for the world to see.

My Ego sees a new sphere of memory evolving as Moore's Law unfolds. Lets call it the Mnemotechnosphere. The Mnemotechnosphere is the realm within which our memories become digitally externalized, the newly-emerging and ever-expanding network of externalized memory systems. The Mnemotechnosphere is the in-the-world Tango parter of the Noosphere. In other words, our collective memory is literally becoming objectified and revealed for the world to see and share as the Mnemotechnosphere. The Mnemotechnosphere is the realm of the subjective-objective; the Sobjective.

For instance, My Ego snaps a photo with the iPhone. My Ego is there, perceiving the moment, and downloading it into My Ego's subjective memory system. This system is mine and mine only; not even words can come close to describing what these memories are to me. The exterior reality the photo is taken "of" is the object, in this context. My Ego shows you the photo on the iPhone a few minutes later. This phenomenological experience takes place within the Mnemotechnosphere, between two subjects viewing a Sobject. The Web 2.0 is of course the best example of the Mnemotechnosphere in action, the blogosphere being a finger on the hand of the Mnemotechnosphere.

The more we externalize and meta-tag our memories into the Mnemotechnosphere, the more the Noosphere becomes a 'viewable' presence in our every-day life. Another great example of the Mnemotechnosphere is the Virtual Earth project, that pieces together photographic images to form shared objects in computerized space.

The question returns back to the a/effect this is having on us. It is easy to fear that the more we externalize our collective memory into the Mnemotechnosphere, the less we'll be able to remember. Therefore, like any other technology, the reliance on the Mnemotechnosphere is the greatest danger.

More to come on this...

mIe


***UPDATE: David Brooks wrote about the Mnemotechnosphere the DAY BEFORE My Ego posted about it. While his prose smokes My Ego's, he didn't come up with a pseudo-philo-scien-psycho-term to describe the realm within which it develops.

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