Filed under: memory and forgetting
so i’ve been thinking a lot more about forgetting and have been trying to wrap my head around the notion and had a short discussion with some other students here at school. my friend matt made an interesting remark about scrolling through the internet archive’s wayback machine and coming across old pages where the html was still there, but the pictures and what not had disappeared altogether.
something about this started me thinking about how forgetting is conceived of as a specific act, that one can in fact ::forget:: versus something much more process oriented. particularly in the instance described above the notion of decay seemed to be more appropriate. as i mull it over, i can’t help but feel that forgetting in the digital environment does not entail a kind of active moment of forgetting but embodies a more evolutionary process and over time as we collectively move across systems and certain sites slowly unravel or change become updated. so, during this wider process of flux, forgetting inadvertenly happens, almost like an implicit and underlying fashion. that’s what i think for now at least. maybe i’m just making it more poetic than it needs to be.
Filed under: memory and forgetting
i’ve been thinking quite a bit about this view of social and collective forgetting for a proposal that i’m putting together on the current debate surround sexual predators and i’m strugging with it quite a bit. legislation like Propisition 83 aka Jessica’s Law (with similar iniatiatives in Florida, Wyoming, Iowa, Texas, and the UK) is contingent on the kind of surveillance, tracking, and data capture that leaves no room for collective forgetting. there has been growing discussion on the ethical and moral argument for forgetting (1, 2) but what i’m most confused about right now, in the case of sexual predator tracking to reframe the debate beyond the the view of forgetting, forgiveness, and clemency. i think this is just part of the picture. there are additional issues with regard to information overload with the burden of tracking, but how would one evaluate forgetting? forgetting, by nature disappears and so how do you identify traces of forgetting? does the anne galloways argument of “too much memory” or notions of “information overload” necessarily fit within this context? i don’t disagree with the the role of forgetting as a social and personal mechanism for change and growth however it remains unclear just how we would begin to put these frameworks into practice and research.
