Alex Pang's recent entry at The End of Cyberspace, "A thought about the future of memory", brings up what I think is a crucial issue to consider in our networked-archival lives. Alex begins by remarking that he remembers very few - if any at all - phone numbers anymore. Just like the rest of us, they exist in his cell phone, listed by name, and sorted alphabetically. This phenomenon is not limited to cell phones however, we see this offloading of memory in the increasing ease of photography and its networked storage, blogging, birthdays, and so on. Who needs to remember birthdays when we have Facebook to remind us?

A natural reactionary criticism of this shift is that it represents a larger cultural deficiency - that our natural memory has failed as a result of being so overly outsourced. Certainly if we rely on devices and services to remember facts for us, we have no need to commit them to memory. Yet to imply that that this represents a cultural or even generational loss of memory misses the mark. The rote memorization of facts indeed may be off-loaded, but that hardly represents memory as a cultural force. This latter form of memory takes the form of nostalgia, tradition, and history - each of which is heightened in different ways by these same networked-archival entities that have become our outsourced memories.

I return to this often here, but the phenomenon of mourning on social networks is fascinating. From the profiles of the deceased on MySpace to dedicated networks like Respectance, the argument that networked-archival environments diminish memory on any large scale is clearly off. If anything these technologies/devices/services/etc have allowed us to revel and wallow in memory. We are faced with an abundance of memory and if there is a crisis, it is a crisis of nostalgia waiting to happen.