What happens to the concept of collective memory en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_memory when confronted with the 'net? Twitter, Facebook, photobucket et al. have an immediate and direct impact which would never entered the picture a few, or 700 hundred years ago.
Does this accessability to a huge range of information actually boost the collective memory?, or does it make it obsolete due to the fact that the memory doesn’t need to be ‘catalogued’ anymore, as you can just ‘look it up’??
From what I’ve seen, the colletive memory dramatically improves people’s productivity and quality of life. Twenty years ago if you had a problem, you had a problem and you were pretty much on your own. Now you spend a few hours on google and you can find tons of info about other people who have had it, and what they did. No matter what your problem chances are there is a message board full of people who have great advice based on research and personal experience.
So I think the net just makes collective memory more accessible the same way jets and cars make different geographic regions of earth more accessible. The collective memory was always there, but before the internet we couldn’t access it the same way China was always there but before airplanes we couldn’t get there very well.
I think the benefits of easy access to collective memory have been powerful, but in a lot of ways fairly subtle.
Just imagine when wireless broadband is just a bit more ubiquitous than it is today and we’re able to have cyborg wireless antennas implanted into our brains.
I think Wesley Clark said it pretty well. I have spent some time on internet message boards talking to a lot of people, and it’s quite interesting to see the increase in sophistication of discussions on message boards over time due to the constant access and the resistance of people who know more about something than other people hammering it home day in and day out.
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