My Memory is Online

I feel fortunate that the digitization of my life seems to be happening at a point when my own brain is straining to retain (and retrieve) all the information I think it is supposed to hold. Having lived my professional life as a writer - and much of my work having appeared online for the last 15 years - I'm finding that the Web is actually doing a pretty good job of remembering things for me that I had almost forgotten.

I like to think of memories as being kind of like that big warehouse at the end of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie, where there's a seemingly endless array of boxes containing historical artifacts - most of them gathering dust and all difficult to identify and unpack in any rational way.

What is surprising to me now is just how many pieces of my "pre-Web" life are appearing on the Web (and spark retrieval of those things I haven't thought about in a long time). I would not have expected, for example, that the writing that I did in my university student newspaper days would ever make it to the Web. And yet, through the magic of archived PDFs, my writing (and that of many of my friends) appears on the University of British Columbia's library archive site. In this example, on Page 5, I see a piece that my old friend Tom Hawthorn wrote about exploitation of students working at a certain large burger chain, On Page 6, there's a piece by Bill Tieleman on the efforts by the New Democratic Party to rebuild itself (shades of today) and, on Page 9, I am reminded that I actually did write an extensive feature about the perils of being a parent and living in student housing. And all of this took place in this week 31 years ago!  

Meanwhile, the Web also holds the text of long-forgotten technology articles. This piece unearths work that I did in writing about how the early Apple Macintosh was used to help Fleetwood Mac's road manager handle the band's 1988 European tour. If you had asked me to remember anything about writing that article, I would have been hard-pressed to do so. In fact, I had completely forgotten having written it until I saw that piece while doing a search for this post.

Come the 1990s and things get a little easier. But many old Web sites have been taken down or radically altered. So as an aid to my memory, I sometimes use the "Wayback Machine", which provides archives of some pages of old Web sites - even if the sites themselves are long gone. You just stick in the URL of the old site and it will bring back a list of pages it has archived from now defunct sites - organized by day.

Of course, none of this is really a substitute for actually remembering things. And I'll try to remember that.