In her thoughtful book Shakespeare's Memory Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2010), Lina Perkins Wilder says that props, actors, and the space of the performance area "provide the vocabulary of Shakespeare's memory theatre, but they do not function merely as physicalized reminders or mnemonic res... Rather, in their frequent absence such objects become a way to evoke a mind and a past that move between the common (shared by the audience, staged elsewhere in the play) and the comparatively private (unstaged, but described in ways that evoke the physical materials of the stage)" (2).
I've been thinking a lot about the role of Twitter in my research recently, and this quote made me think about the status of individual tweets. If Shakespeare's actors, props, and even spaces could be not only reminder-objects but points of merger between a "common" and a "comparatively private" space, could tweets somehow be the modern equivalent of those objects, allowing past and present, thinking and viewing, absent and present, to merge?
I've recently found myself tweeting mnemonically, for lack of a better way to describe it. There's a great Folger blog post on signatures that I know I'll want to find again, for example, and so I sent a tweet about it to remind myself where it is and what it said. Even as that tweet serves me as a memory device, though, it's also an act of performance with an audience: I'm publicly remembering, in such a way that other Twitter users can access a virtual space, and remember the same thing that I'm choosing to remember. Absent things and people (the Folger blog, my Twitter followers) are entering a dialogue with the things that I'm currently doing and writing. I'm not sure if that makes the Twitterverse a giant memory theatre, or something more along the lines of a giant, group-accessible diary. What do you think?
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