Assignment #1.1

Introduction


In Charles Baxter's essay Shame and Forgetting the Information Age, he covers a wide range of people and how technology, forgetting, memory, print, and shame ties into one. Throughout the text he talks about his brother Tom( at the beginning ) then ventures off into mentioning others and how they react to the information age. He also includes textfrom others writng like Walter Benjamin, who wrote " The Storytellers" (1936) . Shame and Forgetting the Informantion Age realy goes in depth about the whole concept of memory and technology. Baxter's main purpose, I feel, in writing this essay isto show how forgetting can be shameful. Many people feel shame in not memorizing something. Baxter's thought on forgetting is that we should not be shameful, if something is forgotten. Evn though his brother Tom had a learnign disability he did not want him to be shame if he could not remeber things of the information age well, because his memory of experience was excellent. For many of those who grew up in the age of print this new era of technology is more difficult for them. Memorzing information was a bit more complicatee and challenging. Now in today's world you have all the computers and technology in the world to help you with all sorts of things even memorizng. People tend to reflect more on the negative things in life verse the good, just as now where people rely more on technology then themselves. Neil Postman states, "We have transformed infroamtion into a from of garbage" (141), what I get from ths quote is that we have taken the power that we have in technology and over used that power. We now use technology for wasteful things; it is no longer used for informatiom only but for plkay. We take for granted the technology we have and rely too heavily on it .

Quotes:

"Strategic Amnesia might be an appropriate phrase to describe how we are coping with information-glut..." (145)

"Remembering data and remembering an experince are two different activites. It is possible that the quantity of data we are supposed to remember has reduced our capacity to remember or even to have experiences..." (146)

"Experience, has fallen in value." (149)

"If memory stands against death, forgetting stands against data." (154)

"History is narratable as long as its events occur in sime logical way, but when trauma and shame are introduced into the mix, history is corrupted from the from the inside." (156)