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Thursday 4 December 2008

The web is the most conservative force on Earth

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

We will have to make quite different judgments about our memories and archives. For my parents’ generation any memento sparked a precious memory of an important family event. Anything that could be preserved became precious just because it had survived.

Writing history is mainly an exciting act of detective work to piece together the story in scraps of material left behind by earlier generations. Historians of this period of history onwards will have the opposite problem: too much material to choose from.

We, the mass archivers, will face the same issues. Now we can keep so much, so easily, the question becomes how to distinguish the significant from the merely everyday. That is why the most contentious issue in the Wikipedia community has been the dispute over what counts as a notable entry. When everything and anything could have a Wikipedia entry — my local cheese shop for example — why disallow something from being recorded for posterity?

Sceptics like Carr and Greenfield are following in the footsteps of the American poet William Stanley Merwin who, long before the USB stick and the iPod, predicted that the fallibility of human memory would lead to the creation of personal remembering machines which would preserve both what their owners experience and their perspectives on that experience. Writing in 1969, Merwin warned these machines would eventually become substitutes for experience itself and a man who lost his machine would become ‘a ghost’. Far from creating a reliable outboard memory, digital technology is encouraging a dangerous dependency, the sceptics warn.

Yet we have always partly stored our memories outside our heads, in everything from holiday memorabilia to the landscape we inhabit. The range of ways we can support the organisation of our failing memories is expanding. Off-loading mundane tasks to technology to allow us more time to think and dream should make us better off. The alarmists are wrong: the web is not rotting our minds. More people than ever will be able to live for longer with a richer set of memories which they can show to and share with other people, giving them a stronger sense of identity.

Now pass me that USB stick. I’d like to upgrade my memories.

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