Memoria Technica is about the coolest phrase I've heard in a long time and whilst its literary origins are slightly off-beam in terms of absolute appropriateness of meaning, it speaks volumes for me as a label for the whole weblogs / web as an organic memory device concept I've been known to bang on about in the past...
Orwell was wrong about more than just the year. 2003 is a perverse rendition of 1984 where we, the proles, happen to be the Thought Police and Big Brother rolled into one with our plague of weblogs, relentlessly reporting everything we see, do and think to the authorities every single day.
Our democratized, capitalist societies functioned well enough when their peoples were disconnected from each other. Governments covered-up, news stories were hushed, the truth was 'managed' for us and this was all done with the best of intentions, all for our own good. But now the totalitarian, Web empowered Little Brother exposes the naked truth before the news managers have even answered their ringing cell-phones. And Little Brother isn't a lone voice that can be easily silenced. He's a thousand voices a second, in a thousand separate locations. Little Brother is Big Brother.
Lately, with cameraphones and moblogs, I can't help but feel there's a faint structure emerging of a digital life which a little more every day, is becoming an inverted distortion of the Big Brother society described by Orwell in 1984. More like little brother is watching you with his global nodal network of pocket spy cameras and weblogging informers. Trust N01.