As social scientists engaged with the new technology of the Internet, we are faced with myriad claims about how the present is different and how the future will be reconfigured. However, we rarely think about how our relationship with the past changes with such new technology. The author proposes that a new regime of technologies for holding and sharing past experience has been developed through a process called databasing the world – and explores some implications of this new regime for how people understand their lives and their collective histories – how, in other words, they negotiate this profoundly altered structure of participation and representation of their worlds. In particular, the author argues that only through understanding our ways of configuring the past with new technologies can we develop new models of participation in the construction of knowledge and power.
