By Michael Lithgow and Kirsten Kozolanka

[Presented by Michael Lithgow at MiT6 Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission on 24 April 2009, Boston, MA]

The era “globalization”, among other things, describes a shift in consciousness that includes new and emerging practices of remembrance and new locations and new forms of public memory (Stepnisky 2008).  Not so long ago,  the study of public memory rested on, at least in part, an assumed distinction between archival memory and “lived” memory.  Archival memory assumed formal and specialized practices of selection, cataloguing and access (through exhibitions, museums, archives, etc.), and lived memory assumed the more spontaneous, vernacular and generally ephemeral qualities of remembrance by citizens, often through rituals and ceremonies.  Digital technologies allow these distinctions to be conflated.  The storing and organizing functions of the archival aspects of memory have collapsed into and with the access and interactivity of vernacular ceremony through digital technologies like the internet.

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