I can relate to this.
For most of history, almost everything people did was forgotten because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But this had a benefit: “social forgetting” allowed us to move on from embarrassing moments. Digital tools have eliminated this: Google caches copies of blog posts; networking sites thrive by archiving our daily dish. Society defaults to a relentless Proustian remembrance of all things past.
From an article in Wired.

1 comment
Comments feed for this article
November 8, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Matt Warren
I have been wondering about this for quite some time. Forgetting also plays a role in allowing our “memory” of an event to evolve to protect our ego. Ageless, non-degrading data works against this natural biological function. Thanks for bringing this article to my attention.