Anyone find themselves struggling with the disconnect between footage of the past and how it actually looked at the time? I can't really envision the 90s, despite living through them, because the grainy footage we have now seems to have usurped what I actually saw. The 90s were grainy the way the 50s were black and white.
Do you think it has anything to do with our attention spans being shortened, which may somehow effect how we archive memories? Maybe our memory is getting more and more optimized for the short term, since we are trafficking through increasingly information-dense environments?
Its not just that more is happening (although arguably so), but that we are enabled to be aware of more and more, and that draws processing power away from long term memory? That is, what constitutes long term memory is, in absolute terms, constantly being shortened - because the information within our experiences is getting denser, so the parameters need to be adjusted accordingly? Maybe for those of us who are more acclimated to this information dense environment, time and/or memory are dilated or contracted in weird ways? Not sure if the case could be made scientifically, but that doesn't seem to be our concern.
An attempt in other words: Your farming/storage capacity is met by ten square acres of corn, with one stalk grown every five feet, in a grid. If the corn density were to be increased, say to one stalk every three feet, and yet your maximum storing capacity were to remain fixed, you would have to shorten your acreage accordingly, or else risk ruining that which you invest energy/money/attention in.
In terms of processing things, information-density seems to objectively be increasing. In fact, online environments are arguably spaces of
pure information. And while our abstract processing capacities may be increasingly accordingly, perhaps the demands are too high, and we need to narrow our frame a bit.
This does seem to deviate entirely from your point, but to try and return (or just deviate in another direction): Perhaps as our tech-archives become more and more robust, and are increasingly better are capturing experiences, the information of our experiences can be more and more consolidated into potent and affective clips or reels (memes?) that can serve to supplant ever-longer spans of memories. Maybe at some point, our tech and/or pharma could instantaneously neurologically trigger lucid zeitgeist memories/impressions, bypassing the need for media, because it would be
immediate. Arguably the media we have is just the mediocre means of that kind of surgically precise impression-tech.
