By Teresa A. Martin 
Memorial Day is for remembering. Which got me thinking about how and what it is we remember, and how technology plays a role in all of this.
You see, from the earliest days of humanity, the ability to remember events and facts coupled with the creation of tools to record and pass this information along has defined us. Whether we are remembering lost loved ones, debts and repayments, or epic moments in life, we've been using our tools to save the moment.
Early cave drawings - which required the invention of tools for creating lines and color - were memorials to great moments in hunting. Or moments in the life of the community. Not just an oral tradition, they drew upon our tool-using soul to create a place of memories, memories that have lived on for more centuries than the creators ever imagined.
Early writing and data systems recorded debt and payments. Cuneiform was widely deployed in the name of trade. This, too, is a form of memory. It's a cultural recording of the everyday give and take of a society, the footprints of the commerce that defined Babylonia, Sumeria, and the Mesopotamian world.
Engraving, movable type, presses ... all ways to record the moment in drawing or in words and to share it with each other and posterity. Same for audio recording, video recording, and the creation tools for each.
Culture is defined by the ability to teach, learn, share, and pass along perspectives, practices, social organization, values, behaviors, and systems of meaning. In other words, at the cornerstone of culture is memory - and a toolbox for recording and sharing that memory.
Wow, if you look at it that way, the very core of culture is defined by technology - you know, that innate human skill that connects the brain to the hands to the creation of tools, solutions, and applications.
When mass media and cynicism about it was at its peak, we used to joke that Gilligan's Island was our defining cultural touchstone, the thing that linked us together as a culture. That was a bit extreme, but within that flip comment lies the idea that we use our visual storytelling media as ways to share underlying concepts or issues within our culture.
Jump online and we can argue that social networking sites are one more step in that process, that they are really a big forum for defining who and what we are, and what memories and values and concerns we share.
The strongest image of Memorial Day is cemeteries - the stones themselves are symbols and then we imbue them with additional symbolism through language, flowers, and images. Those symbols reflect the ascendant values of our culture at that point in time.
Death heads, urns and willows, religious signs, and word choice - and in some places today directions to videos, websites, and multimedia memorials nearby - use every tool at our disposal to define who we, in the broadest sense, are.
This all came rushing home to me recently, when I was involved in having a gravestone engraved (a process that turns out to be heavy on computers and lasers, not hand tools, by the way). I spent some time in a cemetery, a place of Memorial Day tradition, and listened to a million echoes of the past speaking through the tool-created symbols on stone and celebrated deep in my soul the value of memory.
Memorial Day is a good moment to keep and to hold and to acknowledge all that has been before and that which is yet to come. And to know that because our minds meet our hands to create tools, we are able to have these memories among us, defining us and creating our place in the world.
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