Posts tagged “memory”

David Isay on selective memory

Krista Tippett interviewed David Isay for her show On Being. He talked about interviewing his father and his story highlights the gap between what we remember from an interview and what actually transpired in that interview.

DI: I remember that I asked him when we were in the StoryCorps interview, “What are you proudest of in life?” And my memory of that was that he said “the books I’ve written.” And I always teased him. I said, “Dad, we’ve done, whatever, 10,000, 20,000, as time went on, 50,000 interviews, and everybody says their kids. And you, the one person, you said, ‘my books.’” And I just endlessly went after him, and the night he died, I listened to the interview, and I said, “What are you proudest of?” And he said “My kids.”

KT: Really?

DI: Yep.

KT: Was that exchange even in there? What you remember? You just didn’t remember it?

DI. ISAY: Yes, and then he said, “I’m also proud of my books.”

Takeaway: Record your interviews and go back to those recordings — don’t rely on your memory!

Keeping it real

Print vs. Online: The ways in which old-fashioned newspapers still trump online newspapers. [slate.com] – Jack Shafer recounts his rejection of and then ultimate return to consuming the news in good olde print. For him, attention to and retention of the news is much improved. Our old friends tangibility and experience exert their influence on him as well. Recent research seems to support his experiences. How might newspapers create real value out of this burgeoning new respect for the medium? There might be something to Shafer’s sarcastic idea about having his carrier hand-deliver his digital content with cues to the familiar physical form. There’s a little bit of a buzz lately about hybrid digital/physical delivery systems, like the recent Phoenix Down album-delivery system on a sweet flash drive, noted below.

I started missing the blue Times bag on my lawn and the glossy goodness of the Sunday magazine. Perhaps if I could have gotten my carrier to toss a blue-bagged computer preloaded with the Times Reader onto my lawn every morning, I could have survived. But no. What I really found myself missing was the news. Even though I spent ample time clicking through the Times website and the Reader, I quickly determined that I wasn’t recalling as much of the newspaper as I should be. Going electronic had punished my powers of retention. I also noticed that I was unintentionally ignoring a slew of worthy stories…My anecdotal findings about print’s superiority were seconded earlier this month by an academic study…The researchers found that the print folks “remember significantly more news stories than online news readers”; that print readers “remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders”; and that print readers remembered “more main points of news stories.” When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw… Newspapers are less distracting-as anybody who has endured an annoying online ad while reading a news story on the Web knows. Also, and I’m channeling the paper a little bit here, by virtue of habit and culture a newspaper commands a different sort of respect, engagement, and focus from readers.

Phoenix Down: Brooklyn hip hop trio release their latest album on a pixelated feather [coolhunting.com]

Besides eliminating clutter, one of our favorite upshots of the post-CD era is the micro-movement of creative USB stick design. We’ve seen Doc Martens, surfboards and Red Stripe bottles among other adorable forms for the little devices, so it’s somewhat surprising that more bands haven’t paired sound and vision like Junk Science and Scott Thorough recently did by releasing their new album Phoenix Down on a mini-hard drive. Loaded with the tracks, as well as instrumentals, a cappella versions and a bonus folder of remixes and more, the limited-edition flash drive is a soft-rubber pixelated feather-a fitting mix of nature and digital for their 8-bit-heavy sound and lyrics like “the future’s pixelated.”

Vergangenheitsbewältigung: coming to terms with the past

Wired writes about the attempts to reintegrate 600 million scraps of paper from surveillance notes and dossiers torn up by the East German secret police as the wall fell. Some of the article deals with the enormity of the challenge and how technology is playing a role, but the best part deals with the powerful personal and cultural meaning of this part of German history represents to the people it affected so strongly.

G?ºnter Bormann, the BStU’s senior legal expert, says there’s an overwhelming public demand for the catharsis people find in their files. “When we started in 1992, I thought we’d need five years and then close the office,” Bormann says. Instead, the Records Office was flooded with half a million requests in the first year alone. Even in cases where files hadn’t been destroyed, waiting times stretched to three years. In the past 15 years, 1.7 million people have asked to see what the Stasi knew about them.

