Una pausa tre domande. La crisi della memoria nell'era dell'accesso.

The paper offers a critical reflection on the crisis of memory in the digital age, characterized by the paradox between unprecedented information production and the growing fragility of preservation and transmission processes. The authors question the idea of digitization as an automatic solution to the challenges of safeguarding and accessing memory, emphasizing instead its selective, interpretative, and inherently political nature. Through three key questions—why we digitize, who decides what should be digitized and preserved, and how digitized and born-digital sources are used—the paper examines ongoing transformations in archival practices, historical research, and public history. Particular attention is given to the tension between institutional archives and distributed, participatory archives, as well as to the impact of artificial intelligence on the use, mediation, and interpretation of historical sources. The contribution calls for a shared and interdisciplinary “pause for reflection,” involving historians, archivists, computer scientists, and communities, in order to foster more conscious, sustainable, and responsible approaches to the construction of contemporary digital memory.