The Autological Constitution of Digital Cultural Artefacts: An Analysis of the Implications of ICT on Memory Organizations

The societal shift from writing to printing to information and communication technologies has been accompanied by a shift in the structure of social memory that seems to threaten our capability to remember. Within this context, a preliminary analysis is offered on the impact of the digitization of cultural heritage on the ways social memory is being organized by memory institutions (archives, libraries and museums) attempting to bring their repositories online. Informed by the work of Niklas Luhmann and Elena Esposito, the paper addresses the problem of an ICT driven organization of cultural heritage transforming information objects into autological, self-describing digital information objects. The research aims to contribute the notion of memory as a counter-concept to the discussion on information and its technologies in the information systems field and related domains such as organization studies and the social study of ICT. It also advocates the necessity to focus more on the implications of ICT on the ways social memory is structured.