Sophie lives in BK, works, writes, plays music, puts on shows and uses twitter.
A few blogs I run or help run:
flavorpill.tumblr.com
thepermanentwave.tumblr.com
sadjams.tumblr.com
spiralringnotebook.tumblr.com
pseudoprofoundelectronicartists.tumblr.com
silentdraperunners.tumblr.com
Quote reblogged from Hardcore for Nerds with 5 notes
This means that common sense is quite wrong in thinking that the past is fixed, immutable, invariable, as against the everchanging flux of the present. On the contrary, at least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened. Thus we have as many lives as we have points of views. We keep reinterpreting our biography very much as the Stalinists kept rewriting the Soviet Encyclopedia, calling forth some events into decisive importance as others were banished to ignominious obliivion.
Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective - ‘Digression: Alternation and Biography’
At first, when I read this, I thought ‘well there goes my chosen discipline’, but historians already incorporate revision and reinterpretation into their work, and largely distrust ‘remembrance’ and the use of the past for direct ends in the present. It fits more with my distrust of the history of the self, the interrogation of one’s own past: for one cannot be one’s own historian. Biography is fine, if a little narrow; auto-biography is merely a specialised, if interesting, form of fiction.
(via hardcorefornerds)
Not to mention that memories are actually neurologically rewritten every time we remember them.
Source: hardcorefornerds
Quote reblogged from Blue Lines Revisited with 19 notes
The amount of data that will get accumulated over the course of a person’s life will be huge. So the team experimented with chopping that all up into specific years. A Facebook hackathon project called Memories, for example, which was accidentally released to the user base briefly last year, did that very thing. Users navigated between various buckets of content by clicking on years.
But that didn’t achieve the effect Facebook wanted. That’s not how we remember our life, Felton says. We don’t remember it in chunks. We remember it as a stream. ‘I felt strongly that your life should be shown in one long continuum,’ Felton says.
“Designers Behind Facebook’s Timeline: 5 Keys to Creating a UI With Soul.”
The stream metaphor works really well to craft narratives, which is what Facebook is trying to have us do. Per Walter Benjamin, I believe the opposite: “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”
(via marathonpacks)
Weirdly enough earlier in the piece they acknowledge that people DO remember things in chunks - or at least in discrete images and moments - but this didn’t lead to a very workable or flowing UI.
I think Facebook have memory wrong here - from my limited understanding of the current thinking in brain science memory is a process of re-inscription not recall in any case - but I also think the cleverness is precisely that: like Eric says, the stream works for narrative, and we like the IDEA of memory as narrative. Timeline isn’t really an attempt to mirror how memory works, but to build something that works how we’d like memory to.
(via tomewing)
That’s kind of perfect though, isn’t it? Memory is basically rewritten constantly, and so to have something that appeals to our idea of memory makes sense, as that then, will be what we remember as memory.
Source: marathonpacks
Quote with 10 notes
The brain has no interest in immaculate recall – it’s only interested in the past to the extent it helps us make sense of the future.
Quote with 7 notes
Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. What’s disturbing, of course, is that we can’t help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere, so that the ad we watched on television becomes our own, part of that personal narrative we repeat and retell.
