mtl3p

more on retaining our ability to forget

Anne Galloway’s abstract for the HCI conference she was going to attend in Montreal is all the memory/forgetting/archiving stuff that I’m interested in.

The first paragraph of her paper:
Collective remembering and the importance of forgetting: a critical design challenge:

(and remember - she’s talking about software here)

This paper takes the position that, if the goal is to better understand designing for collective remembering, we cannot afford to overlook the importance of forgetting. Memories are understood as relations of power through which we, as individuals and groups, actively negotiate and decide what can be recollected and what can be forgotten. And without being able to decide what we can remember and forget, we are effectively left without hope of becoming different people or creating different worlds.

(bold added)

Other quotes from her paper:

“In his discussion of the abuses of history in One the Geneology of Morals Nietzsche describes what he calls “active forgetting” and also reminds us that forgetting is not simply a failure of memory:

“Forgetting is not simply a kind of inertia, as superficial minds tend to believe, but rather the active faculty to … provide some silence, a ‘clean slate’ for the unconscious, to make place for the new… those are the uses for what I have called an active forgetting…”

More specifically, for Nietzsche the purpose of ‘active forgetting’ is to willfully forget the past in order to overcome our traumas and transform our hauntings. Not dissimilar to Ricoeur, Nietzsche treats forgetting as a kind of affirmation rather than as a denial. In this way forgetting becomes necessary for our own happiness and for imagining our possible futures. Put otherwise, the value of forgetting is its ability to interrupt time or escape temporal continuity, and thus (re)imagine human experience.

This is *exactly* the stuff that I was talking about over the last couple years. Blogging intensively and being involved in designing Wifidog have made me very aware of these issues:

Me from earlier posts:
2005/08/06/ - forgetting

“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.“

With my suggestion of how to add an ability to forget to Flickr (opt-in):

“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.”

a comment on MK’s post on digitizing everything:

“Why does no one ever talk about the value of degradation, of losing and forgetting things! how are we ever going to re-invent stuff if it’s right there in front of us all the time?”

And here’s the best example. A post where I was trying to introduce readers to narrative therapy and it’s implications for persistent digital memories / archives. Go check it out quickly if you want to learn quickly about narrative therapy.

I’ve spent some time a few months ago wondering about how all of the personal authoring that we’re doing was affecting us. . . . If the idea that narrative therapy is based on is true and a lot of how we live our lives is determined by the storys we tell about ourselves, then how is that affected by blogging, flickring, etc. Is our ability to re-author our stories augmented or decreased? And what about the persistance of these online narratives? Will it be harder for me to re-author my story of my teenage years if I can actually go and read them in my old livejournal?

What I’m wondering is: Is our increasing inability to forget going to hinder our ability for personal growth?

Re-authoring does not only require paying more attention to certain events in our lives that we were previously downplaying. It also requires downplaying events that we were previously focusing on. It requires forgetting - and are we going to be able to forget if we know a record is just a click away?

Again, I gotta say it’s encouraging to see some justification for the ideas I had in my head. Because I think that very few of my fellow practicioners see this as an issue.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Whatever. 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.

3 Responses to “more on retaining our ability to forget”

Jeff Traynor Says:
April 18th, 2006 at 12:21 am
This is a really interesting question your asking. I’m first time visitor to this blog, so forgive me if I’m asking a question you’ve already discussed.

It seems like the link you draw between our own act of fogetting and the online narratives we create raises very interesting questions. However, I’m wondering how it takes into account repressed memories - those memories that are still stored in the “hardware” of our brains but unaccessible by the “software” of our memories. I know that theories around repressed memories are sitll up for debate, but I think it’s safe to say many of our memories are only temporarily forgotten.

Perhaps the idea of forgetting online narratives has less to do with deletion, as in the case of having certain photos from flickr “culled” each year, and more to do with some kind of “conditional accessiblity.” However, I don’t know how such a mechanism would work.

It’s a very interesting question you raise. I’d apppreciate your thoughts. Thanks for the post.
mtl3p Says:
April 18th, 2006 at 12:27 am
re: some kind of “conditional accessiblity”

perfect! why doesn’t someone build some software that tries to do that? We won’t get it right first try, but we need to start trying some of this stuff instead of glorifying permanent, constant accessibility.

Jeff - this is totally not my field at all, so I’m not even going to take a whack at “answering” because I can’t. I just think that this stuff is worth talking about. And I’m glad you chimmed in. Please re-comment if any thoughts hit you over the next couple of days about this.
mtl3p Says:
May 1st, 2006 at 11:11 pm
frustrated

I felt everything coming together. all the work and thinking and conversations that I’ve been having over the last 3 years. all my questions, concerns and dreams from hacking the city to questioning who the people are that are hacking…

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more on retaining our ability to forget

3 Responses to “more on retaining our ability to forget”

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