Forgetting In The Digital Age

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger expresses his concern for the future of society with the increasing prevalence of media forums and surveillance systems in the chapter, “Failing to Forget the Drunken Pirate,” from his book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, which was published in 2009. Specifically, his main concern is with society’s changing nature of forgetting information and remembering exceptions to remembering becoming a default as forgetting becomes an exception. With companies like Google and Yahoo! documenting the search histories of all of its users and keeping these pieces of information for years, which can inevitably be traced back to the individual, it's difficult for digital actions to be kept private. Nearly every …show more content…
Where I do believe the Internet remembers every action of every individual, I think the extent to which he believes people themselves actively remember all this information is entirely blown out of proportion. Although everything is recorded, it does not necessarily mean people remember it all. Though I am sure the prevalence of the Internet makes it more difficult for things to be forgotten, it does not mean it never is. In my experiences with the Internet, certain events, news stories, individuals or anything can be blown up by social media users. This may continue for days, weeks, or even months but at some point, everyone loses interest. When the interest is lost, the amount of posts relating to the previous topic drastically decreases and by this point, media users have found a new story or person to obsess over and have more than likely forgotten about the previous craze. In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, he discusses his own observations of how the Internet has impacted society, but mainly our capacity for holding information, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (Graff 315). The overall idea of Carr’s personal observation is that our thoughts are changing as constantly as the information that feeds it, information mainly coming from the Internet. With the Internet affecting the attention spans of society, there is no possible way that we have not forgotten pieces of information over time. I know for a fact that I do not remember what the social media craze was just a few months ago. We are still a society that is able to forget. It is the technology that