The web is the most conservative force on Earth

12 July 2008

Digital technology has made us a society of mass archivers, says Charles Leadbeater. Far from rotting our brains, the web enables us to preserve all our memories

My parents have a large box of black and white photos in their loft, mainly of groups of smartly dressed people looking slightly uncomfortable at the seaside in the middle decades of the last century. I have no idea who most of these people were. When my parents pass away the meaning of this physical archive of family history will be lost. In future families with digital archives should not suffer this catastrophic memory loss.

From early on the computer revolution promised to create vast shared stores of memory. When Lee Felsenstein became chair of the Homebrew Computer Club in the early 1970s he had just started a project called Collective Memory for people to share their memories using computers in public places around Berkeley. Similar projects on a much larger scale are now being run all over the world. Our expanded capacity for collective memory will make us more productive and politics more accountable.

One of Tim Berners-Lee’s motives for creating the software that spawned the web was his poor memory; he tended to lose things. One of the attractions of digital files is that it is easier to trace their history. If a software project runs into the sand, the programmer should be able to trace his way back to the fork where he took a wrong turn. Digital technology keeps older versions of the same document. That makes it easier to retrace our steps to ideas that were prematurely discarded, often one of the richest sources for innovation.

Our collective capacity for instant recall should help to make power more accountable. Hillary Clinton’s mistaken memory that she arrived at Tuzla airport under sniper fire was quickly corrected. The powerful will find it more difficult to impose on us their version of the past.