Two recent news stories offer quirky challenges to the conventional wisdom that new technologies–especially the Internet–have made it impossible to forget anything. Raising questions about what we remember and how information and memories are transmitted, these episodes seem somewhat surreal at first glance but show media taking on a life of their own.
The July/August 2009 issue of Orion carried a short article about the Oxford Junior Dictionary. According to Robert Michael Pyle’s piece in the magazine’s Sacred & Mundane column, the current edition omits a wide range of words related to ecology, botany, and zoology:
Brooks have no buttercups or brambles on their banks, but then there are no brooks, either. Woods exist, sans fern or fungus, willow or weasel, porcupine, beech, or sycamore.
These and other terms disappeared to make room for entries on mass culture, technology, and the joys of the internet. The editors made the choice, Pyle explains, based on “what children are learning.” By reinforcing the immediate and failing to give children the tools they need to frame questions about the natural world and their own environments, the editorial choice highlights Richard Louv’s contention that contemporary trends in education lead children to see nature as only a distant, abstract concern.
As words disappear, or–in the case of blackberries–change meaning, some pieces of information mutate in more amusing ways. On 14 July 2009, the Fox News website published an article with the title “Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies.” The site quickly corrected the story when it became clear that the title and some details could be read in a misleading way, implying that the robot built to use dry biomass (e.g., sticks, dead leaves) to generate steam power was in fact a mechanical ghoul. The correction appeared by the end of the week, although local affiliates continued to carry the story in its original form.
Correction made,time to move on . . . in theory. Others, however, found a certain morbid potential in the story. Blogs and right-wing commentators quickly spread the original story. As the threat of flesh-eating robots hit the internet, readers rushed to comment on the story. Forums quickly turned into paranoid, post-apocalyptic ramblings as people voiced concerns about FEMA plots, bizarre elitist attempts to thin the ranks of the middle class, and fears that the robots actually operated more efficiently when they consumed people alive. One contributor to Prison Planet helpfully albeit cryptically suggested that “We should make armor out of magnets for the future warfare.”
It is possible to see the case of the children’s dictionary as an instance of the failure of culture. Rather than serving as a tool of social memory, passing down information to provide a foundation for future growth, the dictionary becomes self referential. Becoming wholly reflexive, it legitimizes the culture of the present without providing a broader context necessary for understanding the past or dreaming about the future.
In the second case, memory is present, but the wrong kind of memory. Rather than learning from a mistake, commentators have granted the misleading information a kind of immortality, allowing it to live and dance across discussion boards. While Fox News has a broader audience base, the number of sources reporting the original text and the sheer morbid entertainment value of the first story give it greater immediacy with readers.