Yesterday, while on a vacation-time excursion to my local research library and independent bookstore, I happened upon a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton UP, 2009). The title struck me immediately, for a variety of reasons. First, because the memory seminar ended with several readings that addressed forgetting; second, because I am working on a conference paper dealing with amnesia; and last, because as a blogger who posts primarily on historical and political matters, I cannot help but be hyper aware of the need to catalog everything.
Blogging is about stopping time and recording everything, or establishing a record. It is a bit like trying to press pause on the flood of continual information coming at us from all sides. But blogging also seems fearful of the past, because what counts is what is going on now, which will be old as soon as I get to the end of this sentence. What happens to the information being "logged"? As Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic, blogging "is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in." And, I would add, the consequences for our memory as well.
In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines a fresh idea -- the need to forget in a time in which the abundance of information threatens to drown us. I think of one of my students, who remarked on the challenges of sifting through data for class research projects; or myself, as I drafted my dissertation -- was more information always better, when more information was "never enough"?I am thinking more and more about where forgetting comes into all the discourse on memory. I would like to believe we are beyond the stale dichotomy of "memory, good, forgetting, bad," but that seems doubtful. How do we talk about forgetting in the context of historical trauma? How does forgetting enable new memories to develop and transform existing narratives? And, where does new media come into the discussion? I read Marc Augé's Oblivion in January, and recently re-read Paul Connerton's "Seven Types of Forgetting" (along with several of the articles written in response to the latter in Memory Studies, such as "Should We Forget Forgetting?"). I did not buy Delete, but I hope to check it out very soon and report back here after I've had a chance to evaluate it properly. For now, I leave you with this informative lecture by Mayer-Schönberger, and a few other helpful related links on his book:
Interview with the author on NPR
Princeton University Press Technology & Media blog (with links to additional interviews with the author)
Review of the book by Peter Cliff, Software Engineer at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Blogging "is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism."
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm pretty sure that's a description of bad blogging. Good blogging - like good journalism, good criticism, good writing in general - aims for just the opposite.
And I don't want this to sound polemic, but the idea of a need to forget is not very "fresh" either. Perhaps it's best expounded by Borges in Funes el Memorioso; Luria talks about it in his extraordinary account of the mnemonist S; and it has been discussed by various journalists and critics in the debate on the information glut. I'd also point to Wole Soyinka's exceptional The Burden of Memory, although he refers to that particular type of forgetting that is forgiveness of course. Seminal book anyhow.
Here's another review of The Virtue of Forgetting.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408555
And an excellent blog entry by the same reviewer in Crooked Timber.
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/23/the-internets-never-forgets/
Giovanni,
ReplyDeleteGood points. Of course there is Funes, which we discussed in class, and which has been linked here since I began the blog. And I thank you for the other references.
I think that when I mean "fresh," I am thinking of memory scholarship -- theoretical formulations - rather than literature. I do think it is significant that just 2 years ago, the nascent _Memory Studies_ decided to tackle forgetting. While it may be true that plenty of works have addressed the other side of the memory coin, it is still unexplored territory. However, I have to admit, I am far less in tune with memory as it relates to technology (your area of expertise!).
I come at the forgetting issue from my particular field, where one will almost never find reference to "forgetting" as a positive -- what one is trying to *overcome* is forgetting, the kind produced by the authoritarian State. Hence, we find phrases like the "recuperation/recovery of historical memory;" speak of “breaking the ‘pact of silence’;” and talk ad nauseum about the need to remember and the very real psychic burdens of memory -- often, with little concern for what so much memory "means" and what will be done with it.
Whereas in your field, forgetting may be nearly a cliché, in my own, it is not something that can be easily integrated into the debate. Isn’t there a difference between talking about the flood of information available on the internet and the “virtue of forgetting,” and addressing the mass of cultural production on the Spanish Civil War and Francoism and what to “do” with it? If we’re talking about testimonies, monuments, memorials to victims of a dictatorship, it’s a lot harder to talk about how great forgetting is, no? The discussion is so charged -- long before the memorialist phenomenon emerged in the late 90s/early 21st century, of course, Franco's victims were systematically "forgotten" via exile, disappearances, executions and the like. In the Spanish case, forgetting is perceived as an ideological gesture of the right. Perhaps the work being done in the area of digital media/memory can provide insight into the problem of the "memory glut," but I have trouble believing this will just carry over into matters of traumatic historical memories because the technological or engineering issues of memory don’t necessarily address the ethical ones!
I come at the forgetting issue from my particular field, where one will almost never find reference to "forgetting" as a positive -- what one is trying to *overcome* is forgetting, the kind produced by the authoritarian State.
ReplyDeleteI think you'll enjoy Soyinka's book very much then - he does conceptualise memory as a burden, although the kind of forgetting he advocates has little in common with the one practiced by the apologists of former totalitarian regimes. Derrida's late writings on amnesties are also very apposite.
Perhaps the work being done in the area of digital media/memory can provide insight into the problem of the "memory glut," but I have trouble believing this will just carry over into matters of traumatic historical memories because the technological or engineering issues of memory don’t necessarily address the ethical ones!
That's a crucial point. But all those memorial projects - think of Spielberg's Shoah recordings - do put a strain on our resources, and I don't mean just technically but also culturally, so a key task going forward will have to be how to maintain those archives, keep them accessible, allow researchers and other stakeholders to search them. Not that I'm advocating erasure, mind, but all that material then folds back into the large archive of everything, which is always in danger of collapsing around us. Perhaps we'll need to forget something else, then, less important life stories, so that we can preserve those vital testimonies.
Not strictly related to this, but I wonder if you're familiar with the work of Paolo Cherchi-Usai?