Today's quote: "Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting." (From a commenter on BoingBoing.)
This grew out of a discovery that many teens on MySpace were happy to forget their passwords and start new profiles. Lose their old "friends" who they didn't really know in the first place. But this fits teenagers in general -- that whole time period is about moving through stages and shedding skins along the way. The general quote transfers the idea to broader society.
Does technology remember too much?
Selectivity is key to our cognitive processing; we couldn't handle the flood of data that would hit us at every stimulus if every related memory came back. And in a spiritual sense, the idea of repentance is all about forgetting. That we can experience pain and then -- not experience it any more. You may remember that you hurt at one time, but the memory of the pain is dulled.
And what about change? As chat logs and emails persist, idle comments from years previous can be dragged up and tied to the present. How do you account for something you said in a moment of carelessness years ago? Confronted with 'hard evidence' of a past thought, can we really allow people to change? (Four years ago, you said you hated so-and-so! Clearly now you're just trying to use him!)
I think the extension of copyright also plays along with this idea. There's a fixed space for artistic representation in any medium -- only so many songs using the same notes, only so many short stories using the same vocabulary, only so many paintings using the same colors and sizes. As each work is allowed to exist forever, the space becomes more and more crowded.
Sorry my blog is all just random threads. (Not like discussion board threads -- like snippets of thread that fall to the floor and wait to someday be assembled, or vacuumed, or assimilated into the carpet.)