Commemoration Cultures
Collective Memory, Identity, and Soft Power
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of information | May 31, 2025 | Vol. 3, Issue 29
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively.
Cite as: Coleman, Anita S. (2025, May 31). Commemoration cultures: collective memory, identity, and soft power. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 3 (29).
Updates
May 28, 2025. The leadership of the Library of Congress, along with that of the Copyright Office, a “constitutional and institutional crises,” remains “in limbo.” Robert Newlen, Deputy under Dr. Hayden, 14th Librarian of Congress, continues to be the Acting Librarian of Congress, awaiting directions from the Senate. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly denied Shira Perlmutter’s emergency request for her immediate reinstatement to the Copyrights office. The lawsuit will continue.
May 30, 2025. “FOIA has taken a serious beating over the past five months.” Jason Leopold’s latest FOIA Files describes how budget cuts have impacted the State Department’s FOIA operations. I’ll be returning to our Freedom of Information Act Libraries series.
Future of public knowledge: Copyright must remain central is the core message of the Authors Guild’s response to the national AI Action Plan. AG also recommends voluntary licensing as the way forward, not new copyright exceptions, and no copyright for AI created works. There are still 39 active copyright lawsuits against AI companies in the US. There’s been no publicly available updates or published rulings from the recent hearings in the OpenAI Copyright Infringement litigation. Two cases are reported to have had oral arguments: Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic. No decisions yet on these book cases where issues of market harm and fair use hang in the balance. Judge Chhabria and Judge Alsup appear to be leaning in favor of the AI companies, i.e. although Copyright Law was violated to accept fair use as transformative (even highly transformative) by AI companies. But 79 year old Judge Alsup noted he may change his mind. He was concerned about Anthropic’s use of pirated books and he’s asked for a supplemental briefing on Authors Guild v Google (2015).
Information flows like tea: The Google search monopoly case is concluding, with closing arguments presented by Google and the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court. Both groups have presented very different options. Judge Amit P. Mehta, who ruled that Google illegally maintained its monopoly, is now considering remedies to restore market competition. Remedies include the sale of Google Chrome browser in which both OpenAI and Perplexity.ai have expressed an interest should it become available. Other remedies include: banning exclusive search agreements with device makers like Apple and Android, requiring Google to share its search data with competitors and AI developers, stop exclusive deals for its AI products, like the Gemini chatbot, to prevent it from using its search dominance to control the AI search market. A ruling is expected in August.
Commemoration Cultures
Collective Memory, Identity, and Soft Power
"People often ask me, ‘Why don’t you just open the tomb?’ My reply: ‘Because we don’t have the technology to preserve what may come out.’" – Bowers Chief Curator Dr. Tianlong Jiao
The golden bronze artifact had the face of a rabbit and the body of a deer. I looked closer. I saw fish scales glinting on its belly and cloud-spirals carved into its hooves. It was designed to hold wine, the curator had said, ritual wine, thousands of years ago. But now, it held something else entirely: the power to make a room full of strangers crowd around it, each one eagerly sharing what they saw in it. An animal that was universal, found near a Chinese mausoleum on the other side of the world, a land of culture, wealth and mystery to Europeans, fresh out of their own medieval nightmares.
This Memorial Day weekend at the Bowers Museum, surrounded by life-size terracotta warriors and ornate chariots, I found myself facing a troubling paradox. Here stood clay soldiers, created over 2,000 years ago to protect a dead emperor's vision of eternal empire. And here we stand today, in an America where political leaders criticize Europe for abandoning democracy, while they speak of building walls, and ending birthright citizenship. Will humanity and our leaders never learn?
That preview of The World of the Terracotta Warriors: New Archaeological Discoveries in Shaanxi in the 21st Century became my lens for exploring how cultures honor their past and shape collective memory. But it’s also something more urgent: a warning about what happens when the battle for memory becomes a war against the universal values that bind us all.
The Battleground of Memory
Here's what people often get wrong about libraries and museums: we think of them as peaceful sanctuaries, quiet repositories of human knowledge. They are. But they have never been places without strife either. The battle over what gets collected, what gets preserved (chained or loaned), what gets displayed, and what gets forgotten has always been exactly that — a fight. Museums and libraries are instruments of soft power, yes, but they are also weapons in the war over who gets to define reality.