Fragments of an Infinite Memory

March 1, 2020
A French writer and translator explores the changing nature of the human experience when the internet is virtually inescapable. Most Gen X readers have the ability to remember life before the internet but also to live now at the relentless pace that the digital age requires. Renouard, formerly a teacher of philosophy, turns his considerable intellect to the consequences of life with the internet, specifically his own. One might expect such a contemplation to be either technical in detail or hopelessly academic, but the author strikes a surprisingly conversational tone. As the narrative opens, the author is on a Paris boulevard, idly daydreaming about whether he could use Google to reconstruct where he was and what he was doing at a certain time two evenings prior. "For some people," he writes, "to throw a few words into Google has become the gesture of a new form of divination--googlemancy." These succinct but evocative chapters aren't essays in the traditional sense but rather pieces of a scaffolding on which the author can hang his often inspired, sometimes perplexing reflections. It doesn't hurt that Renouard's language is quite nimble. He can state the obvious with grace--"Each generation sees the technological advances of the previous era--no matter how near--as excrescences of an ancient world"--and then circle back to the thought in a subsequent chapter with a poetic melancholy: "In the Internet there is a fountain of youth into which you drunkenly plunge your face at first, then see your reflection battered by the years, in the dawn light." Using films, books, and personal experiences as touchstones, Renouard offers a thoughtful consideration not of the internet's properties or even its possibilities but how its very presence changes us as human beings. A pleasing metaphysical ramble through the nexus of self, emotion, memory, and experience in the digital age.

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