The Electrate Professor

Just posted a slideshow on a new concept of "memory management" I'm calling "mnemonomics." This was for a presentation to a group of school librarians taking a course on Web2.0 and its potential applications in the classroom. I wanted to communicate my sense of profound amazement at the phenomenon of social bookmarking. It's simple enough to use del.icio.us, for example, but in the context of the history of memory and the current major transition we are undergoing in communications technologies, it is literally "mind-blowing" (insofar as other people's minds become part of our own: "collaborative memory"). I expand on an entry from my other blog on "Memory in the Age of Electracy", and as I worked on the PowerPoint the subtitle changed from being "Social Bookmarking as Public Memory" to "Social Networking as Collaborative Memory." I added references to Twitter (which I've just started to do: twitter.com/rsmyth) and slideshare as well as a plug for Pierre Levy's book Collective Intelligence, which I think all of these technologies point to in a nascent form.

One quote I return to in my presentations of late, by Barbara Maria Stafford, invokes the sense of radical transition that occurred as a result of the printing press: "Pixels are the movable type of the future."

Labels: grammatology mnemonics electracy