The Plague of Digital Forgetfulness
When Saving Everything Means Remembering Nothing
There's a peculiar moment familiar to many academics: returning to a carefully annotated paper weeks1 later only to find cryptic notes from a past version of yourself that have lost all meaning. A hastily scrawled “important!” or “connect” in the margin is now inscrutable. Many of us just chalk this up as a consequence of existing in a world designed to constantly grab our attention. This small scholarly crisis mirrors a larger scene from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the inhabitants of Macondo, facing a plague of forgetfulness, begin labeling everything with its name - only to realize that knowing something's name doesn't preserve the knowledge of its use or meaning.
When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and José Arcadio Buendía put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters. (García Márquez, p. 48)
This parallel isn't merely literary. In both cases - whether it's a researcher's marginalia or Macondo's labels - we see the fundamental limitations of bare documentation. Just as knowing that a highlighted passage was once deemed important tells us little about why it mattered, labeling something as “cow” or “chair” captures nothing of its role in daily life, its cultural significance, or its web of relationships with other objects and practices.
This disconnect between labels and lived experience is captured in the image above, where a simple golden plaque stating ‘this is a cow’ tells us nothing about the complex daily routines and knowledge systems. These are represented by increasingly fragmented post-it notes that actually define animals context.
The Digital Echo
Today's digital preservation efforts face a strikingly similar challenge. We save websites to the Internet Archive, tag our photos with metadata, and organise our digital lives with labels and folders. Yet like Macondo's inhabitants, we often discover that preserving the form of something doesn't necessarily preserve its meaning. A saved historical webpage might retain its text and images, but lose the cultural context that made it significant. A carefully tagged photo collection might tell us who was present and when, but fail to capture why the moment mattered. Author Victor Hugo famously wrote: ‘What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.’
Consider this following scenario: a shared Google Doc filled with highlights and comments from many users. Over time, these digital traces become a kind of archaeological site - layers of feedback, questions, and responses accumulating like strata. Months later, a comment like “we should expand this” becomes as inscrutable as Macondo's labels. Who wrote it and to whom? Expand what, and why? The context that made the comment meaningful has evaporated. The technical capability to preserve every mark we make hasn't solved the fundamental challenge of preserving meaning. Hugo's “echo” becomes increasingly faint with each digital transformation, each migration from one platform to another, each attempt to capture lived experience in metadata.
Living Memory and Digital Preservation
This challenge extends beyond collaborative documents. Consider the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - a vast repository of web history that preserves the form of historical websites but doesn’t the essence of their cultural significance. Currently, these digital artifacts remain legible because we still have living interpreters - people who remember why a particular GeoCities aesthetic was meaningful, or how a specific web forum shaped online culture. But it is that transition from living memory to purely documented history can fundamentally alter how we understand the past.
The space between preservation and living memory becomes particularly apparent when we examine how historical understanding shifts as direct witnesses pass away. World War II provides a stark example - as the generation that experienced it firsthand diminishes, we see how documented facts alone, without the context of lived experience, become abstractions that leave gaps where misunderstanding and revisionism can take root. The difference between knowing something happened and understanding its full human impact becomes painfully clear.
Winston Churchill warned us of this very eventuality: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. While Churchill was certainly a proponent of studying history - famously telling one colleague “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft” - the doomed-to-repeat-it quote is actually a paraphrase of philosopher George Santayana's more nuanced observation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This misattribution itself demonstrates how meaning shifts over time. Even as we preserve the words, we lose their origins, their context, their full significance. In this case, the transformation of Santayana's philosophical reflection into a Churchill sound bite shows how preservation without context can subtly alter our understanding.
Digital Preservation's Double Bind
This brings us to a central paradox in digital preservation efforts: the more thoroughly we try to document everything, the more we risk drowning meaningful context in a sea of preserved minutiae. Like Macondo's inhabitants meticulously labeling every object, our digital archiving tools can capture vast amounts of information while still missing the essential meanings that make that information valuable.
The Internet Archive, for instance, has preserved billions of web pages, but browsing through its early captures of social media platforms reveals how much context is lost. A preserved MySpace page might retain its glittering graphics and auto-playing music, but without understanding the cultural moment that made such design choices meaningful, future viewers might see only dated aesthetics rather than expressions of digital identity and community. Future digital archaeologists might devote years of scholarly research to explain why everyone was friends with a guy named Tom. A detail that made perfect sense to users at the time2 but becomes cryptic without this context. This isn't the first time scholars have grappled with such interpretive challenges. In a fascinating parallel, 18th and 19th century antiquarians encountering mason's marks in medieval churches developed elaborate theories about their symbolic significance and attempted to trace individual craftsmen across Europe via their distinctive marks. As architectural historian Jennifer S. Alexander documents, it took years of research to discover these marks were primarily practical tools - tracking piecework payment and ensuring blocks were assembled in the correct order. The antiquarians' misinterpretation reminds us how easily we can overlay complex meaning onto what were, in their time, mundane technical solutions.
The challenges of digital preservation mirror those faced by previous generations of archivists and historians. When organisations attempt to preserve their institutional knowledge in vast databases and wikis, they often discover that documented procedures, no matter how detailed, fail to capture the tacit knowledge - the unofficial workflows, the unwritten rules, the accumulated wisdom - the map, as the saying goes, is not the territory. Yet while we can still decipher these mason's marks today (even if they were initially misinterpreted), our digital preservation efforts face an even greater challenge: the rapid obsolescence of both hardware and software threatens to make even perfectly preserved data incomprehensible.
