The art of memory with Abby Smith Rumsey and Simon Bill – books podcast

We explore memory and forgetting with a fictional artist who struggles with recall and a cultural historian examining the past to solve present troubles with data storage

This week we’re dredging the seas of memory, examining how identity is constructed out of what we choose to remember and what happens when we cannot use this faculty.

According to the cultural historian Abby Smith Rumsey, the 21st century isn’t the first time human beings have found themselves drowning in data. She explains why it’s too easy to blame information overload on IT, how brains are designed to look for meaning instead of facts and where to build a library in a networked world.