New Social Memory

In the article, New Media and Social Memory, written by Richard Rinehart, the thesis is how new media art can be last for a long time. Also, he talks about the challenge of preserve the digital forms of new media art. He uses a lot of example not only to discuss the issue of social memory, but also to prove some of his arguments. The primary purpose of the work is to show the public what is social memory and how it works. First of all, he breaks the social memory into two parts in order to be more clearly. One is formal, which usually canonical and manage by formal institutions such as museum and libraries (Richard, p.15). Meanwhile, it use computer as the tool to collect and maintain the data, seems like a collective memory banks and database of civilization to us (Richard, p.15). It focuses on preserving the original copy of cultural object, and maintains its history and integrity (Richard, p.15). The other part is informal social memory, and it focuses on folklore and distributed object. Especially, it used to preserved memory by making it a moving target, such as “the effort to preserve video games from 1980s” (Richard, p.15). And, it used to focus on update or recreate the cultural object as their method to keeping it alive (Richard, p.15).

Yet, “the challenge of new media to social memory is not purely and issue of technology” (Richard, p.18). From this quote, it shows that technology is not the real challenge for social memory. In here, the author uses self-answering to catch the attention of reader. The challenge for social memory is on legitimation side, which is the “control and ownership of information being a crucial political issue” (Richard, p.19). Meanwhile, he uses an example of TV to prove his argument about “when system fails, it offers us a rare opportunity to consider the system explicitly” (Richard,