The Challenge of Digital Remembrance

As you most likely know, Japan marked the one-year anniversary of the tragic March 11th earthquake and tsunami yesterday. For me, living in Tokyo, the enormity of the disaster was and still is incredibly hard to comprehend. I’ve not visited Tohoku before or after the quake, and trying to put it in perspective from afar is difficult to say the least.

But most of us know the experience of losing someone close, and similarly, you probably know what its like to gradually have someone’s memory fade over time, and what it’s like to struggle to keep it. Given the death/missing toll of last year’s disaster – nearly 20,000 – that means there are hundreds of thousands trying to cling to memories of loved ones. For many, some memories have been quite literally washed away as many families had photo albums lost or damaged in the tsunami as well [1].

In Japan and beyond, people have been making an effort to mark the day by looking back to the memory of a year before. Yesterday The Japan Times [2] encouraged Twitter users to share where they were when the quake hit. Many of those memories were subsequently collected and shared via a Storify embed on its website.

But then, there are more than a few people who’d like to go back and check what they actually tweeted on the day [3]:

I wish @twitter would give us an easy way to search our tweets or to go back to a specific point in history. Trying to scroll back to 3/11

— Level20EastGuy (@Level20EastGuy) March 11, 2012

I was just re-reading the always excellent Craig Mod reflect on both the power of Twitter in crisis [4], but also on its short-comings when it comes to accessing past messages:

…I can see how [archiving] might not be a top priority within the company. But I hope that there is a sense of how important the right interface to those archives can be. And how surfacing the stories captured within Twitter’s efficient reportage ecosystem could be one of the company’s strongest, most beautiful assets.

Similarly, I’ve mentioned before about the problem of tracking all the video footage that exists on YouTube from the earthquake and tsunami. If you do a search for “earthquake” + “311” and filter for playlists, you can see that there are pages and pages of users who have each created collections of videos from the disaster [5].

I wasn’t initially a fan of Facebook’s timeline, but when it comes to looking back to specific dates and times such as last year’s earthquake, it’s far easier to access and definitely has value towards preserving our collective memory. The social web, while amazingly powerful, is still very ephermeral, sometimes with little more permanence than a radio broadcast. Status updates, Twitpics, and video clips emerge, but are then buried under new ones pushed down into obscurity. They can only tell the story of what happened when picked out of the pile and reassembled somehow. We need more ways to reassemble the information we produce, or like Facebook’s timeline, a chronologically navigable output that’s easy to explore to begin with.

And perhaps it’s not in every social network’s interest to create an interface like Facebook’s timeline, but considering the importance of such discussions to our culture, and to the preservation of our collective memory and history, it sure would be great to see more services do so.