Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: the dualityof memory and implications for ubiquitous computing

Abstract

From earliest times, humans have developed strategies for increasing their ability to remember and commemorate significant events in the history of their communities. Epics have been created, memorized, and passed on through generations even before the development of written records. Monuments have also been built to commemorate important events. Stratagems for helping people to retain information, mnemonics, have allowed us to develop what has been termed memoria technica—‘artificial’ memories. In this essay, while recognizing that new technologies support people and organizations in their remembering processes, I wish to stress that other complementary human activity that constitutes the duality of memory, namely forgetting. This is a topic that has been relatively neglected or treated in a cursory fashion in much academic discourse to date. I note some examples of the scattered but intriguing work on the subject, from very different disciplinary perspectives, before turning attention to the potential relevance of judicious forgetting in the context of new technologies and visions of the future. Examining the role of forgetting opens up some interesting possibilities. We should re-frame our discourse and expand the design space concerning ubiquitous computational technologies in our everyday life to incorporate aspects of this forgetting dimension.

Keywords:

• Duality of memory
• constructive memory
• forgetting
• collective forgetting
• amnesty
• design space
• ephemeral technologies

Acknowledgements

The VISION project was created and managed by Jakub Wejchert, and I wish to thank him for his vision, energy, and commitment to the idea. I also wish to thank Geof Bowker, for his critical yet supportive comments over the years. His work on organizational forgetting has been a beacon for me and many others. Thanks to Michael Cooke for comments. Support from Science Foundation Ireland on the Shared Worlds project is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹Indeed, the concept of ‘ambient intelligence’ itself warrants just as much de-construction for its rhetorical significance as the term “artificial intelligence” received in an earlier period.

²Although there has been a recent surge of interest in the topic—see the Postscript.

³A recent English translation of Borges Collected Stories (Hurley 1998) has, unfortunately, changed the title to Funes, His Memory, which I feel reduces the connotation of active remembering that I am pursuing here.

⁴Pollan provides an amusing and informative account of the effects of marijuana on human memory.

⁵Paradoxically, our reliance on electronic storage devices such as CDs to store data instead of using paper has reduced the lifespan of our archives, as CDs are not built to last more than 50 years, as against 500+ years for paper!

⁶The issue of what is actually being preserved when we do make some form of record of an event is also open to question, as usually it is the personal experience of being there that is valued, not simply the visual or aural signal captured by the machine.