A recent advertisement for Google Chrome showed a series of important events in a child’s life, each one belonging to a different part the Internet—the first steps on YouTube; birthday e-mails; Face book photos of teenage parties. The message was clear: a life can now be fully expressed through the Internet.
This, of course, has a significant effect on how we remember things. Online, major events and experiences can be read about—and with video, watched—again and again. Computers and the Internet, rather than offering something new, combine all our technological means of artificial memory—text, sound and image—to create a synthesis that can recall memories more intensely than anything before.
