Working With Purpose

Charles Baxter's piece entitled "Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age" was written in five pieces to convey the correlation between memory, data and the importance of its usage, non-usage and its purpose. He divides his essay into parts to draw the reader into understanding that we use technology and data to gain information, just as our brains use its memory capacity for storage and recollection. However, in his plight to give emphasis to the strengths of memory through computer and human usage, he also points out that memory can be destroyed over time in the human mind. Memory can be categorized into experienced, informational and data memory. It is the experienced memory that loses its importance as one over consumes data. The over exposure to information has caused man to be less effective at memory retention and data interpretation.

Memory for humans entails retaining and recalling past experiences. Forgetting pertains to the banishment of past thoughts. Shame reflects feelings of embarrassment. I believe Baxter chose to combine memory, forgetting, and shame into a collage. Emphasizing how garbage is obtained due to information overload and lack of usage.


* Outcast of the informational age p. 141, paragraph 2

* Forgetting is shameful p. 141, paragraph 3

* Those who cannot easily process written information are the data disabled
p. 142, paragraph

* All the documents and letters and magazines and bank statements and computer printouts and postcards and newspapers and ranks of unread hot-to manuals and books and directories and reference books -- were stacked and stashed everywhere. He lived amid the documents.
p. 143, paragraph 5

*People here take considerable pride in their minds and more particularly in their memories.
p. 144, paragraph 3

*Marshall McLuhad said that the mechanical extensions of humans have nor apparently extended to our brains and more particularly to our memories. p. 145 paragraph 2

*Our memories" are memories of our experiences in narrative form. Not in the external computer, data by contrast is the proliferating facts and figurs, can easily be stored.
p. 145, paragraph 2

* Strategic amnesia has everything to do with th desire to create or destroy personal histories.
p. 145, paragraph 5

* The constant flow of infomation has led to data exhaustion. Information of screen is different from information gleaned from books. Because of the information explosion anxiety has come about. p 146 paragraph 1

*information can be processed anywhere, however to survive, have to had competency in handling data, organizing it, moving it around, displaying it and disposing of it. p. 146 paragraph 2

*A proliferation of information causes information-inflation, value loss/ information becoming garbage. p. 146 paragraph 3

* obsessing about mental competence p. 147, paragraph 3

* In an information age, forgetfulness is a sing of debility and incompetence. It is taken as a weakness, an emblem of losing one's grip. p. 147, paragraph 6

* Ronald Reagan became the poster child of forgetfulness. p. 147, paragraph 6

* His forgetfulness and disavowals of responsibility, his social ethos of self-interest and selfishness to him into his final data-free twilight. Regan managed to contradict the principle that I laid out a few paragraphs ago; his forgetfulness, far from making him incompetent., enabled him to be the sort of president he was; it set him free from responsibility for his actions. He made his forgetfulness work. p 148, top continued paragraph from page 147

*Clinton remembered huge quantities of data, but also seemed eager to slip large quantities of the past into the trash icon. Clinton was able to bury the past without demonstrating visible shame. p. 148, paragraph 4

* Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" argues that the explosion of information in the Modern Age is denying us something precious, " the ability to exchange stories."
p. 149, paragraph


* The data leaves no experience-memory in her head. Here he uses arbitrary questions.
p 150, paragraph 1

* Benjamin points out that our experiences hae been reduced in number at the same time that the available mental space for them has shrunk. p 150, pararaph 2



* Rich in information but poor in experiences. She sits all day in front of screens

p 150, paragraph w

* Forgetting and shame might just serve, under the immediate surface of consciousness, as an escape route of sorts. p. 150 paragraph 3

*not rememering locates itself as an act of sabotage against mere data, of rebellion at the local level. It is momory's version of Freudian reversal, as an escape route of sorts.
P 150, paragraph 4

*Bartleby would feel shame at not remembering if she felt her job was reall work doing.
p. 150, paragraph 5

*Benjamin - Information-poisoning is areasonable response to the devaluation and even destruction of personal experience. p. 151, paragraph 1

*What you remember is the key to who you are. P. 151, paragraph 5

*Robert Haas, "All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking."
p 152, paragraph 2

*In a dysfuntional narrative, true accountability vanishes. This is a complex response to shame. Shame comes first, but strategic forgetting follows closely behind.
p. 153 top paragraph

* Evading their own lives, they manage by means of dysfunctional narratives to disable the lives of their children, their listeners. Strategic amnesia replaces paternal accountability.
p. 153 paragraph 2

Shame and Forgetting In The Information Age

Baxter used five parts to create parallelism and cohesion. He started the paper with simple phrases, to pull us into understanding information and the memory process that humans possess. This was shown when he spoke of his brother and how his brother saw himself. Another area where this was shown is when he spoke of memory in description of the two women from Ann Arbor.

When reading this essay, I thought initially that Baxter was trying to place the reader into a setting that focused on the difference between the memory process and the importance of data. Data being experiences as well as information. After reading it a second time, I tried to take on a more indepth understanding. In doing so, I came to the realization that his focus is really the importance and significance of what we take in, how it is placed and the need to use or delete.

When Baxter talked about is brother and the connotation he gave to himelf of being considered the dumb brother (p. 141) was the beginning of using a play on words. Significance of words is given again when Baxter speaks of how much memory one has (p. 144). One initially assumes he is speaking of the mind but in reality it was the computer memory. Later on in his passages he speaks of Reagan and Clinton and how competencies were and were not measured in their need to use memory and data to be effective.

With the play on words shame was used as a strength and a weakness. It helped to redefine the importance of how what information matters. Baxter eluded to the quality of innocence and boyishness gave forgetting a means of power. So is there shame in forgetting? And, is forgetting a hinderance towards the use of data? In my opinion no. With the degree of information at our finger tips and the extensive ways we have for retrieval, there is not a need to place extreme emphasis on data remembrances.