It is interesting that today we can Google a term like "digital amnesia" and we find so many people have used and reinvented the term to describe a concept they were busy with. In the "old days" (last century!) we did not have that power and we suffered from "printed partial amnesia", where we conveniently but confusingly "forgot" about the many other books that might have had the same term in them because we did not have the ability or time to access and read them. Today, I believe that it behooves us to list all the found meanings, and then to specify which one we are talking about. This way, today, our reader will not be confused.

Now what was your question about again?

Ian, the range of meanings or interpretations of this terminology all make sense to me, but I suspect there are lots more examples -- & as you suggest, there's been variations on a theme of amnesia happening for sometime! I am more interested in how others associate this term with their experience -- and the breadth of meanings -- rather than trying to define a specific meaning. Also, I'm inclined to think "sense-making" precedes "meaning-making". I do have a specific interest in applying this term, though, & that is it seems to me that despite all the cliches about the emergence of the "knowledge society" etc that many organizations seem to have a disregard for the preservation or curation of content beyond their immediate strategic priorities ... & a lot of useful digital content is lost from the public domain.

I think what you are calling Digital Amnesia is abetted by the ease with which we can bookmark content for future reading. My Diigo account is stuffed with useful sources that I noticed in passing and tagged, but can rarely find again despite Diiigo's toolset. So I use Evernote for more material, and I've got 1500 or so notes there. All tagged (well, mostly tagged) and indexed for easy searching but there is too much there and I still can't find it. So I make use of Zotero with another 1500 or so entries. And today, when I need that idea I vaguely recall noticing and saving a few months ago, I start with Google -- from scratch. When I find it no doubt I'll add it to Pocket. Because there is so much out there, I keep collecting and never using, never binding it together into a knowledge-base. To me, that is digital amnesia.

Thanks Kate. I agree that we are not yet able to manage the content so that it becomes information, much less knowledge. I seem to recall that memory involves both storage and retrieval -- you need to be able to do both or you have amnesia. Personally, I can store a lot but I don't yet have a method for retrieval that works. Organisational amnesia (planned or otherwise) probably involves the same two factors at some level. Looking at retrieval offers some interesting options. If we do not have time to process the content we store, we are less likely to manage to retrieve it. Metadata is the solution that is often proposed (through tagging at its simplest level), so tools are developed to make tagging easier, which requires less processing, which means I spend less time processing the information; the result is that I know the tags better than the content.

This term could relate with computing term named "garbage collector",

@Kate - your comments about organizational forgetting are pertinent. The problem with this form of digital amnesia is that it is often manufactured -- that is, websites (or pages within them) get taken down during organizational re-structure & renewal or when projects simply come to an end & no-one cares about digital preservation.

@Eben I think you have provided an excellent example of the hazards of the proliferation of choice that flows on from relentless innovation

@Virginia - I was not ware of this term from Computer Science & have just looked it up -- while I can see its usefulness as a memory management tool I am challenged to understand how it can be deployed to avert the kinds of digital amnesia so far referred to. Am I missing something?

@Jon: Today there is no need to suffer from personal digital amnesia.

1. Making a local copy is imperative. Bookmarks have a horrible

halflife. I use Qiqqa for PDFs plus DOCs because it keeps local copies.

2. Multiple tagging of documents in Qiqqa, together with its full-library, full-text searches soon finds what I am looking for, and a

cascade of associations on the side. The key to extracting knowledge, mentally processing and "making sense" of the accumulation of the documents is to gingerly and tenderly tackle one tag, one author, one theme, or one keyword at a time.

3. A more appropriate association would be Garbage In Garbage Out.

Keep your document libraries clear of any dodgy doccies or they will come back to pollute your search results!

@Ian: I like Qiqqa (and zotero, mendeley, colwiz etc). They share some core functionality like tagging and I can use them according to my personal, organisational methods. When I am methodical. I am not. It's not they way I think or work. Taxonomies are fine in theory, but in practice I prefer a visual spread. So problem one is that we need different systems for different people. That creates problem two if we are thinking about organisational memory or amnesia: how to share information. There is currently no standard for doing this rather fundamental thing. My Zotero content can be imported into other systems, but not collaborated on by them. Each is a closed system.

My GIGO system, by the way, is if it's not been used for a year or so, out it goes. I know I can find it again eventually.

@Eben: I am not advocating taxonomies, because they are like straight-jackets (one document has one label). I am advocating attaching personally chosen, multiple tags that remind you _why_ you were interested in this document (/data). Then when the fruits are ready to be plucked, you can pick (/filter for) the particular fruit by the tagging that reminds you why you wanted it.

Yes, when you want to _share_ information, you do have to think bigger: why would my _organization_ want to keep this document (/data)? Does the destination viewer have the same software? Everybody must be given permission to expand on the tag list and to annotate.

I would advocate an approach where we are all squirrel away what we should need for the coming season, but like the cartoon animal, deliberately suffer amnesia, until we need those proteins, carbohydrates or fats, and then we pull out the buried treasure.

@Researchers: Would you like to have all the papers

you have written to be put in one place? {YES!}

Would you like to have all the papers that cite you to be

put in one place? {YES! YES!}

Would you like all the {YES! PLEASE!} papers you have cited

in all your papers to be in one place?

Would you like all the papers that your co-authors used

in writing papers with you to be in one place? {REALLY?? PLEASE! PLEASE!}

Would you like them to all be searchable? {Now you are talking!}

See

http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2013/11/google-scholar-library.html

Yes, Google Scholar is really useful but there's limits. While I think Google Search still is one of the best innovations in IT search doesn't solve all the problems of content stewardship. One of the deeper problems causing 'amnesia' is the fragility of URLs. It is particularly so in the government sector. For example, in the year 2007-2013 successive Australian governments funded many programs based upon a policy called the "Digital Education Revolution". Dedicated domain names were established and special websites within the federal department of education. The trouble is, with the change in government & policies late in 2013 a lot of these websites have been dismantled & much of the content lost. While attempts through Wikipedia etc to document this history are laudable, many of the referencing URLs within these sites also get broken.

I documented 16 interesting and different definitions for plagiarism that I found in 2001. To my amazement, when I checked in 2013, all 16 pages had gone.

Do not just bookmark. Do as I did, save the text or file also.

So here's another take on all this is: now that we all use plenty of services like RG the responsibility for persistence or continuity of service lies mainly with the provider. What would you do if all your papers you uploaded & conversations you bookmarked on RG all disappeared tomorrow because of unforseen circumstances of the provider? What backup plan do you have? I know when I started using RG & Academia the initial motivation was to keep a collection of my publications in one place, having already experienced that papers published on some conference websites no longer exist. Local copies of papers is probably a good strategy but papers are not the only content. But the digital world changes so quickly. There are always good examples around of sustainability -- eg., the WELL was the first 'online community' initiated in 1985 & it still exists, although in a different form. But there's also countless examples of websites & learning communities that have all just come & gone. In some ways this is just the way of all things, but from another perspective it seems to be a shame that digital content & 'social capital' both disappear so quickly when the potential is there for them to at least as a persistent record.

R.I.P. Geocities. R.I.P. AolPress. R.I.P. Altavista Discovery.