Mediating Remembering

Middleton and Brown turn to Russian theorist Vygotsky (1987) to argue that any sort of mediation, through language, symbols, gestures, and artefacts results in the

‘objectification of human action’. Drawing also on the work of Serres (1982), the

mediator becomes a third party to any communication that ‘contributes its own dynamic.’ (Middleton and Brown, 2005, p.145). More simply, we can recognise that telling a story through pictures, numbers, or in a different language might all lead to different

understandings. The challenge is to make oneself understood, to convey the right information, within any constraints or characteristics of the mediator.

Serres’ work, and the Actor-Network Theory which follows (Latour, 2005), explicitly recognises the agency of mediators (usually objects or interfaces, physical and digital) in an exchange. With the notion of ‘translation’, this method of sociological inquiry

emphasises how mediators “extend, ramify, amplify, displace and transform our actions" (Middleton and Brown, 2005, p.146). Reflected in remembering, this agency creates what (Wertsch, 2002) describes as an “irreducible tension”; between the past as mediated, and the past as reconstructively remembered.

For example, in one of Middleton and Brown’s many discursive examples, a mother shares a family photograph with her youngest son Paul. Paul’s mother is using the photograph as a basis for family recollection, and engaging her son in claims about his developing identity. In this case – being able to keep his balance on a bouncy castle. While the still photograph creates the occasion for such recollection and reflection, it also

commits the family to only one particular perspective and moment of the past - "a past that was not, and could not have been experienced as such by all the family members” (Middleton and Brown, 2005, p.144). This is where the tension lies, which necessitates a degree of negotiation between Paul and his mother, as to what meaning can be derived from the past as it appears in the photograph.

This photograph is not simply a cue for remembering. Radley (1990) explains the mediating role of objects as offering “opportunities and directions for appreciating the past”. Middleton and Brown also talk in these terms; physical objects in particular provide “occasions to extract and reconstruct the past” and act as “structures or envelopes into which we can insert and develop recollections” (Middleton and Brown, 2005, p.142). Radley (1990) describes how objects that mediate the past become

mementos when they are displaced from their original time and context. Their relatively fixed and enduring nature (in relation to the continuous flow of the present) allows us to 'define the world of which it was a part’ and offers a basis upon which interpretations of the past can then be reconstructed.

These objects can become ‘condensed symbols’ (Radley, 1990) or, in Middleton and Brown’s terms ‘punctualise experience’. Even within cognitive memory research, it is acknowledged that our memories of associated events are rarely distinct. Remembering childhood ‘bath time’, for example, we would tend to construct a compound image of many 'bath times' rather than bathing on one specific occasion. Middleton and Brown work this through further as a consequence of a memory that is ‘always on’. They question how it is that we are able to divide up, mark out and ‘punctualise’ our pasts as happening in discrete episodes and distinct parts, rather than as James' (1890) continuous ‘stream of consciousness’. Objects help us do this, and mediate remembering in part by ‘packaging up’ the past. In their relative stability and enduring nature, they indicate both continuity, as well as the things that have changed. They often also share a set of

collective values, and as such, they seem to offer a cohesive front, or representation of the past, which provides a ‘foothold’ in an otherwise seemingly fluid and indistinct mass of past experience.

These footholds are also often publicly available, in a way that one’s own mental experience is not. As a shared resource, objects can be used to coordinate and structure

shared remembering. Family photo albums or heirlooms are canonical examples of collective remembering, anchored by an object or indeed a familiar set of activities. Buchanan and Middleton (1995) share examples of older women reminiscing about the effort in washing clothes together. What is notable is the extent to which the building up of a shared account relies on recounting different objects (bath tubs, Sunlight soap, bed sheets) and activities (punching sheets, blowing in the wind). These objects need not even be present, but are the structures through which people localise and share their individual memories. Their interior mental experience is mediated and made available through a shared materiality.

Understood more broadly, Jose van Dijck (2007) emphasises the constructive nature of mediated remembering as ways of ‘defining personal remembrance in the face of larger cultural frameworks’ (p.25) – in this case the significant domestic, and gendered, chore of laundry. Remembering is not just the recounting of events that happened, but turns on

“the ability to locate and identify pieces of culture that identify the self in relation to others" (p.50). van Dijck’s work emphasises that mediators are not simply to cue the most evocative memories, or accurately convey the most information about past events. They work to link individual and collective remembering, through aspects of shared culture. The questions in this thesis concern how quantified data becomes a part of shared culture, and the particular qualities it exhibits as a mediator of individual remembering.

2.2.7. Summary

Beginning with the pioneering work of Frederic Bartlett, this section has set out a

definition of remembering as an imaginative reconstruction, which is active and dynamic, and is undertaken in relation to the past as a whole, rather than discrete, pre-formed memories. Vitally, remembering is understood to be present focused and action-oriented; it is always doing something. My clear focus here is on the way remembering becomes meaningful to an individual, rather than the psychological faculty of recall. This means that like an understanding of data, the meaning of an instance of remembering is deeply situated in personal contexts and cultural frameworks. Bartlett describes the way

remembering is structured and gains stability through ‘organised settings’. Middleton and Brown elucidate Bartlett’s meaning by describing commemorations, social conventions, objectification, and, most relevant for this thesis, mediation. The crux of this thesis is in

understanding quantified data as a new mode of objectifying and mediating remembering; I seek to understand the value of this new experience.

The next section moves this core argument on, to focus explicitly on ‘technologies of memory’, perceived to directly capture and represent the past. This will first present socio-cultural theories of a ’new memory ecology’, predicated on digital technologies. Secondly, this will chart a brief history of HCI studies of technologies of memory. This begins with notions of total capture and the advent of ‘lifelogging’ through to studies of remembering with digital possessions.