Tony Liang Essays - Judaism, Islam, Genizah, Synagogues,

Tony Liang Prof. Landau English 1A-76 27 October 2015 Rhetorical Analysis of "Memories" Data-dumping is an ancient practice, according to Dara Horn. In her article, "When we save every memory, we forget which ones are special", published on the Washington Post, Horn implicitly conveys that people in current day society excessively record every moment of their lives, thus defeating the purpose of attempting to revisit these special occasions in the future; she accomplishes this by stating two historical analogies, each with a specific purpose, along with a series of rhetorical questions directly aimed at the audience to help convey her point. Horn begins by giving an analogy of a 900 year old Cairo synagogue that stores all documents written in Hebrew letters in a room called a genizah, meaning "hiding place"(51). This sacred 12-by-14 foot space contains all sorts of documents ranging from famous literature to children's schoolwork. She compares this practice of data-dumping to what ordinary people do - taking pictures of their meals, weekend trips, and even themselve s in random places- today on a daily basis. Advancements in technology had enabled us to send and share our personal information at the ease of our finger-tips with anyone across the globe in a blind of an eye via the internet. Today's internet based corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are analogous to the Cairo Genizah, or the "medieval Facebook"(52) as Horn calls it, except each of their "geniza"(51) is infinitely many times bigger from the undisclosed amount of information they have collected from us, the users. After stating her analogy, Horn questions rhetorically the purpose humans have to unnecessarily save every memory. She does this to lead her audience straight to her argument; people should not snapshot every moment of their lives without a justifiable reason. In contrast, the Jews of Cairo had a legitimate religious reason; they did it in the name of God, in reference to Horn. In her second analogy, she states how Egyptian pharaohs filled their tombs with valuables 2 they hope to save for eternity, as a result of their fear for mortality. Likewise, people today share a tendency to capture all our so-called "precious" moments, hoping they will remain static forever and wait for us to revisit it in the future. The purpose of her second analogy is to reveal the fault of preserving everything. Horn claims that doing so will inevitably make it hard to distinguish between trash from treasure, therefore undermining the goal to revisiting special moments. Horn concludes with a philosophical quote, rather than her own explicit message to her audience to maintain her rhetorical style. In essence, she hopes that her audience will only save moments in their lives that are genuinely of great importance, to prevent them from getting lost in our own endless genizah.