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forgetting. In a highly ‗subjectivised interest field‘ many (historical) events (and other
information) pass unnoticed before much (or any) sense can be made of them. This quite likely
fertilises ignorance. At best, the highly ‗personalised‘ imagining of the past with all the presumed
freedom it offers to the homo memonautilus, necessarily also marginalises and obliterates the
relevance of (national) events and stories, thus raising issues over credibility of sources and
interpretive authority. In this respect, Chris Anderson‘s notion long tail (term originally applied to
the economic sector) applies quite well to the situation: confronted by unmanageable pressure to
choose, a significant number of people will find a marginal enough website/topic/belief to make it
significant/influential enough to exert certain impact on wider socio-cultural processes and
phenomena, i.e. significant number of people will produce and many more still will find
distributed beliefs and memories relevant enough as to make them into a relevant phenomenon. 34
Nevertheless, the problem remains: in a perpetually changing environment (as compared to print)
it takes quite some effort to find last years‘ news and still more to tell valuable, reliable, credible
information from a fake. And it is this mechanism of a certain ‗information overload‘ and designification
of accumulative knowledge that in light of instant connectivity potentially leads to
superficial social engagement (click-democracy) and fragmented attention. Still, this is not to
downplay the potential for social engagement and mobilisation (particularly when compared to
offline mobilisatory techniques). Yet, one has to be cautious when advertising and investing too
much potential, as Evgeny Morozov advises, into technological fixes for social, cultural and
political problems. 35
In the past, the state-sponsored archiving was strictly submitted to the (ideological) archival gaze
that set and enforced eligibility criteria. Along the dominant and most obvious externalisations of
memory, i.e. monuments and memorials, print, arts and architecture, the new technologies
developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, i.e. photography, film, radio and television, opened up a
whole new field of ‗capturing‘ the present. Jussi Parikka argues that the:
archive [after] the Foucault‘s expansion of the concept from the concrete physical places of
storage of cultural data to the discourses that govern modes of thinking, acting and
expression of cultures has been a key node in relaying and storing data of modern culture,
and hence acted as a key medium in itself – very much connected to the bureaucratic mode of
control alongside registering and manipulating data e.g. in offices and through office
34 See Chris Anderson, ―The Long Tail,‖ Wired, viewed on 15 June 2008,
www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html, accessed 8 August 2011.
35 See Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion, on the over-exaggerated roles and potential ofTwitter and Facebook ‗Arab
Revolutions‘ in the Spring 2011.
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