According to Jeff Pruchnic and Kim Lacey, in their 2011 Rhetoric Society Quarterly article, “The Future of Forgetting: Rhetoric, Memory, Affect,” “[o]f the five traditional canons of rhetoric—invention, style, arrangement, delivery, and memory—memory has by far suffered the largest scholarly decline over the intervening centuries. Indeed, in almost all revivals of rhetoric that have invoked the canons, memory has traditionally been, as is often claimed in another context, “the first thing to go” (Pruchnic & Lacey, 2011, p. 472).

Of the five canons of rhetoric, Brooke writes that “[i]f there is one canon that would seem to be the least useful for a rhetoric grounded in the printed page, it would be memory” (p. 31). He, of course, mentions the urtext for this view, Plato’s Phaedrus. He also brings up Christina Haas’s Writing Technology (1996), a text briefly discussed by both Shipka and Mueller. Haas observed that when we write by hand, we remember more than if we type out the same text on a word processor. When writing on a computer, one is able to cut and paste, meaning that one does not have to think out everything as carefully beforehand. Memory is also affected by the need to print out earlier versions of our work, as well as what part of our work the screen “lets” us see at one time. For Brooke, “she demonstrates that writing calls on us to practice that canon in different ways” (p. 32). Moreover, “in Plato’s estimation . . . the delivery of a written text is more accurately perceived as a text devoid of the various qualities of oral delivery . . .” (p. 33). One way memory and delivery have been technologized, if you will, can be seen in the phenomenon of the politician’s teleprompter. Not only does this machine help politicians remember what to say, but it gives them directions for delivering their speeches: “applause line, pause here,” “repeat this line,” “smile/laugh here,” “raise voice in anger,” etc.

While memory still holds importance in, say, public speaking, some compositionists (Edward P. J. Corbett, for example) hold that any requirement to memorize material has been obviated by written communication (see pp. 143-144). Here we have what Brooke calls ecologies of code and of culture (p. 147); that is, memory as storage and memory as history (p. 147). Regarding the latter, memory-as-history can take the form of books or of monuments—with monuments acting as perhaps a kind of visual rhetoric. For Pruchnic and Lacey (2011), “the future of memory as a rhetorical force, will be tied to the “future of forgetting”: the ways in which our experiences are externalized in various media and forgotten by us or become embedded in our very affective dispositions and responses—their obscurity to our present consciousness in many ways proportional to their effect on our future actions” (pp. 491-492). The authors reason that as “the persuasive landscape is currently, and one presumes, will continue to be, marked by the recursive connections between subjective interiority and environmental exteriority best thematized as memory, we would do poorly to forget the age-old connections between these forces and rhetoric” (pp. 491-492). This ties in with Jasinski’s (2001) point that in rethinking the traditional canon of memory, an important research direction “merit[s] attention” (p. 355). This is “the emergence of interest in the ideas of collective, popular, and public memory (as well as the relationship between rhetoric and the process of memorialization)” (p. 355). Brooke reframes memory as “persistence.” It is more of an activity for Brooke than it is a repository. He writes that, “I believe that certain new media offer us tools for building persistence of cognition, the inductive perception of connections, and patterns across multiple sources” (p. 157). In other words, “the potential utility of persistence as a memory practice” (p. 157).