Simon White: Accessing random memory

Around 10 days ago, I was sat at home with a glass of red wine in my hand. And I had a thought. Inevitably, in this day and age, I shared it on Twitter first.

Within half an hour, I had bought a domain, set up an email account, a Tumblr page and began what is now known as My Earliest Memory.

I then tweeted about it again...

Almost instantly, I had a submission. It was then I knew I might be on to something interesting, so I blogged about it.

For those readers who prefer to stay on the page, here's a bit of background:

"It was Sunday. I'd been to visit my Dad. When we arrived at my Dad's house we discovered a bag of old photos. We plundered it. And the reason we plundered it was because my daughter has no recollection of meeting her Nana, my mother. So we looked at photos of her. And my daughter asked me about what her Nana was like.

So, I told her some stories.

Each of these stories was based around a photograph we were looking at. That was easy. Then my daughter floored me with a question: what is your earliest memory of Nana?"

So now you know. That's the project's raison d'être.

Stories or archives?

At this point, the idea got me thinking about memories. And that got me thinking about stories. The two are, I believe, intertwined; stories create memories and memories can create stories. And telling stories is something, as a writer, I'm interested in.

The project is a lot of different things to different people. It could be art to some; it could be a digital library or online museum of memories to others. Any label you care to put to it. And none of them are wrong. Or right. To me, it's about collecting memories, having them lead readers into a story of their own creation (one reason behind The Rules of the project); it's also about digital archiving.

And it's that second point which is becoming a focus for me: the ideas behind the latest digital capturing happening via Memolane, Facebook Timeline, or other similar services. But how are we capturing the older memories, the analogue?

I spend a lot of time with digital services that attempt to trap, capture and index the ideas that already exist, human – or mostly, individual's – knowledge. The big players are Google and Facebook. But they are only the now and, possibly the future.

So, perhaps we should include Flickr and Picasa as players in this game. That's Google (again) and Yahoo!. Yes, we should, but they are slow to catch up with the 'before' and the 'now' is deemed more interesting. And they are looking at the bigger picture.

I think there is a lot of room for niche players in this 'capturing' market. And when it comes to the visual side of things, platforms such as Instagram are starting to emerge and lead the way. By making its focus on words, the niche market is certainly where My Earliest Memory fits in. It's an attempt to document personal, biased experiences that are first person. There is no corroboration, as happens with commenting on photos, etc. Context is left, more often than not, completely to readers' imagination.

No one knows this memory except the person who is sharing it. It's utterly unique. And in the world of digital effluent, My Earliest Memory feels sufficiently different. If it achieves nothing else, that alone will be more than enough for me. Just for the record, I'm not about to suggest it's as important as Instagram, Facebook or Google.

The future for past memories

For me, the My Earliest Memory project is emotional, emotive, real – and already unreal, with just a dozen posts at time of writing. And it's just the start: for this project and the many others that exist – those I've touched upon, and new ones yet envisioned.

There are already services springing up capturing the everyday, the languages that are dying out, the stories that history determines aren't big enough to write about, yet are those which add emotion and dispense with fact. And there are people looking at the future of memories – as well as memories that are yet to be created, that can only be guessed at, such as MemCode plc.

I think the future of My Earliest Memory is not necessarily the words submitted, but about the reactions and stories created by the people who engage with the project as a reader. And if people begin to augment their submissions through other platforms – GoogleMaps, FourSquare, Broadcastr, a geo-located tweet, or whatever may be to come – it could become something that the digital archaeologists of the future delve into, centuries from now.

Even if it achieves none (or all) of these ambitions, it will become a memory, archived digitally. And it will be full of emotions, not definite, corroborated facts. And the digitized world should be as emotional as the analogue one that came before.

Simon White is a senior creative in advertising, and developer of the My Earliest Memory project.

We shall be publishing an "In conversation with..." between Simon and Gregory Povey of Mudlark, discussing digital memory, soon on Imperica.