Using computers to make sure we never forget

Convergence Culture:Online memory projects need the same attention as works of art, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

What distinguishes a computer from other machines, such as a calculator, is memory. Computers are memory banks and memory machines. It's a peculiar type of machine memory, linked to a central processing unit, involving different types of storage, but memory it certainly is.

Have we yet understood what the memory machine is doing to our own uses of memory? Memory plays a central role in how we understand ourselves. It incorporates memorials to the past and commemorations of people we are taught to revere; it knits families together and links us to our own pasts. Identity is impossible without it. It has a place right in the centre of how societies function.

We are building memories faster than we are building houses. Photobucket and Flickr are photostorage and photosharing sites. Flickr has around 40 million individual visitors per month and Photobucket has 38 million members. Both are in and around the top 50 of global internet sites.

Around the world the computer is being used to store, and the internet is being used to retrieve huge new memory projects. Virtually every state in the US now has a memory project. The American Memory Project is probably the daddy of them all, with the ambition of documenting the American experience. But is size so important? And by important I mean is the internet's capacity to store as important as the power of relatively few memories to transform how we think? As much as we now store memories, the function of memory, to help us interpret life creatively, is in relative decline.

Look at Flickr and Photobucket and then go to the Bhopal Memory Project or the September 11 Digital Archive (see Words In Your Ear, below).

The September 11 Digital Archive seems a worthy inheritor of non-digital creative forms, such as the novel or factual odysseys (for example, Anthony Beevor's accounts of the second World War). It is a work of art with the power to transform.

Here you can find an extensive and growing account of the day the World Trade Center was destroyed by two terrorist-directed passenger planes. The collection includes e-mails sent by people in New York as the reality of the atrocity unfolded. For example: "Sept 11, 2001. 8.09pm. To all concerned friends and family members. Yes, I'm okay," or: "Damn, this is one way to get up to the minute news. Excite news just put up a brief blurb on it. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. The building is on fire. I'm staring right at it."

The quantity of e-mails of this type is less important than their accessibility and tone. Photographs on Flickr can be beautiful, charming, entrancing, but these e-mails speak beyond their obvious meaning. How can we imagine the state of mind of the person that wrote the first e-mail? Irritated, traumatised, businesslike? Or the second: Excited? Appalled? Their ambiguity has the power to transform my understanding of the day without dictating what that understanding should be. That is also the power of creativity.

In 1984 in Bhopal, India, a Union Carbide pesticide plant spilled deadly methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere. Here is the data from the Bhopal Memory Project: dead on the night, an estimated 2,000-10,000 people; those surviving or fleeing, 200,000-500,000.

Twenty-three years later and there is still no clear record of the number of deaths. The disparity is an astonishing 8,000 people. And of those who were injured or harmed by the poison, we are told as many as 300,000 may or may not have existed. What are these lives, either before or after Bhopal, that they are so unknown? It seems much of what passes for memory on the internet is memorabilia, trivial for the most part and personal. For example, the photograph that places a person in one place on a particular day, such as a card signed by a soccer player, or a record sleeve with Paul McCartney's signature scrawled on it.

These applications of memory anchor us in time and place. The role of creativity is to transform. In that sense the use of the vast well of memory that computers provide is wasted. The computer increases our capacity to remember without necessarily furthering our capacity to transform each other's viewpoints.

On the other hand, transformative memory projects are beginning to take shape. They need nurturing in the same way that novels and paintings are nurtured. They should come with the same critical oversight that works of art are subject to. Memories have to become, yet again, those things we must never forget.

Words in Your Ear

Random Access Memory - a computer's ability to retrieve information on demand

Bhopal Memory Project - www.bard.edu/bhopal, a record of the Bhopal chemical disaster

911 Digital Archive - www.911digitalarchive.org. A record of the 9/11 atrocity drawn from the people who experienced and observed it

The American Memory Project - http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html