Jul 27, 2014  Andrew McKillop

 



Is Society Erasable or Deletable?

Trying to compare human thought with computers is not easy. Even larger difficulties face us when we try defining “social memory” before comparing its use, modification, or deletion with computer hardware devices and software programming techniques. One of the largest hurdles is that society is an abstract concept and has no formal or single physical representation.

 

To use a computer analogy, there is no “motherboard”.

 

We could for example look for key social memory stores and start with national libraries and museums, or national archives of various kinds like birth and death registers.  Then we could look at educational and research institutions. Next, we could take public information media and their “floating stock” of news items and issues, checking them for traces of “major or dominant social paradigms”, but here we find another problem. There is no formal definition of the paradigms which articulate society.

 

Social paradigms are another “floating stock” with a heavily ramified network of “data objects” that are not formally hierarchic – making it probably better to compare social memory with cloud computing.

 

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