Research Assignment#3:The Medium Is the Memory

This piece by Florian Brody entitled, “The Medium Is the Memory,” is similar in title to Marshall McLuhan’s famous piece “The Medium Is the Message;” but there is where the similarities end. Brody’s piece focuses on the book (the medium) as an extension of one’s memory. While McLuhan’s piece focuses on the overall medium of which a message is conveyed through. The purpose of this blog to explain how the medium is the memory in relation to new media.

Brody’s piece starts off by discussing how books are an extension of one’s memory. The way people learned and acquired knowledge was through books he points out. He goes on to add that the book is no longer were people’s dreams and fantasies lie, they can now find them through a digital medium. These digital mediums include: television, film, and the computer. Through digital medium Brody explains, “If medium is a conveyor of memory rather than of messages, this offers us some insight into how to design for mew media” (143). This is where the medium as memory and new media come into play together. It is here that new media is considered to be the medium, and the information that one finds or contains from new media is the memory. Brody goes on to further explain that, “While the relation between the story and the apparatus has been much discussed in relation to film and television, we are only at a point where we can develop a theoretical discourse that ties the consumption of narrative to the media—unlike film and video—have the potential to emerge as a new type of book” (135). Come to think of it this statement is similar to the way educational systems are try change their curriculums to in order to provide a method of teaching where students can retain more of the information the learn by creating mnemonic devices as teaching aids. This statement also reminds me of O’Gorman’s hypericonic devise as well.

The way new media ties in to the medium as memory is an interesting one. We started off the semester in this course talking about the medium as the message in terms of new media, but I did not quite understand it at first. After reading essay from other new media theorist throughout the semester I understood that the book is the medium while the words it contains is the message. Now after reading Brody’s piece I know that the knowledge attained from the book is the memory.

Works Cited

Brody, Florian. “The Medium Is the Memory.” The Digital Dialectic: New Essays On New Media. Ed. Peter Lunenfield. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999. 135&143.