The web is the most conservative force on Earth

09 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

The expansion of our shared memory in millions of mini-archives should be an unalloyed good, especially for an ageing society in which millions of people will be losing their memories and, as a result, their sense of themselves in the decades to come. Yet a growing group of thoughtful sceptics — the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, the technology critic Nicholas Carr — argue that far from supporting our minds, the web is rotting them, including our capacity for memory.

Carr argues that the web is engulfing us in a culture of distraction in which it becomes impossible to focus and think clearly. Greenfield and other neuroscientists warn that this culture of distraction is reshaping how our minds develop: destroying our capacity to organise our memory for ourselves, reducing memory to mere bits of disconnected stimulus and so, in the extreme, undermining our capacity to develop a distinct identity based on our own narrative of our lives.

Certainly cues for individual memory will be even more social in future and so in some ways less under our control. Your past will be recorded on your friends’ social networking sites, warts and all. This will have downsides. I for one am very glad that YouTube and Facebook were not around when I was 17. Employers will no longer have to trust your account of your history set out in your CV; they will be able to look at your social networking profiles, blogs and other online activities. As yet the generation growing up with the web, however, seem pretty relaxed about this public display of private memories: if everyone is putting embarrassing material online, why worry?