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Memory Hole

The phrase memory hole, as seen in the phrase "Going down the memory hole", is a reference to the book 1984 by George Orwell. In this book, the government of Oceania uses a process by which historical records are altered to fit the current interests of the state government. For example, if the government predicted last week that chocolate rations would increase to 1 pound per person, and then this week it turned out that it only increased to one-half pound per person, then the historical record (often back issues of the Times newspaper, which is Oceania's official oldspeak mouthpiece) would be changed to show that Big Brother had in fact announced an increase to only one-half pound. The memory hole was a hole that was present in many government offices, especially the Ministry of Truth where Winston Smith worked, into which the original damning documents were to be dropped, where they were believed to be incinerated. (Later in the book, however, O'Brien produces material that appears as though it may have been dropped into a memory hole.)

More recently it has come to refer to the act of deleting, moving, or otherwise altering existing information on a web site especially when the change is believed to be politically motivated (e.g. [http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_11/002561.php]). It has also been used to describe a process complementary to link rot whereby as older web sites goes offline their contents disappear with them.

External links

- thememoryhole.org is a web site that "exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known," especially that of the US government.
- Internet Archive's Wayback Machine keeps large, searchable copies of much of the internet over time.

Category:Nineteen Eighty-Four

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Memory Hole".

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Memory Hole
The phrase memory hole, as seen in the phrase "Going down the memory hole", is a reference to the book 1984 by George Orwell. In this book, the government of Oceania uses a process by which historical records are altered to fit the current interests of the state government. For example, if the government predicted last week that chocolate rations would increase to 1 pound per person, and then this week it turned out that it only increased to one-half pound per person, then the historical record (often back issues of the Times newspaper, which is Oceania's official oldspeak mouthpiece) would be changed to show that Big Brother had in fact announced an increase to only one-half pound. The memory hole was a hole that was present in many government offices, especially the Ministry of Truth where Winston Smith worked, into which the original damning documents were to be dropped, where they were believed to be incinerated. (Later in the book, however, O'Brien produces material that appears as though it may have been dropped into a memory hole.)

More recently it has come to refer to the act of deleting, moving, or otherwise altering existing information on a web site especially when the change is believed to be politically motivated (e.g. [http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_11/002561.php]). It has also been used to describe a process complementary to link rot whereby as older web sites goes offline their contents disappear with them.