When you think about it, the internet was kind of supposed to be the greatest archive humanity ever built.
Infinite space, access and preservation. Sounded perfect. But most things that do are too good to be true.
So, instead, we’ve created something closer to like, a "collective forgetting machine" lol. Culture goes in. Content comes out. But memory doesn’t really survive the process.
It really feels like, every day, something disappears.
A platform shutters. A social feed reorganises itself beyond recognition. A link that once held a beloved article or video now returns an error.
A studio that once shaped global storytelling gets absorbed into a tech giant’s portfolio. Entire advertising dynasties are folded into “integrated networks” until there is nothing left but a name in a press release.
These are symptoms of a system that has stopped caring about continuity altogether.
This is what I’d like to call "the great media amnesia." Not the loss of ownership, but the loss of memory entirely.
The internet was built for circulation, not preservation. Platforms reward the new and bury the old. Algorithms hold no loyalty to history. If something doesn’t generate engagement and attention in the current moment, it may as well not exist.
Our digital world is now optimised for turnover, not longevity. And anything built on turnover eventually forgets everything that isn’t right now. Are you still with me?
Traditional media ecosystems had whole archivists, curators, literal physical vaults.
These were institutions designed to safeguard the past. Even advertising agencies were like cultural libraries. Decades of campaigns, films, case studies, creative philosophies. Knowledge passed down in hallways, over late-night edits, through shared language and inherited taste.
That entire architecture of memory is evaporating in real time. When a holding company retires multiple iconic agencies overnight, you don’t just lose jobs. You lose lineage. The slow, human accumulation of craft.
The same thing is happening across entertainment.
Warner Bros being absorbed into Netflix might streamline distribution. But what happens to the historical record? The lost pilots, the behind-the-scenes footage, the original cuts, the notes, the outtakes, the minor works that mattered to small communities?
What happens when the custodians of cinema become data warehouses with KPIs? What gets rescued? What gets lost during a cost-cutting cycle? What disappears because a spreadsheet said “low viewership”?
For the first time in modern history, our cultural memory is not slipping away because it is old. It is slipping away because it is inconvenient. And that, my friends, should break your hearts as it does mine.
Media companies treat archives as liability.
Platforms treat the past as clutter. Creatives are encouraged to constantly produce but never revisit. And audiences are trained to live in a perpetual present.
Boom. The result is a society that consumes cultural output at unprecedented scale while retaining almost none of it. A culture without memory cannot develop taste. A culture without continuity cannot build depth. A culture that forgets itself becomes easier to market to, but harder to inspire.
And that is the real cost of the great media amnesia. Not the disappearance of content, but the erosion of context.
Without context, everything starts to feel the same. Films, art, marketing, ads, flattened. Once-distinct institutions dissolve into one another until they all behave like interchangeable nodes in a larger optimisation engine.
Homogenisation is what happens when memory collapses. Sameness is not an intentional aesthetic choice, but the residue of forgetting. And you know what? I think people will feel this loss even if they can’t articulate it.
Hence the resurgence of physical media, rise of personal archiving, the fascination with analogue devices, rediscovery of books, CDs, local libraries, long-form blogs.
It’s almost instinctual, a recognition that something vital is slipping, and that if individuals don’t save it, no one will.
Because the truth is simple. The internet is not an archive. It’s a performance stage with a trapdoor underneath.
If we want culture to survive, we will have to start preserving it ourselves. Saving things. Storing things. Building our own libraries. And rejecting the idea that digital permanence is real.
Because if the companies shaping our cultural landscape continue to prioritise efficiency over memory, then the future will be built on gaps, not history.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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