On the Synthesis of Social Memories

This essay is about the synthesis of social memories rather than social memoryper seand discusses such a synthesis in the light of digital technologies. Synthesis here is understood in the Kantian sense of ‘putting together different representations and grasping what is manifold in one [act of knowledge]’.² Synthesis thus demands an active unification of parts in contrast to an unconscious or mechanical repetition. To remember something is always a reconstruction in which the fragmented past and the projected future are brought into the present. In the early twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs introduced the concept of social memory in