mtl3p

Memory has always been an issue for me. I have never had a good memory and in many of my relationships, the other person plays the role of holding the memory of our time together, whether it’s hockey games in grade 6 or second kisses (I can usually remember first kisses).

Then when I was in Burkina I had a flood of memories. I would go to bed early, lie naked sweating under the mosquito net and ceiling fan, and passively listen as stories bubbled up from different meaningful and meaningless points in my life. After that I realized that I had some control over my memory - not whether I remembered something or not, but that I could decide to stop thinking about whatever was in my head and spend 30 minutes remembering - just lying placidly casting over different periods and places in my life and watching what came up.

Then, suprisingly, during the last 6 months forgetting has become important to me. Not because of any memory I want to excise - actually I have no idea why this became important. I realized that forgetting isn’t a lack of an ability to remember, but that it is an ability in it’s own right. And I guess I’m disturbed that we’re not building our new communications systems with this ability.

Oh - I remember why I started thinking about forgetting. My hotmail account was erased because I hadn’t logged in during the last x months.. I had had that account for 4 years and there was a lot of emails that I thought were very important in there. At first I had the normal reaction of being suprised and pissed off. But anger dissapated quickly and I realized that I felt lighter having lost that data.

Enter present point:
Wifidog doesn’t currently have an archiving system. We can’t clear our portal pages because there is no way to keep content associated with a page without having it show up. This is a problem because the pages are getting really full and messy.

We just got a (small) bit of cash to build that archiving system. I’m going to try and convince the group and the developpers that we should add in the ability to forget to this archiving system.

I think we need to keep everything in the database because some data we need to keep (like content that we get grants to showcase), but from the users perspective I want the system to have a leaky memory. I was thinking about a process that would erase (or make invisible to the common users) 10% of the last year’s content and 2% of the the global content.

I know it sounds kinda flacky and whimsical, but in that we are building software for public spaces, for communities, I think we need to engage with these kinds of soft, un-obvious design ideas. Also, I like that I don’t want this feature because I want to make a point about the human condition as opposed to machines, or anything else. I just think it will _work_better_ this way. I’ll have to see what the rest of the group thinks.

ADDED: Ideally, the system would mostly (but not exclusively) the items that had been clicked on less. I would also love to see something like this added to Flickr. Having 10% of my photos that had been viewed the least culled every year. But this isn’t an optimization system, so the algorithm should be more like 8% of the total selected from the 20% least viewed pictures and 2% of the total selected from the entire account.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2005 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Identity & Community / Technology, memory, forgetting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.