We Cyborgs:
Posted by on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 6:44 pm“When losing a phone feels like losing a piece of your soul, you’ve become a cyborg.” –Jad Abumrad
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Rightly or wrongly I’ve been feeling like that lately (not WRT my phone!).
I’ve thought of photographs and recordings as memory prostheses for a long time, even if they are detached from the physiological embodiment of my memory. I feel the loss of one set of photographs in particular as if it is a phantom limb. A bizarre recording I ended up with on another occasion, while making a stereophonic tape of a heavy rainstorm, feels even more like a phantom limb. It plays over and over in my mind, but the vividly three-dimensional feeling of the rain’s sound and echoes in the street, combined with the exceptional sounds it contained, are unrecoverable.
I think it is like this for packrats, hoarders, as well, with the mnemonic significance material objects take on.
Maybe that bends the topic a little bit, but generalized — is context in the most abstract sense comparable in its effect to a memory prosthesis? It helps to prime us to recognize some faces quickly, and without it face recognition can be much slower, or even fail to happen. Context or cues.
In this way our surroundings can almost come to serve us as “memory palaces”: recollections of all kinds, episodic, semantic, textual, visual, organized and cued by setting: memory embedded within an ecology, and adaptation imposing loads and delays upon it, with never-ending remodeling and restructuring. A kind of yin and yang of adaptation and performance, differentially weighted to suit the relative familiarity or strangeness of circumstance…
Reading this quote reminded me of my zombies class in my undergrad. We watched Dawn of the Dead and talked about how people returned to the mall because it was familiar. The simple motor skills that the zombies develop are simply imitations of what they spent most of their lives as humans doing. My professor asked us what we would probably be doing as zombies and the general consensus was that many of us would probably all be walking along typing on our cell phones, still tethered to our technology even as the mindless undead.