We can doubt whether the Egyptians themselves, who of course cared deeply about posterity, would have selected these papyri had they been commissioned to set up a time capsule. Hunt & Edgar 1932) we have no idea whether these agreements, letters, wills, accounts and charms are representative or not of social and business life in Hellenistic Egypt. Our knowledge of Ancient Egypt, for instance, stems partly from the accidental survival of certain papyri from various rubbish tips (cf. We have always had artificial aids to memory of course the twenty-first century twist is that suddenly we are presented with the possibility of memories for life. Memory for life is a research problem, and a problem space-but what problem, and why now? The use of electronic media for supporting human information storage and recall needs defines an area. The ability to co-opt electronic media for the storage of personally relevant information gives rise to the notion of memories for life (M4L), currently being discussed as a ‘grand challenge’ for computing ( Fitzgibbon & Reiter 2003 Shadbolt 2003 b), to define and solve the problems caused by people storing increasingly large quantities of information about themselves. Memory is by no means the only relevant area for interaction at the interface of the mind and the digital, but it is a very exciting one, as evinced by the impressive convergence evident from research reviews commissioned by the United Kingdom's Cognitive Systems Foresight programme ( Morris et al. In recent years, the development of such commonplace innovations as email, ubiquitous computing (including the Internet), virtual reality and advanced prosthetics have brought home the requirement for an increase in the scientific and social understanding of cognitive function, in order to design and evaluate appropriate technological devices.
Thinkers as early as Socrates and Plato focused on memory as one faculty of mind for which technologies of storage could change individuals' psychological makeup, by, so to speak, externalizing or ‘outsourcing’ mental function. It has long been recognized that the interaction between technology and human society can have far-reaching psychological effects ( Ong 1982). The interface between the physical world and the digital world seems to be blurring, and becoming less determinate ( Abowd et al.
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