The recognition that the medium of digital technology fundamentally alters its message, brings me on to the final part in this series of posts, which is concerned with the broader implications for memory in the digital age. As a mode of communication, digitisation is significant for memory insofar as it implies a collective view on past events that is increasingly constituted via digital networks. Drawing on an argument made by Andrew Hoskins, José van Dijck sets out the digital challenge to established accounts of collective memory:
“The traditional idea of collective memory is generally grounded in the presumption that the individual and the collective are separate entities that are associated through technological mechanisms, such as media, and through social institutions, such as archives. However, the formation of memory is increasingly structured by digital networks, and memory’s constituting agency is both technological and human”.
Likewise, as the discussion of the memory institution demonstrates, digital technology networks consolidate links between cultural organisations through social media and online collections. This new model is indicative of a more pluralistic, diverse, and possibly less unifying societal restructuring. While the medium of the network, exemplified by the Internet, may provide increased opportunities for collaboration and the dissemination of content, its architecture and mode of interaction are geared less toward building a consensus. One of the differences the media theorist Marshall McLuhan discerns between print and digital technology explains this apparent contradiction. He observes that where electric media is total and inclusive, previous technologies were fragmentary and partial, drawing attention to the participatory aspects of digital technology and the totalising structure the network installs across different levels of society. The early theoretician of social memory, Maurice Halbwachs, wrote that ‘while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as groups who remember’. However, the demand for plurality seems less achievable when undertaken by individuals or even groups of individuals in increasingly diverse societies. A programme for systematic inclusion ironically runs the risk of breaking down the categories it seeks to shore up, raising questions about whether diversity comes at the cost of the communicability of memory.
In the idea of tomorrow’s memory, which was the starting point for this discussion, it is possible to detect a reluctance to remember for its own sake, the implication being that it should be the responsibility of the next generation to decide what is important. The situation is not a new one but it is distinct in that memory is inflated beyond any previous individual or collective capacity. We are exhausted by the sheer volume of memory, particularly in cases where it is equated with an artificial storage model or inventory. Yet perhaps that model offers the only chance of securing a genuinely representative collective memory, when it is no longer the role of societies but of computer systems to do the collecting. It is still possible, therefore, to speak of the utopian dream of preserving cultural memory online but it is an ambiguous sort of utopia:- at once anxious and hopeful about the prospect of regaining a proportional sense of memory yet covetous of the dream of oblivion (see Heidegger, Hidden Histories post), in which the task of remembering is no longer humanity's responsibility (see also Stiegler).
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