Two years ago I was thinking a lot about social media and bereavement and I wrote a post (I friend dead people – Are Social Media Mature Enough to Cope with Bereavement?). Today, by strange coincidence, I happened upon this post: AI resurrector lets people Skype their dead relatives. As the post points out, this appears to be an incarnation of an episode of Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker, so apart from worrying about which other of his dystopias people are going to invoke next, I was again prompted to think about forgetting and remembrance as information processes.

In the past, human beings have found it very easy to forget and have struggled to remember. Oral histories and stories preserved by poets and carvings in stone to record conquests and kings were early memorializations and were important precisely because so little was recorded. Pre-Renaissance librarians and archivists were often more concerned with gathering and preserving scant records than with information overload, or even systematic organization of knowledge, simply because the volume of materials they had to work with was limited. As printing technologies developed and more informational records were paper-based, archivists had to balance the urge to preserve with practical considerations such as the costs of space required to store documents. During the 20th century, the massive surge in the volume of paper documents generated meant that we had to start thinking carefully about what we would deliberately forget.

The digital age seemed to suggest that somehow storage would become so cheap and search engines so intelligent that we would be able to save everything and find it again without a worry and many people seemed to see this as a good thing – archival management becomes a lot easier if you do not bother to select and manage a collection. Professional archivists have pointed out the pitfalls of this attitude and on a personal level, so far, we have – by and large – used our PCs, cameraphones, scanners, etc., to generated huge unmanageable collections of data without regard for what we want to remember and what we want to forget. The urge to “just keep everything” is strong. Charlie Brooker’s dystopias are valuable in showing us the psychological pressures we will have to deal with in this new world.

Our traditions of marking anniversaries, building memorials, and remembering our past have led us to equate memorializations with respect and love, against a background where most things get forgotten. However, as humans we need to forget pain and grief, we need to “let go” and “move on”, otherwise we cause ourselves psychological problems, so we need to be careful with our digital memorializations as extensions of our social networks (for example Facebook video memorials). They may seem like works of love and respect, but there is a danger they will lead people into unhealthy obsession with the past. We have, after all, never before lived in a world where it is harder to forget than it is to remember.

Update: More Google ‘forget’ requests emerge after EU ruling

For Claire – not forgotten.