Forgetting

My work offers forgetting as the defining mode of our relationship with the past, rather than as memory’s silent partner. To this end I firstly, treat forgetting holistically, as emergent through a connected ecology of individual, social and organisational domains; secondly, take digital media as the principal shaper of how and why individuals, societies and organisations forget, and, thirdly, consider new interdisciplinary ways in which forgetting can be represented and understood.

 Forgetting – its worth and possibility – is increasingly a conundrum. Forgetting must be avoided yet it is easy, it is essential yet impossible. It is precisely because there is an excess of the past made present – societies have become increasingly swamped in connectivities and cultures of remembrance and haunted by all of the digital traces of self – that forgetting becomes urgent. The past seems bloated and yet our algorithmic present seems impossible to capture and preserve for use in the future. 

 I take as the heart of this conundrum digital infrastructures and cultures of participation fostering of new and unpredictable entanglements between humans, humans and machines, and machines and machines, ushering in paradoxical challenges of both forgetting and not being forgotten.  

These themes are developed in my forthcoming book Breaking the Past (OUP 2023) a study of our relationship with difficult and ever-present histories.