Can Web 2.0 shape meta-memory?

Abstract

The social features of recent Web 2.0 technologies applications can bear a strong relationship to memory production and can help to shape personal identity through emotional connections by synchronizing people’s subjective experiences. When added to life, the proliferation of mechanical memory, experienced and produced by technology, makes for a new type of shared awareness. Therefore, we should look at these tools as instruments of reminiscence and as creative mnemonic aids. The input of new media technologies into “how” and “what” to remember is a crucial factor influencing memory status in contemporary societies. They are tools of recording and updating historical past as well as a guide for future memory and identity. These procedures are being used as auxiliary memory and reflect our time techniques. The computer network is a performative agent of remembrance processes, and new and important criticism arises due to the externalization of personal memory into digital forms. This type of mediated memories widely circulates in mass culture and despite not having an organic basis, they can, however, be interiorized by a person without having it experienced in real life, as a result of the involvement in cultural technologies. As those memories become integral part of personal experiences archive, can they act as a prosthetic element? In consequence, can individual sense of meta-memory be affected?