Series Of Tubes

Ernst discusses the parallels of the human unconscious (Freud and Lacan) and storage devices when thought of through “media theory.” In a pretty simple sense, I guess you’d have your mind and a sort of pool of memories, feelings, thoughts that collected forming an unconscious. This is all automatic and there’s no real way of organizing all of this in your head. One’s unaware these things are there unless you accidentally tap into said storage. This got me thinking about the Internet as an archive, an expansive collection of everything and anything one would ever choose – or perhaps not – to archive. With something so large and varied, accessible to almost anyone with a computer, the Internet becomes a collective unconscious, a collection of human experience, memory and thought. This was only a very small portion of the entire Ernst article, but it was interesting to me to think about the ease with which somebody can “archive” whatever he or she saw fit. Moreover, new media’s placement in the present tense fits in completely with Freud/Lacan/Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious as a constantly changing, amorphous, yet common reservoir of memory and knowledge.