Disneyfication of Museums

An extract from J. G. Ballard's 1990 annotations to his experimental 1970 novel, The Atrocity Exhibition:

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize the past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.
J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibitionfound at: www.apieceofmonologue.com/

Experiencing Self vs. Remembering Self

In the video I posted here Nobel laureate (2002) and founder of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman speaks about experiencing self and remembering self, and how these two parts of our self perceive happiness. What really matters in the long run is the way we are remembering things not experiencing them. Kahneman illustrates this with an example of vacation: imagine you have a choice to go to a very good vacation but after it you'll forget everything. Will you do the same things which you would definitely do knowing that you will remember them? Probably you'll even choose not going to such a vacation at all. 

I think that I personally would not go to such a vacation if I knew that I won't be able to share my experiences with friends, when memories would be kept exclusively for me. Who needs this very positive experience if one has to keep silence of it? OK, maybe I do exaggerate but it leads to a rather interesting though about the experience now and its relation to the projected memory in the future. How many things we are doing because we are anticipating certain memories in the future? Kahneman is speaking very little on this in the video but he does mention the future as anticipated memory.

Remembering self is one who tells the story and it definitely does not tell the whole story. It just physically cannot cope with all the present-ness. If the psychological present lasts only 3 seconds, everything what goes beyond of each of three seconds experienced becomes our past or our future. Furthermore, it becomes so through narration. Remembering self does not keep track of all what we experience, but after all we speak only about the experience that our remembering self tracks. 

Of course, this statement becomes questionable as soon as we think about memories which remain un-narrated (and still present in our self and potentially can become narrated), but this thought on memory-in-future, of future-programmed-now-as-memory really seems interesting to me. 

Since long I've been thinking of historical memory as a selection of the future preferred or anticipated that is why this concept of future as anticipated memory could simply pass by me and I had to register these thoughts here.