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Two-time CASBS fellow Fred Turner engages CASBS board of directors chair Abby Smith Rumsey before a live audience to discuss her new book "Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History." When the erasure or distortion of collective memory through storytelling hijacks fact, truth, and history itself, what kind of information infrastructures can effectively confront those false narratives? Turner and Rumsey explore the tensions between history and storytelling and resulting implications for political beliefs, actions, and our collective sense of reality.ABBY SMITH RUMSEYCASBS website bio | Personal website | Talk at Long Now Foundation in partnership with CASBS MIT Press web page for Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with HistoryCASBS Q&A with Rumsey (2022)FRED TURNERStanford University profile | Fred Turner's books | on Google Scholar |"Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age of Authoritarianism," Harper's Magazine (2019) Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website|Twitter|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach
As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing visions of the future. Drawing extensively from Russian history in the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future.
As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing visions of the future. Drawing extensively from Russian history in the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future.
History is the product of remembering our past, so it involves the mind, though we have underused neuroscience in understanding how we know what we think we know. Abby Smith Rumsey chairs the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and she is out with a new book Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History, in which she looks to science to help her understand the past. And a false narrative about children dying in Gaza is amplified by the media echo chamber. Produced by Joel Patterson and Corey Wara Email us at thegist@mikepesca.com To advertise on the show, visit: https://advertisecast.com/TheGist Subscribe to The Gist Subscribe: https://subscribe.mikepesca.com/ Follow Mikes Substack at: Pesca Profundities | Mike Pesca | Substack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
EPISODE 1786: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Abby Smith Rumsey, author of MEMORY, EDITED, about what we should remember and what we should forget about historyAbby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She focuses on the impact of information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity, the nature of evidence, and the changing roles of libraries and archives. Her most recent book is When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (2016). Rumsey served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia; Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources; and manager of programs relating to preservation of and access to cultural heritage collections at the Library of Congress. She served on the National Science Foundation's Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Economics of Digital Preservation and Access; the American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on the Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences; and the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Program. Board service includes: Chair, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences; the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library Advisory Council; the Stanford University Library Advisory Committee; the Society of Architectural Historians; the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia; and the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the Harvard University Library. Rumsey received a BA from Harvard College and MA and PhD in Russian and intellectual history from Harvard University.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.
Show page with suggested readingsJohn MarkoffNilam RamByron ReevesAbby Smith RumseyMaryanne WolfThe Human Screenome ProjectSocial Science for a World in Crisis
Memory is not about the past, it is about the future. Historian and media expert Abby Smith Rumsey explores how digital memory, which cannot be preserved, will shape the future of knowledge and affect our survival. From March 02016. Abby Smith Rumsey is a historian who writes about how ideas and information technologies shape perceptions of history, of time, and of personal and cultural identity. She served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia, and worked for more than a decade at the Library of Congress. Her book When We Are No More, How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future (02016) looks at how human memory from pre-history to the present has shed light on the grand challenge facing our world--the abundance of information and scarcity of human attention.
Our memories are terrible, mice can lead us astray, and Americans didn't always love chicken. This week, we've got a show packed with surprising facts about both human brains and animal realities.
Abby Smith Rumsey, author of 'When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future', joins this episode to talk about data, archiving, and cultural memory.
Our podcast team is taking a break this week for the holidays. We’re revisiting some of our favorite interviews from 2016. Back in May, we spoke with author and historian Abby Smith Rumsey about her latest book, “When We Are No More: How digital memory shapes our future.” The book explores human memory from pre-history to the present, from pictures painted on cave walls to the present, with all the world’s knowledge available in an instant on our mobile devices.
You can read a book from 100 years ago… but will your descendants be able to access a USB drive? A look at the world of digital memory.
Back in 320 BC Socrates worried about how written language would impact our ability to remember. This was long, long before moveable type, the computer, the pda or any form of digital technology. Socrates worried that reliance on simply writing would erode memory. But also and maybe more importantly, that reading would mislead students to think that they had knowledge, when they only had data. Today, similar debates are going on with respect to the digital world. Leading a great deal of this discussion and giving us much insight is Abby Smith Rumsey in her book When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future My conversation with Abby Smith Rumsey:
We explore memory and forgetting with a fictional artist who struggles with recall and a cultural historian examining the past to solve present troubles with data storage
You might think your tweets on Twitter belong to you. But in 2010, the Library of Congress acquired the entire archive of Twitter. Why would such a majestic library acquire such seemingly ephemeral material? Historian Abby Smith Rumsey, author of When We Are No More, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about this decision of the Library of Congress and the general challenge of how to cope with a world when so much of what we write and read is digital. Subjects discussed include what we can learn from the past, the power of collective memory, what is worth saving, and how we might archive our electronic lives so that we and those who come after us can find what we might be looking for.
In today's podcast, we follow moves to upgrade US Cyber Command to a Unified Combatant Command. We follow developments in Operation Groundbait, Phineas Phisher's latest, and the discovery of China's 50-cent-ers. Conficker is still out and active eight years after patching We take a look at industry news, and hear about how TeslaCrypt may be closing up shop. Our expert today is Accenture Labs' Malek Ben Salem who discusses semantic technology for cyber defense. We'll also hear from historian and author Abby Smith Rumsey who'll talk about her book, “When We are No More: How Digital Memory Memory Will Shape Our Future."
Abby Smith Rumsey, historian and Consulting analyst on the use of the cultural record in a variety of media, gives her views on digital preservation and the role of research libraries in the preservation of electronic media.