More of our lives are recorded than ever before, but that sheer abundance of information from the past is different from "the act of remembering," which Jonathan Gray describes as "like taking something out of a jar, reconstructing it, and placing it back." He plumbs this paradox:
While we will no doubt continue to contrive ever more cunning machines to capture and reproduce our experience of the world, ultimately we must all confront the finitude of our situation, which is the end of all remembering. While we may be able to leave behind us an archive of all that we have seen, heard and felt, the significance of these things is difficult for others to comprehend without our being present to confer meaning on them. When we attempt to communicate to others the significance of things that happen to us we either assume a background of shared experience, or – through conversations or cultural artefacts, paintings or Proustian narratives – we must attempt to reconstruct a picture of our past which highlights why something holds meaning for us in the way that it does. While the tree makes fruit and the bee makes honey, we humans manufacture and traffic in meaning, and the sensory stuff out of which this is created is like dust or pollen.
The Dish 