This technical challenge is further complicated by the sheer volume of digital content being created every minute. Meta's recent introduction of AI-generated profiles and content adds another layer of complexity to future digital archaeology - creating volumes of artificial detritus in the digital archaeological record. Just as medieval church walls contain both mason's marks and casual graffiti, our digital spaces now contain a mix of human and AI-generated content. Organisations can effectively flood digital spaces with certain types of content while obscuring others, making the task of future digital archaeologists3 not just one of preservation and interpretation, but also of distinguishing between different types of digital deposits in these ever-deepening layers of virtual sediment.
Beyond Digital Stratigraphy: An Anthropological Reading
The challenge facing digital preservation isn't just technical - it's fundamentally anthropological. When medieval masons left their marks on cathedral stones, they weren't trying to communicate with future generations; they were participating in a living system of craft knowledge. Similarly, when we create digital content today, we're primarily engaged in present-day meaning-making rather than conscious preservation. Indeed, this newsletter itself demonstrates this principle - while these words may be preserved in various digital archives, their full meaning emerges from their participation in an ongoing conversation about anthropological thinking in unexpected places4.
This distinction matters because it highlights a central tension in digital preservation efforts. Like the antiquarians who misinterpreted mason's marks as mystical symbols rather than practical guides, we risk misunderstanding digital traces by focusing too much on their form rather than their function within living cultural systems.
Living Knowledge in Digital Spaces
Drawing from anthropologist Tim Ingold's distinction between studying about versus studying with (Ingold 2024), therefore begs the question: how do we preserve not just information, but ways of knowing? We saw this tension played out dramatically during the pandemic's shift to online learning. Some students discovered they thrived in digital spaces, freed from classroom social dynamics and physical distractions to engage more deeply with the material. Others found their learning severely compromised, discovering that their understanding emerged not just from the content itself, but from the shared physical experience of learning - the subtle cues of classmates' reactions, the informal discussions in classrooms, the embodied experience of being present in a learning space. Same content, same preservation methods, radically different ways of knowing. This divide revealed something profound about knowledge transmission: it isn't just about preserving and accessing information, but about understanding the diverse ways people engage with and make meaning from that information.
Yet our current preservation methods often fail to capture this dynamism. When the Internet Archive preserves a webpage, it captures a moment frozen in time - like pressing a flower between pages of a book. The form remains, but the living essence that made it meaningful is lost. This preservation paradox becomes particularly acute when we consider collaborative digital spaces. A shared Google Doc's comments and revision history might preserve who changed what and when, but they can't capture the informal conversations, the contextual knowledge, and the shared understanding that shaped those changes.
The Artificial Strata
Today's digital landscape presents an unprecedented challenge: the introduction of AI-generated content creates artificial strata in our digital archaeological record. Just as geologists must distinguish between layers of sedimentary material, future digital archaeologists will need to develop methods for differentiating between human-created content and AI-generated material. Meta's recent introduction of AI-generated profiles adds another layer of complexity - creating volumes of artificial detritus that may obscure or complicate our understanding of genuine human interaction.
This challenge echoes earlier anthropological debates about authenticity and mediation in cultural documentation. Just as early anthropologists grappled with questions about how photography and sound recording transformed their field practices, we must now consider how AI-mediated content affects our understanding of digital culture.
Implications for Contemporary Practice
These observations suggest we need new approaches to digital preservation - ones that draw from anthropological insights about how knowledge lives in communities rather than just in documentation. Some promising directions are emerging:
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is experimenting with preserving not just individual pages but entire webs of connected content, attempting to maintain some of the context that gives them meaning. This mirrors anthropological understanding that cultural practices can't be understood in isolation.
Digital ethnographers are developing new methodologies that combine traditional participant observation with digital trace analysis, recognising that online communities exist across multiple platforms and timeframes.
Projects like Mukurtu, developed with Indigenous communities, show how digital preservation can incorporate different cultural approaches to knowledge sharing and preservation. Their platform allows communities to maintain traditional protocols around knowledge access while using digital tools for preservation.
Looking Forward When Looking Back
As we create ever more sophisticated tools for digital preservation, we might do well to remember Macondo's inhabitants, who discovered that labelling something doesn't preserve understanding of its use. True preservation requires maintaining not just the form of knowledge but the living contexts that give it meaning.
Perhaps the future of digital preservation lies not in trying to capture everything perfectly, but in maintaining living connections between past and present knowledge systems. Just as traditional anthropological knowledge is preserved through both documentation and living practice, digital knowledge might best be preserved through systems that support ongoing engagement rather than mere storage.
This suggests an important role for developing digital ethnography and anthropology as a methodology - not just studying digital cultures, but helping to develop preservation approaches that maintain living connections to the stored knowledge. As we navigate these challenges, we might find that the most valuable insights come not from technical solutions alone, but from understanding how communities maintain and transmit knowledge across time.
References
Alexander JS (2008) 'Masons' marks and the working practices of medieval stone masons', In P.S. Barnwell & Arnold Pacey (eds.), Who Built What? New Studies in Construction History, London: Spire Books, pp. 219-236.
García Márquez G (1967) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Harper & Row Publishers.
Hugo V (1866) Les Travailleurs de la mer [The Toilers of the Sea], London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston.
Ingold T (2021) 'In Praise of Amateurs', Ethnos, 86(1):153–172, doi:10.1080/00141844.2020.1830824.
—— (2024) 'Anthropology is good', American Ethnologist, 51(1):37–39, doi:10.1111/amet.13245.
Thomas B (13 December 2024) 'Meta's New AI-Powered Chat Feature Is Like Getting Friend Requests From Bots', The Wrap, https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-ai-bots-new-social-media-friends/
Let’s be honest and say days.
He was MySpace's co-founder and was automatically added as everyone's first friend upon signing up (and if you needed this footnote you are too young to be on the internet).
Not to mention current users.
Thanks for being part of the zeitgeist.