Tony Ageh on 'The Value of Memory'

A recent speech by the BBC's Tony Ageh's to the 'Telling History' conference organised by the Prix Italia has been published in full on the About the BBC Blog and is well worth a read. Its theme is "the way the Internet is turning us all – or at least, WILL turn us all - into memory institutions." Ageh (the BBC's Controller of Archive Development) was talking to a room full of broadcasters, and his comments are particularly relevant to public service broadcasters in particular. But it's clear from the text that the "us all" can be read more widely to refer to other organisations and even individuals.

One passage looks at a recent project using the BBC archive to shed the light of hindsight on the 80s Miners' Strike. Probably the key line is this: "The footage needs to be balanced by personal input – by witness accounts – by the voice of people and the opinions of people who were involved." In other words, organisations like the BBC (and more familiarly museums and galleries) - squarely "memory institutions" - perform the most useful service to society's collective memory by opening their content to public recontextualisation and interpretation by other participants.

But we believe there is also a hint here for a strategic opportunity that could be relevant to a broader range of our clients, particularly in arts, broadcasting and publishing. The form that public recontextualisation of content takes is already getting more interesting. From a world of hosted comments we have moved into social media where users can take more control of curating their own commentary across the web. Services like Storify take a stage further the process of adjusting the power relationship between the traditional tellers of stories and the rest of us. What next? Ageh points to a world where much more content is made available. In order to make sense of this in the aggregate, it would help for content to be better-structured and semantically addressable.

And that might also help with a much more vexed question, addressed only fleetingly here by Ageh - the development of business models to monetise content (the other kind of value). The money question matters for public organisations like the BBC, because the right kind of answers might help to unlock content wrapped up in the rights of creators and contributors (and to justify the investment of public money in the complex technology involved in digitising and classifying content). It matters even more for the private sector. The Press Association's recent publication of its ontology, and the emphasis that the organisation is placing on the value of semantically organised data, represents a bold strategic move based on an understanding of the value that deep thinking about metadata can add to large bodies of content in a commercial context (albeit in this case B2B). This is an unproven area and therefore not without risk, but for the same reason those organisations that can figure out the right model have an opportunity to carve out a strong position for themselves.

As Ageh says, we are at an early stage of making sense of how to remember online. But if we don't move pretty quickly to address these questions with some diverse and creative answers, we might wake up and find that Facebook is basically doing the whole thing for us (more on this in a later, much overdue, post).

Nostalgia's much better than it used to be

If I had any lingering doubt that I had recently stumbled into the same pet topic as the entire rest of the Internet, then listening back to back to a couple of episodes of BBC Five Live's under-appreciated Outriders put it to rest. In under an hour, I heard interviews and features on a project to restore the place and time where the Internet was invented, a shared drive for virtual rubbish, the restoration from authentic parts of a Second World War computer, an app that prints real books from Facebook data and a monument maker embedding QR codes in gravestones. It's official: our new collective obsession is with memory in all its forms.

After what feels like twenty years of an eternal present on the Internet, of a breathless rushing after the now, we are waking up to a few facts:

1. The Internet has a past.
2. The Internet has our past. But not all of it, just some more or less random shards caught in the branches.
3. We are continuously generating that past with every page viewed, track listened to, tweet, status update, comment, photo published (by us or of us) - and many of us now simply by walking around with our phones switched on.
4. The Internet has our past - and there's no getting it back. It's spread around too many places, in too many copies. We have little control.
5. The Internet has our past - but some of it is made of dust and might crumble in our hands.
6. The Internet has our past - and some it is made of numbers, and boy can you do interesting things with that.

OK - when it comes to looking back, some have been further ahead. On the objective past of the Internet, the Way Back Machine has now been going strong since, er, way back. But the wholesale recreation of the look and feel of the room where the Internet came to life at 3420 Boelter Hall feels like a step further down that road. Martin Belam's great post from last September on the difficulties of recreating the user experience of the past is worth reading as much for its content as for what it says about our priorities. We're living in the future but that means we are increasingly surrounded by a ubiquitous past. I can't really put it better than Simon Reynolds in a recent Guardian article; he's talking about pop music but his point has wider application:

We have all this futuristic technology at our disposal, endowing us with capabilities that would have seemed fantastical in 1972, but it is getting used as a time machine to transport us into yesterday, or to shuffle and share pop-cult detritus from long ago. We live in the digital future, but we're mesmerised by our analogue past.

And, I would add, by our digital past.

As for the loss of control over the content and data footprints we've left all over the web as we stumble about looking for the future, clearly smart people like Danah Boyd woke up to this some time ago. Concerns about privacy and the Internet are now the daily staple of news bulletins. I myself first came face to face with it most powerfully when as editor of a website at the BBC we received an email request from a user to remove a comment he had made using his real name a few years earlier. He had been saying nice things about a pop record, his musical taste had moved on and he was embarrassed. All very 1.0 (and pretty innocent), but the core issues at play - ownership, control, censorship, privacy and authenticity - haven't really changed.

As to the brittleness of our current record-keeping, Simon recently alerted me to the concept of the "Digital Dark Age". The problem of potential data loss through wholesale format changes in software and hardware is well enough understood that it has a name; indeed, there are several initiatives devoted to combating it. And that's not to mention the more mundane problems of server corruption. We've blogged here before about the queasy paradox we live with today, that our content is simultaneously too abundant, widespread and unfiltered, but also too dangerously brittle, to be safe.

So we have been spraying memory around randomly, either hoping it will stick or not even thinking for a minute that it might. In reality this approach is unreliable, incomplete and hard to keep track of. Perhaps the Internet is a global brain like they say - it's shaping up to be faulty enough to look more like a brain than a big computer. How do we respond? One thing we reach for is the physical - thus Social Memories, the aforementioned Facebook-to-scrapbook service. Intel's Museum of Me is a kind of halfway house - a virtual conjuring of the physical from the virtual (and a very nice marketing campaign to boot).

A smarter approach is embodied in the rise over the last few years of personal informatics: services that enable us to turn our memories into data rather than simply content - quantifiable, analysable, comparable with others and so on. This field is brilliantly summarised in a recent article by Gary Wolf in the New York Times, The Data-Driven Life (and tracked in his blog Quantified Self). Data has some key advantages over content. It's more susceptible to our control; we can analyse it and draw conclusions; we can correlate it with other people's data; and it's more resilient, its formats less subject to obsolescence and more easily convertible without, well, data loss.

Of course, to some extent I'm setting up a false dichotomy. Digital content generally comes with plenty of data attached, data that enables us to do interesting things with the content. That's an opportunity both for individuals and organisations. Probably the most exciting thing I've seen in this field recently is the outline of an ambitious idea (courtesy of Chris Sizemore and conceived by Richard Northover, who both work for the BBC in the online space). The concept involves the use of a semantic data structure to enable users to "collide personal & public histories in a million amazing ways", creating a "shared, universal timeline" where users can interact with the BBC archive. Users retain ownership of their data, while that data also adds value to the collective experience. So far as I'm concerned, bang on the strategic target where the BBC should be aiming - and quite profoundly reassuring that the BBC still understands its potential to innovate in appropriate ways.

How the BBC and other organisations face up to the opportunities of the memory meme will tell us a lot about their future in the digital realm. More soon.