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Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture
The Notion of "culture" is changing at the speed of information itself. Computer technology is creating a new kind of public cyberculture with all its utopian and apocalyptic possibilities. But is it that new?
Popular debate generally ignores cyberculture's historical context. The official history begins in the 19th century and tracks the evolution of telecommunications, the egalitarian dream of the global village, and the emergence of the military-industrial complex. However this omits the deeper prehistory of technological transformations of culture that are everywhere felt but nowhere seen in the telematic landscape of the late-twentieth century. Cyberculture is an extension, rather than innovation, of human engagement with communication and information technologies.
Popular debate generally ignores cyberculture's historical context. The official history begins in the 19th century and tracks the evolution of telecommunications, the egalitarian dream of the global village, and the emergence of the military-industrial complex. However this omits the deeper prehistory of technological transformations of culture that are everywhere felt but nowhere seen in the telematic landscape of the late-twentieth century. Cyberculture is an extension, rather than innovation, of human engagement with communication and information technologies.
- GenresHistory
132 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1998
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January 27, 2012
Memory Trade
By Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich
A free download from 21C
Memory Trade is a pulsating romp through the pre-life of our digitized age. It is a hybrid stitch-up of text and image going mano-o-mano page by page. It is hyper-caffeinated scholarly musing with a touch of lysergic acid. It is a world where Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes trade cigars with Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and Giles Deleuze while William Gibson and James Joyce talk emailia and cyberspace.
First published in 1998 in analog form, Memory Trade was conceived by Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich as a manic dialogue of thought and image. Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, it is an ‘imaginary’ history of often unlikely, but all too accurate linkages. Memory Trade is an exploration, in text and image, of the unconscious of cyberculture, its silent, secret prehistory. From Plato’s Cave to Borges’ literary labyrinths, Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, and Joyce’s bairdboard bombarment, Memory Trade is an hallucinogenic palimpsest of contemporary culture.
Memory Trade rapidly sold-out and has been much sought after ever since. Fourteen years after it first appeared Memory Trade refuses to age or become irrelevant, thus 21C magazine has re-published it in digital form, phoenix-like, as an e-book that is as sumptuous as the original.
By Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich
A free download from 21C
Memory Trade is a pulsating romp through the pre-life of our digitized age. It is a hybrid stitch-up of text and image going mano-o-mano page by page. It is hyper-caffeinated scholarly musing with a touch of lysergic acid. It is a world where Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes trade cigars with Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and Giles Deleuze while William Gibson and James Joyce talk emailia and cyberspace.
First published in 1998 in analog form, Memory Trade was conceived by Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich as a manic dialogue of thought and image. Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, it is an ‘imaginary’ history of often unlikely, but all too accurate linkages. Memory Trade is an exploration, in text and image, of the unconscious of cyberculture, its silent, secret prehistory. From Plato’s Cave to Borges’ literary labyrinths, Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, and Joyce’s bairdboard bombarment, Memory Trade is an hallucinogenic palimpsest of contemporary culture.
Memory Trade rapidly sold-out and has been much sought after ever since. Fourteen years after it first appeared Memory Trade refuses to age or become irrelevant, thus 21C magazine has re-published it in digital form, phoenix-like, as an e-book that is as sumptuous as the original.
Displaying 1 of 1 review