Home > The Magazine > Features

Saturday 22 November 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

The web is the most conservative force on Earth

Charles Leadbeater

Wednesday, 9th 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.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

More articles from: Charles Leadbeater | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Thank goodness we can have a run on the pound when we need one

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer looks ahead to next week’s Pre-Budget Report and reflects on George Osborne’s contentious remarks about the devaluation of sterling. It looks like Gordon Brown is getting away with his borrowing binge — leaving the Tories isolated

I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it

Rod Liddle

The movie W. did not provide the crude anti-Bush agitprop that the reviewers craved, says Rod Liddle. This was precisely its strength: we need to get inside the minds even of those we most deplore

The great Tory tax and spend battle: seconds out...

Fraser Nelson and Daniel Finkelstein

In the wake of Cameron’s decision to drop his pledge to match Labour spending, Fraser Nelson and Daniel Fin kelstein of the Times trade rhetorical blows over the issue that is gripping and troubling the Conservative party as it adjusts to the transformed economic context

Where is our inspiration when we most need it?

Bryan Forbes

Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-year-old evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts?