| Abstract | Oblivion has been considered by many to be the default position of social memory in the age of digital media, a disruptive force that challenges the very possibility of social worlds. This article will explore what happens when oblivion is not a problem but an opportunity to recast the future in a new light, when not continuity but rupture is the position against which the success of social worlds is measured. At stake in the concerns over social memory today is arguably not the question of memory’s socialising capacity, but its relation to object worlds where objects do do something other than laundering the socialness of the forces that we project onto them, by extending access to resources beyond the confines of persons. Social memory in the age of knowledge requires ethnographic data from small scale societies to be brought into conversation with the vehicular products of industrial and digital design in order for us to envision what we have not yet imagined or built a model for.
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