Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age

  • 10/12/2024
  • Category: Commentaries
No Comments

Author: Luthfi Baihaqi Riziq
Editor: Arifatus Sholekhah

Digital technology capable of archiving every part of our lives has been a major player in the way we think of our memory. We are now capable of saving information in a virtual environment, encouraging mass participation of memory-building.1 This is contrary to the previous “broadcast era”, where we assume audienceship and consume one-way messages, and media producers store their content in material form—such as VHS tapes and CDs.2 This contrasted even further before the availability of prints, where we simply do not have a reliable way of archiving, except for only a tiny subcategory of privileged people (government, royalty, etc.) who have the means of creating material artefacts.3

Practices of Remembering in the Digital Era

We have always been using means external to our brain to retain important information.4 Notepads, circling calendars, or telling other people to remind us about something are all forms of remembering.5 We try to retain information by supplying that information to the outside world in the hope that it will come back to us. Remembering is therefore a social practice: retaining memory eventually ties down to navigate the future by making sense of our experiences and to connect us with the collective cultural memory that gives us meaning.

After the mass use of digital technology, the way we remember has not changed much. Rather, we have a more portable device to store all of the things we need to retain. We store photographs in our phone’s gallery instead of an album book, documents in a virtual instead of a paper folder, and preparation of future events in a ready-at-hand calendar and timer.

However, the practice of remembering and the practice of forgetting are intrinsically linked; they are two sides of the same coin.6 Much of our effort to remember information involves the act of storing it elsewhere, allowing us to forget it in the time being so as to not clutter our brain. Indeed, this is not only a useful feature of our minds, but also necessary. We need to forget because we can only remember so much.

What It Means for Us

So, what has changed? Mainly, it is our reliance on digital means that now dominates the practice of remembering. But the point here is not that we should go back to handwriting notes,7 nor to disillusion the reader that all virtual data are ephemeral: it is all gone when the entire server inevitably crashes down. We all know how fragile data storage is when we change phones and we do not bother to back everything up into the cloud, or when our Google Drive or Dropbox storage runs out and we are not rich enough to buy additional storage so we create a new account.8

The point is that, with the help of our digital devices, we are now on the way to strategize a new form of forgetting, and in turn discerning what is worth remembering and recontextualizing memories. Just as our technologies have “planned obsolescence”,9 so must our memories have “planned discontinuance”. In the study of knowledge management, this is known as managed forgetting.10 The main idea is that not every information is equally valuable in the middle and long run and purposeful deletion of data and memories will not only keep your digital and mental spaces neat, but also prepare yourself for a more meaningful remembrance of things that actually matter.

As individuals, this means that there is a significant correlation between forgetting and emotional wellbeing.11 For our day to day lives, it is important to routinely organize information. As a collective, this means that we as a society mediated by access to digital media should be aware of our shared experiences and means of remembering. As fragmented and separated we are, we still read the same news, watch the same Instagram Reels, and save our memories in a shared media—blogs, YouTube, Instagram, X, and even Substack. Of course, it is nice to have these forever, but ultimately there is much trivial detail and data that we can leave behind. On the other side, there is surmounting importance of 1) making sure the data that comprises the history of our identity to be stored, narrated, and distributed; and 2) fostering a sensibility towards systemic or oppressive efforts to delete and erase important histories.12

Conclusion

Forgetting is understandably scary. It is embedded in our lives that we want to remember many or everything, because remembering serves a purpose of attaining and retaining information without the additional step of accessing an external source. However, it is only natural that we forget. And so the path to technological progress should not just be the ever-storing cloud, but also alternative ways to forget and disconnect. What is lacking is a designed erasure—ones demonstrated in Agrippa and Unus Annus13—which paves the way for remembrance; if the erased truly do matter.

  1. Giglitto, D., Ciolfi, L., Lockley, E., & Kaldeli, E. (Eds.). (2023). Digital approaches to inclusion and participation in cultural heritage: Insights from research and practice in Europe. Routledge. ↩︎
  2. Hoskins, A. (2017). Memory of the multitude: The end of collective memory. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital memory studies: Media pasts in transition (pp. 85-109). Routledge. ↩︎
  3. Van Dyke, R. M., & Alcock, S. E. (2003). Archaeologies of memory: An introduction. In R. M. Van Dyke & S. E. Alcock (Eds.), Archaeologies of memory (pp. 1-14). Blackwell. ↩︎
  4. Carter, J. A., Clark, A., & Palermos, S. O. (2018). New human: Ethics, trust and the extended mind. In J. A. Carter, A. Clark, S. O. Palermos, & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Extended epistemology (pp. 331-352). Oxford University Press. ↩︎
  5. Finley, J. R., & Naaz, F. (2023). Strategic use of internal and external memory in everyday life: Episodic, semantic, procedural, and prospective purposes. Memory, 31(1), 108-126. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2022.2126858 ↩︎
  6. Welsh, S. (2020). Forgetting as a function: When the internet wants to remember, how can we learn to forget?. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 24(2). ​kairos.technorhetoric.net/​24.2/​disputatio/​welsh/​index.html ↩︎
  7. This article does not argue for the cognitive benefits of handwriting instead of digital means of note-taking. For that discussion, see for example Baron, N. S. (2021). Know what? How digital technologies undermine learning and remembering. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 27-37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.011; Marsh, E. J., & Rajaram, S. (2019). The digital expansion of the mind: Implications of internet usage for memory and cognition. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2018.11.001 ↩︎
  8. There is much to say here about the increasing amount of “dead” or “ghost” accounts. For a short discussion in data rotting, see Kersten, M. (2015). Big data space fungus. Proceedings of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, USA. https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/Papers/21_Abstract58KM.pdf ↩︎
  9. Goldmark, S. (2021, September 20). Planned obsolescence: What is it and how to overcome it. Sierra. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-4-fall/material-world/planned-obsolescence-what-it-and-how-overcome-it ↩︎
  10. See, for example, Jilek, C., Runge, Y., Niederee, C., Maus, H., Tempel, T., Dengel, A., & Frings, C. (2019). Managed forgetting to support information management and knowledge work. KI – Künstliche Intelligenz, 33, 33-55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-018-00568-9 ↩︎
  11. See Cairney, S. A., & Horner, A. J. (2024). Forgetting unwanted memories in sleep. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(10), 881-883. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.07.011 ↩︎
  12. See, for example, Vox. (2022, April 8). How Ukrainians are saving art during the war [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltwCjFp9B8s ↩︎
  13. Both are media—poetry and YouTube channel, respectively—which were designed to be consumed only for a set period of time and were set to be erased. This ironically became their source of impressiveness which results in a lasting remembrance in their original audiences. Agrippa is now archived on the internet, yet its original form is still celebrated. Faithful readers may read more in https://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/ ↩︎