Friday, December 12, 2003

Mineral Memory Umberto Eco gave a lecture at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on the different types of memory. The lecture is mainly about books.  However, he does draw a distinction at the beginning about three types of memory (Organic, our bodies; Mineral, see below; Vegitative, paper books) The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. The lecture is on-line at the AL-AHRAM Weekly. His notion of memory media, I think, fits well with my idea of containers of information. (I do mix them up a bit in my multimedia pieces.) I hadn't gone so far as to think about the basic types...quite interesting. Thanks, kuro5hin.org 10:38:03 PM