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The very pace of related cultural, social and political and economic changes, along with the rapid
technological progress, had severe repercussions for conceptualising and understanding memory
matters. Not only in relation to the preservation of the past, which saw tremendous development
in recording/archiving practices and technologies, but also in representing and making sense of
memory:
When a new technological invention enters the world [...] we identify it with the world and
imagine it brings different parts of the world together like never before. You might say that a
new medium provokes a certain boundary confusion [... also because] each new medium
changes sense rations: print emphasises the visual to the exclusion of other senses; electric
media emphasise sound and vision. 25
With the development of recording technologies, the past was increasingly preserved, and in
overwhelming quantity and detail. Yet, the abundance of externalised, mediated records of the
past that characterised the ―post-scarcity culture,‖ 26 can be seen as an implicit response to the
socio-cultural and political upheavals as of late 18th century. Paradoxically it was the abundance
that exposed serious issues in terms of memory/archive management: who was to remember what,
when and for how long, for what purpose and in what circumstances. One of the most celebrated
and still dominant places for storing records, the (institutional) archive, provided the infrastructure
for submitting, classifying and retrieving the data. Aleida Assmann argues that
[t]he function of the archive, the reference memory of a society, provides a kind of
counterbalance against the necessarily reductive and restrictive drive of the working
memory. It creates a meta-memory, a second-order memory that preserves what has
been forgotten. The archive is a kind of ―lost-and-found office‖ for what is no longer
needed or immediately understood. 27
Today, the internet databases, indeed frequently doubling as a lost-and-found office—despite
being a ‗terantic‘ 28 archive that offers virtually endless opportunities for the preservation,
distribution of and access to content—may in a way pose a threat of archival overburdening and
effective uselessness (or hindered usefulness) of digital archiving. The dimensions of the internet
25 Arvind Rajagopal, ―Imperceptible perceptions in our technological modernity,‖ 277, 285.
26 As Andrew Hoskins maintains, ―In the ‗post-scarcity‘ era there is an emergent tension between the scale of the
volume of material that can be made available online and the decreasing capacity of anyone to consume it, or to make
sense of it,‖ see ―7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture,‖
Memory Studies, July 2011, 4(3), 269–280.
27 Aleida Assmann, ―Canon and Archive,‖ 106.
28 I use terantic as a word-play on gigantic, implying that gigantic is barely sufficient for thinking of/counting the
saved data in terabytes. Added an r the terrantic would relate to an archive the size of the world (having said that, the
pace of growth of archived material may soon render this obsolete as well.
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