Requests dipped in the late 1990s but…The Lives of Others, about a Stasi agent who monitors a dissident playwright, seems to have prompted a surge of new applications; 2007 marked a five-year high. “Every month, 6,000 to 8,000 people decide to read their files for the first time,” Bormann says. [T]he Stasi Records Office spends $175 million a year and employs 2,000 people.

The files hold the tantalizing possibility of an explanation for the strangeness that pervaded preunification Germany. Even back then, Poppe wondered if the Stasi had information that would explain it all. “I always used to wish that some Stasi agent would defect and call me up to say, Here, I brought your file with me,'” Poppe says.

She was able to match codenames like Carlos, Heinz, and Rita to friends, coworkers, and even colleagues in the peace movement. She even tracked down the Stasi officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush for him at a bar – he thought he was there for a job interview – they continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. “If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me,” she says. “It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes.” Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone Poppe – often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.

Poppe is looking forward to finding out what was in that last, reconstructed 5 percent. “The files were really important to see,” she says, taking a drag on her cigarette and leaning forward across the coffee table. “They explained everything that happened – the letters we never got, the friends who pulled away from us. We understood where the Stasi influenced our lives, where they arranged for something to happen, and where it was simply our fault.”

How to pay for parking

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Our CCA class just finished a “user experience audit” of BART and found dozens of aspects of the whole experience that are sub-optimal. I’ll add this one (although maybe one of them saw this as well).

Step 1 – remember your stall number.

Too bad this sign is posted in the ticket-buying area of the station, far far away from your car off in the parking lot. It should read Go back to your car, dumbass, and write down the four digit number and then come back here and look at step 2. Their guidance is not presented at a useful point in the process, at all.

Last week I dialed my cell phone with my 4-digit parking code so that I could “remember” it. There’s one machine for buying tickets, and then through the turnstiles is the next machine for paying for parking (“the paid area”). So even if you walk from your car muttering 3214 over and over again, you still have to use a number-heavy interface to select the value of your ticket, enter your ATM password and so on, and that’s likely to wipe out your short-term memory.

But I only learned this from failure. All of which makes this sign so unhelpful.

Semi-persistence of memory

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The New York Times offers some nice cultural insight on the phenomenon of decals in car rear windows as tributes to the departed. Decal Junky, cited in the piece, has six pages of memorial decals.

Arturo Ramirez of Cathedral City, Calif., who expressed his grief over the death of his friend Ernie Zamorez in a car crash in October 2004 by having 50 car decals printed at $5.50 apiece, said he sees the tributes primarily on cars of people with Latin American backgrounds. Trips around the Coachella Valley and Los Angeles freeways, however, turned up other backgrounds as well. “In Loving Memory of Rocco DeJoseph” read one decal on the back of a blue Saturn, positioned next to a decal proclaiming “Italian Princess.”

Those who study the way societies process death see the decals as yet another iteration of an increasingly mobile and transient America. “We try to keep track of our dead,” said Thomas Lynch, an undertaker and poet in Milford, Mich., who has written two books on the culture of death. “We’re the only species that does. There’s a need to name the loss, to give it some texture.” The decals, Mr. Lynch said, are “bringing the cemetery to the freeway.”

Gary M. Laderman, director of the graduate division of religion at Emory University in Atlanta and the author of two books on funeral customs, said the decals bring a do-it-yourself mentality to memorializing death. “It’s part of the post-60’s consumer empowerment, where everything can get caught up in commercialization,” Professor Laderman said. “Before, it was left to the funeral home. Now you take the production into your own hands and have it your way.”

In Southern California, where so much of life is conducted in cars, many people say it makes sense for death to be reflected there too.

Leanne Fuller, the girlfriend of Ernie Zamorez, said decals were the most efficient way to get word out about his death. “He had friends from high school who didn’t hear anything in the news, and they see the car and know he died,” she said, adding that she will keep the decal on her Honda Civic until it falls off.

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