Ledarskap och lidelse - Kungliga biblioteket

Speak Memory: Reconfiguring
Oral, Written and Digital
Communication
Jānis Krēsliņš
What profits a man if he gaineth a world with its comprehensive, all encompassing
networks, its unobstructed channels of communication, its effortless
and sudden access to seemingly endless sets of resources, but in the
process loseth his memory? Woe to him that buildeth, getteth, striveth for
mastery, yet in the process forgeteth the ways in which we remembreth, how
we structure knowledge, conceive the world around us. 1
It is no mere coincidence that I begin my forward-looking tale of digitization
and its contribution to the reconfiguration of communication by
alluding to the Prophet Habakkuk, the Evangelist Matthew, and the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer. Through my oblique references to the past I want to look
into the future. I do not intend to delve into the past to better understand
the present, but rather, albeit for a brief moment, to remember the future;
and instead of using the usual text and image based points of entry, I shall
turn to the world of oral communication. And I shall do this all to direct our
attention to the concurrence of technical innovation and radical shifts in the
ways in which we form identities and in which we communicate, the way in
which we access knowledge. It is only through memory, by analyzing how it
has been structured in times past, that we can get a deeper understanding of
the culture, the contours of which are now just beginning to take shape and
the form of which we are in the process of conceiving.
We can best prepare for our task by casting our sight far and wide and by
searching for parallels to that which we are experiencing today. The most
obvious and the most frequently mentioned is to be found in the history of
printing and in the tale of how the discovery, the spread and the development
of printing left its mark on the mind of man. Here, I would like to shift
my ground to a process which often ran parallel to that of printing, but one
which lays emphasis more on the ramifications of the technical revolution
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