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A couple of years ago there was an exhibition at The British Museum called: ‘The Museum of the Mind’. It was concerned with way in which cultures record in their traditions, values and beliefs in their artefacts – the way they are made and decorated and what they represent. The exhibit presented the museum as more than just a collection of historical objects. It was also a library of cultural memory. The rise of digital technology is likely to increase, substantially, our surrogate memory. We will find ourselves in the position to be reacquainted second hand,with experiences that have been forgotten. In the past this would have been done through a diary, or perhaps a piece of art. When I was young, my parent’s still camera, with a battery operated flashbulb, took frozen snapshots of our lives. However the camera only came out on special occasions – Birthdays or Christmas. Film cost money. It had to be sent off to be developed and turned into slides. Watching these slides involved setting up the projector. There was a financial burden and a lot of ceremony involved. The accessibility of digital technology – both the decreasing price, the portability and the convenience of built-in hard drives as a storage medium, will lend itself to frequent, spontaneous use. Any footage can be transferred to other mediums quickly and with very little fuss. The less effort required to use a piece of technology, the more likely it is to be used. This generation may find their lives documented more than any in the past. As adults, they will have access to a cache of visual and audio data recording their early years. They will see themselves at the beginning of their lives – a period that most of us only have sketchy memories of. Furthermore after they are gone, if the archive is maintained, future generations will be able to look deep into their family history and see people, who they never met, in their historical context. ********** * Visit the Writing and the Digital Life blog http://writing.typepad.com * To alter your subscription settings on this list, log on to Subscriber's Corner at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/writing-and-the-digital-life.html * To unsubscribe from the list, email [log in to unmask] with a blank subject line and the following text in the body of the message: SIGNOFF WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE