The Technology of Collective Memory and the Normativity of Truth

The last two decades have seen extraordinary growth in the development of small, democratised, fragmented efforts to establish collective memories for various groups and cultures, aided by new technology and media, especially collaborative Web tools. This has led to considerable dislocation – one commentator has noted the apparent contradiction of an “obsession” with memory in a society “terminally ill with amnesia”. In this paper I will examine some of the effects on memory, collective and individual, of the memory boom in the context of the spread of technology.  One terminological note: if human memory is a paradigm, then the application of the term to collectives or machines is metaphorical. In this paper, I shall not attempt to analyse the similarities and differences between the various types of memory. I shall assume only that they are distinct, and that individual memory is affected by the other types in at least some respects.