Forgetting has become a gradually hard matter. If an old picture fails to represent a past buried in the rubble, a video clip can always tell its own story. The ubiquitous cameras at every corner of the street conscientiously fulfill their duties to watch everybody passes by and forth and records everything down to the smallest detail. The modern city seems to base itself on the framework of a Panopticon in which the inmates are constantly being watched and examined. The reinforced monitoring of the highly regulated society forms a vast quantity of archives based on the social scene of the unremarkable day-to-day existence in a modern era. The database is huge while the content is enormously rich. Memory cannot fade in a surveillance tape where one can always spot the tracks of the old times. The moment in an immediate past is frozen in the unexpected shots.

 

A whole chapter of the book called “modern age” is devoted to the cultural memory practice of archiving on various levels. The advent of audiovisual records has brought some transformative advances into the way memory is stored and preserved. One picture presented to the eyes fades out while another one grows clearer. The fleeting moments are composed upon the reels. The practice of audiovisual archiving connects the fixed moments of the old photos in the stream of time and refill the imagination tank of the curious minds. The experience of watching oneself in the surveillance tape stimulates one to think about the blurring boundary between the past and the present. The person who appears in the camera seems nothing more than a phantom, something less than human and hard to define. Just imagine the scene: a person happens to be the spectator of the video in which he acts out a part in the past. This is a totally brand new experience offered only to the modern human being who ever watches around while being watched himself.

 

Forgetting is being dreaded in this age. Not even a single day has ever been passed without being recorded and examined. The archive fever extends itself incessantly in the modern era while gathers its momentum in an even stronger manner. The death drive to possess an immediate past pushes one even further in recording every detail of the fleeting moments of time. In the battlefield of memory, people fight to get the upper hand. The idea of collecting the fragments of a past in the surveillance footage serves to take control of a society in a real sense of the word. The loss of a single tape cuts off a portion of the memory. One who is devoid of the ability to recall the past is impotent in some sense. The person who passes by the camera registers himself as a member of the community who stores his memory in the collective archives of the government. He never intends to show his face in front of the camera yet he becomes an actor in the motion picture directed by an invisible powerful hand. No one can ever escape the memory of a surveillance camera.

L. P. Hartley has once said in The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The past is no longer the past in the ancient times. It has become a past under the continuous monitoring of the camera. The advances of the modern era give rise to a detailed record-keeping of an immediate past which could be otherwise different. If there is no surveillance camera, would a past be rewritten somehow? Those who behave themselves under the constant monitoring might change into another person if there is no camera at all. The “impossibility of verifying the reality” (556) of a past still remains. I am just thinking about in an era of 24/7 monitoring, a person is becoming more and more like an actor in front the camera, even if he intends the least to be one. But the camera is there, the time one gets used to it, one runs the risk of becoming a person acting out in the stage.

 

What I am also thinking about is our excess dependence on the technique means for storing the memory which will inevitably engender the danger of memory descend of a whole generation free from the fetters of “physical record-keeping”. The memory machine will always be there for help, so what is the big deal for memorizing the things by heart? That would be the one of the most crucial predicaments which human beings aspire to extricate themselves from in a modern era. The surveillance camera fulfills its task of archiving the details of the everyday scene of unimportant lives and it even does a better job than most of us could ever have done. The human beings still need to maintain themselves a little bit so as not to be overwhelmed by the memory machines. As we are entrusting our memories to the technique means, there might exist the possibilities to turn the memory away from us too far.