An exploration of forgetting: Bannon showcases several examples which demonstrate that while we don't consciously think about forgetting, not being able to forget severely impacts our ability to move easily through every day life because of the sensory overload. The discussion of collective memory (that is, what a society chooses to remember and pass on to the next generation) has been through the lens of cultural identity and national solidarity (see the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs). The question is: can there be collective forgetting? Bannon posits that collective forgetting occurs when a group, passively or deliberatively, chooses to not carry the past into the future. (wouldn't this rather be the case that the group chooses not to carry forward the present into the future?) Historical conflicts often use forgetting to further a particular perspective or heal wounds. Collective forgetting is both a blessing (allows society to move forward) and a curse (society doomed to repeat history). Justice system employs deliberate forgetting to allow individuals a fresh start. Politically, collective forgetting is amnesty. (discussion of amnesty, blanchette, south Africa)

He continues differentiating individual vs. collective remembering and forgetting, similarities and difference between humans and computers, remembering and forgetting in the age of ubiquitous computing and finally forgetting in design.

Perhaps we can think of ephemeral technologies, or perhaps more correctly, technologies that support ephemeral events, in distinction to the persistent technologies that are usually envisaged. The ideas presented are very simple and playful, a starter-pack to begin to explore an alternative design space incorporating aspects of forgetting.

One radical idea elaborates a notion of a ‘digital shelter' where various forms of electronic signals are blocked within certain spaces or places, thus allowing people the freedom to chose to be electronically ‘on' or ‘off' (Sepulveda-Sandoval 2001). We could imagine the development of personal ‘sweeper' technologies that would inform us if particular spaces were being bugged, and activities recorded. Similarly, we could imagine the design of electronic ‘jamming' technologies that would hinder the pickup of meaningful signals from particular sites, akin to the current military jamming technologies. We could imagine various kinds of electronic tagging systems for messages or material that could time-stamp material and contain something like a ‘sell-by' date, where the information would self-destruct after the elapsed time, or where the distribution of your original message could be tracked, although the latter idea raises further privacy issues. My point here is not to provide simple technological fixes to what are ultimately societal practices. Rather, the aim is to highlight different design options. We need to explore augmentation means for all human activities, both remembering and forgetting.

Citation full pdf at ebsco megafile
Bannon, Liam J. 2006. Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: the duality of memory and implications for ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 2, no. 1:3-15.

Problems with the computer model of memory: Our understanding of the human mind has always been informed by technology. Because the dominant perspective of the human mind has been that of an information-processing device (much like that of a computer), the duality of memory (remembering and forgetting) have been seen as a passive model rather than remembering and forgetting being actions. This perspective reifies human memory, turning it into a thing rather than an active process. While the cognitive sciences frame memory with words like “erasure” and “retrieval”, we’ve known for decades that human memory is not like computer memory. Rather than reproduction, remembering is constructive and reconstructive; it is not exact, nor is it important that it is. (Barlett) Cultural historical psychologists (Soviet Vygotsky) view remembering in the context of activity such that if a memory is used in an activity different than its original context, the memory will be reinterpreted with respect to the new activity and there is no guarantee that the memory is relevant anymore in the same manner that it was when it was stored. (not so useful for my purposes) In the computational framework, forgetting is seen as the simple erasure of memory, or the loss of the link to the memory location. Forgetting is seen as an example of the fragility of the mind whereas computer memory with its indefinite and persistent storage is much better. Thus, forgetting is seen as a negative bug, but Bannon hopes to show how it is a positive feature.

Citation full pdf at ebsco megafile
Bannon, Liam J. 2006. Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: the duality of memory and implications for ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 2, no. 1:3-15.