On the Virtues of Forgetting

In his dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato has a supposedly illiterate Socrates worrying over the dangers posed by writing, principally the erosion of our mental faculties as we come to depend on what we've written down rather than a well stocked memory. I always think of that when I contemplate our modern dependence on all the prosthetic memory aids we're now surrounded by. Who needs to remember anything when all one need do is look it up on a computer, using Google or Bing or Wikipedia? As I age I appreciate such memory aids more and more, but I also recognize that my memory, or what is left of that faculty, has hardly been strengthened by such modern electronic assistants. And while I may find it reassuring to know that I can turn to memory jogs ready to help me recover titles of books and movies, significant historic dates, even the names of people I've met, I also wonder how far we are prepared to go in saving all the trivia and detritus of the many electronic records we are creating.

I've begun lately to realize that as these digital records (both public and personal) continue to grow, we are confronted by the possibility of living with our eyes and thoughts fixed more on the past than the future. No one is more susceptible to this tendency than I who delight in pouring over old records, my own and those of other people, both known and unknown to me. For example, at Emory University, one can get access to the personal electronic archive of the author Salman Rushdie. There, if one were so inclined, one could read all the notes and versions of his published and unpublished writing, glimpsing (or so we're told) the artist at work and gaining insight into the very processes of literary creativity, watching the sausage even as it's being processed, so to speak. Who would not want to see Shakespeare's foul papers were they as easily available? What would we not give to see up close the workings of a mind such as George Eliot's? And on Rushdie's cast off computers and hard drives are also his correspondence, and even the records of his household finances. What riches they must hold for future generations of scholars.

And yet is this not only the beginning? In our born digital world, not only Salman Rushdie's computers, but those used by every other writer can be preserved for future study, not just stray scraps of paper, but vast archives of digital records stored on old floppy disks and hard drives, flash memory sticks or somewhere in the cloud with Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, etc. And should we not preserve them all? Because those we think are important at the present moment may fade away while those who have been for the moment overlooked may yet be discovered to be neglected geniuses who walked among us, writing and blogging in virtual (or actual) obscurity. All of these records must be preserved and added to those from the past which we are now digitizing and preserving for future generations of scholars.

And what of these scholars? Must we not preserve all of their records and born digital thoughts as well? How do we determine what is gold and what is dross? Of course, we'll have the help of search engines and sophisticated algorithms to help us find what we're looking for. But how will we know what to look for? All of this puts me in mind of a quotation from another of my favorite works, Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall: "What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." Well, Tom, in future there will be no need for conjecture. We'll look it up online! But the trouble is that conjecture is what a good deal of scholarship has always been about. I wonder what we'll remember when we no longer have to remember anything? I can't decide if we'll be the androids or the electric sheep.