Introduction

How do we remember? By recollection from our own memory: recurrent and reliable. Memories can enrich lives, affirm communities and reinforce cultures; they can inform, enlighten and endorse our identity, our family, our place and our history. Memories can be discovered and uncovered; alternatively, they may hide the truth of events. ‘Memories’, writes Steven Rose, ‘are our most enduring characteristic’ (1992, 1). Memories make us what we are. If Steven Rose is correct, memories must be of huge emotional importance to us. But how do we value personal memory? Is this too difficult to assess, or something simply taken as read: a given? In this chapter I would like to look at individual memory in the archive of the digital age and at its value. Immediately, though, other questions intervene: if the notion of the value of memory is to be explored, can we say what memory is? And can the value of memory be defined?

The topic of memory is highly complex and hugely significant. One of the difficulties of attempting to write critically about memory is the sheer enormity of the subject: the breadth and depth, from the ancient world to the 21st century, from rhetoric to stories, from ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ to cognitive psychology. And now, discussion about memory and its importance is everywhere. In recent years fresh ideas and new thoughts have emerged in a number of fields. New research throws light on any attempt to understand the many and various areas of memory. A brief exploration of these new developments might help us to perceive a little more about the value of memory. But first, to get a proper perspective and some understanding of what we mean by memory, we need to look briefly into the historical place of memory as a faculty and a facility from the Classical world to the 20th century.