Digital technology is enabling us to store, retrieve and link our memories - photographs, diaries, reflections - in increasing quantities. Memory is an important part of our identity, both personally and with respect to the groups with which we identify, so these developments will have profound effects on our perceptions of ourselves and the communities in which we live. But, interactions between technology and society being inherently unpredictable, we can't be entirely sure what benefits (and costs) this will bring.

Finally I get round to reporting on a fascinating and enjoyable workshop on Memory and Technology, sponsored by the LiveMemories project. LiveMemories, subtitled 'Active Digital Memories of Collective Life', is run by the Trentino province of Italy, to create tools (particularly a website) to allow people to post and link their memories of events and places, and to provide automatic support for the community to connect, search and recall.

Great presentations from Fausto Giunchiglia and Bernardo Magnini for the LiveMemories project, and a magisterial introduction to the use of technology to support memory by Nigel Shadbolt, co-ordinator of the United Kingdom Computing Research Committee Grand Challenge of Memories for Life, set the scene. Ramesh Jain of UC Irvine showed impressive work in organising multimedia records.

A particular highlight was a symposium on research using Microsoft's SenseCam, a camera worn round the neck which takes photos periodically. Sounds simple, but research has shown that this can be an important memory aid. Alan Smeaton of Dublin City University gave us a quick tour of his research in the use of SenseCams for lifelogging (i.e. indiscriminate recording of one's life), while Narinder Kapur of Addenbrooke's Hospital reported on research done in tandem with Microsoft to support recall in Alzheimer's patients. What was particularly interesting was how a single device was able to benefit healthy people as well as those with severe memory impairment.

What came over very strongly from the workshop was the way in which memories - accounts and records of events in the recent past, created by the increasing number of digital devices that people carry around with them - are a special type of information in which people are naturally extremely interested. Many hard issues in information retrieval dissolve when we focus on memories, because memories turn out to be much more organised and to possess much more common structure than we might think.

For instance, we organise and index many of our memories around events. Philosophically, events are very difficult to characterise, because they vary so much in scale over space and time. One event might be the fleeting appearance of a Higgs boson, while another might be the Permian extinction of millions of animal species worldwide over a few million years. What could they possibly have in common?

But when we are in the realm of memory, events are relatively well-specified, and generally on a common scale. We remember weddings, conferences, visits to the park, births, football matches, hen nights. Ramesh Jain gave a very structured and principled theory of events, while Alan Smeaton gave us a much more operational account based on discontinuities in the SenseCam record - but despite their different methodologies their accounts converged. Carving nature, or perhaps human nature, at its joints? Events are hard to characterise in the abstract, but in the particular context of human lives there are important commonalities.

It seems inevitable that people and communities will increasingly rely on technology to support memory, whether it be organising stores of digital photographs, linking blogs about the same event or subject, or creating narratives and timelines. This will help keep the past accessible, which one hopes will be an enormous boon.

Technology will also bring people together - memory technology often supports sharing and linking, enabling different experiences to be compared and juxtaposed. There is a strong tendency for memory technology (from writing to photography) to take us out of solipsistic loneliness, into cooperative conversation.

Yet we must also be aware of the importance of forgetting, which plays such an important social role. We forget traumatic events. We forget in order to forgive. Forgetting is good mental housekeeping, and stops us obsessing about faux pas, presumed slights, or our many failures. If all of our lives are logged - and people are retaining (and publishing) increasingly huge personal records - then the past will recede more slowly, remain more present to us.

The past is another country, as L.P. Hartley brilliantly expressed it. But one effect of digital technology and globalisation is that different countries are becoming more alike. That includes the past - it will seem less distant, and become easier to scrutinise and interrogate. Myths can be dispelled, legends debunked, disputes settled. Is that entirely a good thing? Much of the attraction of the past is its shadowy romance; let's hope that technological development allows us to keep at least some of its mysterious veil in place.