Memory and Meaning: Digital Differences

Although humans have always used elements of the environment to help them remember - by carving notches on a stick or tying knots in a handkerchief, for example - there seems to be something quite different, perhaps fundamentally so, about the digital realm. This book is about the challenges and opportunities for human memory and history in an increasingly digital world. Personal, interpersonal, communal, national and global memories are all influenced by cultures of use that form around new technologies. This can be most clearly seen in the voices these technologies enable, the ways in which non-digital activity interacts with digital interfaces, and the tension between recording and remembering the past. Examples, drawn from research across a range of disciplines, show how memory - and the meaning we take from it - is being affected by new practices of recording and sharing information about the present and the past.