Peter Behrman de Sinety has translated French philosopher Maël Renouard's insights about the Internet as Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, preserving the delicacy and nuance that make Renouard such a stimulating thinker. The book is broken into vignettes in which the author ponders the transformative nature of the Internet--his life before and after its advent--and poses philosophical questions about its relationship to the self, to the mind, to art and immortality. The vignettes sometimes border on impressionistic as Renouard recalls personal experiences with Facebook and Google. The majority are discursive reflections on other thinkers, like Derrida and Baudrillard, and how their work informs, and sometimes predicts, the mass digitalization of human life. He also critiques movies and books and digital "graffiti" he's found on the Internet, such as comments on YouTube.
Renouard's most interesting takes on what he calls the "recollection machine" revolve around human mortality and the Internet's ability to extend "the digital signs of life." He argues that the Internet subsumes the material world and offers a digital space in which attributes of life--not whole beings--live forever. He also explores the way morality has changed, or must change, to match this new eternal and very public life. Things no longer lost but preserved through ethernet are subject to a new moral landscape. "There is a latent tribunal in digital exhibition," he says.
Fragments of an Infinite Memory can be intellectually challenging, paradoxical, even fatalistic. But the book is always fascinating and provides a deep, nuanced view of a quickly changing world. It has a charm of its own. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset