[-empyre-] digital forgetting

[Attila Marton]

First of all, thanks for the invitation. I am very much looking forward to this discussion.

As it comes to digital objects and memory, there is so much to talk about, it is really difficult to find a point of departure. In particular, it seems to me that memory (as a concept) can be used to talk about everything and anything, since it combines past experiences with future exploits, identifies self and other and, ultimately, constructs sameness into difference. I believe that memory (or rather social memory in my case) is a very engaging topic and concept in terms of gazing into the deeper structures of the fabric of society. This is particularly true when it comes to the rise of the internet and digitality. And Quinn already mentioned one issue that is highly relevant; does the internet forget? 

I think that this question by itself shows how far the human condition, marked by the memories we share, is intertwined with our very own technologies. However, viewing this intertwining through the lens of memory reveals, I would say, a surprising and, perhaps, counter-intuitive conclusion. Forgetting is not the same as deleting and remembering is not the same as storing. Indeed, one can remember that one has forgotten something or forget that one has remembered. One can remember what once was forgotten and, of course, forget what once was remembered. Memory is the interplay between remembering and forgetting that is, at its roots, highly self-referential [1]. Deleting and storing, on the other hand, is a quite trivial and straight-forward process. Admittedly, the internet does not delete but stores whatever comes in binary form as data. But that is a way of forgetting. "Dis-membered" into 0s and 1s, heritage and its artefacts are re-membered through the emulation of recognizable cultural heritage artefacts (i.e. digital objects) and momentary renditions of order. Storing as binary data means to forget cultural heritage in the form of (meta-)data. Indeed, I would say that the internet (because of its binary-based mediation and datafication) is an infrastructure of forgetting and it requires an immense amount of effort to "re-member" bits and bytes into forms that are culturally recognizable (rather than simply recalled) [2].


[1] Esposito, E. (2002). Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
[2] Foerster, H. v. (2003). Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition. New York, Springer. pp. 101-132.