Nathan R. Johnson. Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020. 224p. Hardcover, $49.95 (ISBN: 978-0817320607).

Abstract

As our society increasingly recognizes the importance of what information others around us interact with, Nathan R. Johnson’s <em>Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age</em> arrives as an important contribution toward understanding the memory infrastructures that underlie our collective remembering. Johnson defines memory infrastructures as “backgrounded resources for practicing memory” that “explicitly obfuscate social issues related to memory because they are built to do just that.” (4) They also “consist of the backgrounds that expose particular modes of memory.” (6) An example of this “background exposure” is the social tendency to “recognize debt as morally sinful, for example, is to read religious texts over the top of what it means to participate in a given nation’s economy.” (14) A key point here is that this reading of religious texts takes place in the background and goes unacknowledged as the shared infrastructure that makes the concept that debt is morally sinful exists at all. We can think of memory infrastructures as shared conceptual frameworks for remembering that often obscure the human labor and human biases contained within their maintenance and creation. Additionally, memory infrastructures are not fixed and are created, disseminated, grow, and finally splinter. (17) In other words, they are fundamentally human creations.