Forgetting and (Not) Forgotten in the Digital Future

Sponsored by SIG HFIS and SIG CRIT

Howard Rosenbaum (Moderator)School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University

Jean-François BlanchetteDepartment of Information Studies, UCLA

Michael R. CurryDepartment of Geography, UCLA

Leah A. LievrouwDepartment of Information Studies, UCLA

Ronald E. DaySchool of Library and Information Science, Indiana University

Why does information force us to remember and to be remembered in certainways? If we do have an information (particularly, digital information) future, andthis is a future of being always present as, and to, information, then what are the political, social, and psychological risks involved? When, today, do we want-andhave the right--to be forgotten? And when is remembering a form of forgetting,according to the times of our particular information day and age?

This panel addresses the issue of forgetting and the right to be forgotten in themidst of information presents and futures, which remember us and make usremember at times and in ways that we don’t always desire. Information presentsand futures that sometimes force us to be remembered when we don’t want to beremembered and sometimes construct the future, informationally, that is, aspresents already said to be.

The panel examines laws of forgetfulness, cultural technologies and techniques of remembering/forgetfulness, and the rights of readers and speakers to remain anonymous. It is important to sketch out the laws of forgetting, the technologies

and techniques of forgetting, and the places or zones of forgetting, in order to see where information, as a form of presence and recall, has not yet been or is being barred from, sometimes by the strategic use of information itself. Sometimes suchplaces or zones occur by legislation, sometimes by tradition and in practices (such as reading) and sometimes they ironically occur by the very overload of information itself, forming a type of forgetting that is not a relief, but rather, numbing. The occurrence of digital information has intensified these questions, asdigital information increasingly occurs in multimedia, mobile, manners.

Indeed, a history of modernity could be sketched out by examining not thefounding, protection, and loss of private space--that is, as a history of beingremembered--, but rather as a history of trying to be forgotten and of forgettingamidst an overabundance of information, and with this, the rights, spaces,difficulties and impossibilities today of being a person that is forgotten, solitary, oreven inattentive and bored. Why, for example, can we no longer read today, butrather, are we more inclined to skim documents--and everything else for thatmatter--for information? What is the relation between the forgetting of reading, theoverabundance of traditional and digital information, and our inability, today, tosimply be bored; while instead of boredom today we are filled with anxiety forattention? Is this anxiety fueled by laws, technologies, and social practices whichdemand and engage our constant attention as information sources and asinformation “seeking” beings? In sum, what is the relation between informationand forgetting today, and what does it mean if we cannot stop remembering andbeing remembered in a certain way (i.e., informationally), now and into ourparticular, digital, “information future”?

Not Just Left Alone, But Forgotten Too! The Case of French Law Jean-François Blanchette

This issue of data retention has been left largely unexplored by privacy laws, with thenotable exception of the 1978 French ‘Informatique et Libertés’ law: the law enunciatesprinciples whereby personal and transactional data must be erased after set periods oftime. Such principles have been based on the legal notion of a ‘right to be forgotten’,elaborated over the last hundred years or so. The first section of this paper traces theorigin and development of this legal concept. The second section describes its inclusionwithin the French privacy law. The third section focuses on its application by the‘Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés’, by studying a number of decisions bythe commission. Finally, we examine how such a concept has been reconciled with other,seemingly antagonistic legal requirements, such as law on public archives. In theconclusion, we argue that the French experience provides a compelling argument for the

importance of clear stipulation of retention periods within data collection practices.

Places to Read Anonymously: New Media Technologies, Intellectual Freedom, andEcologies of Attention and ForgettingMichael R. CurryLeah A. Lievrouw

In the American political tradition, both speech rights and the "freedom to read" have beenconsidered essential for intellectual freedom, individual autonomy, and democratic participation. Anonymous communication has likewise been seen as a legitimate way toprotect these rights.

Although the growing ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has greatly expanded opportunities for expression and reception of non-mainstream ideas andviewpoints online, it has also prompted government and private-sector claims of a "crisis" of security and property rights, leading to the adoption of new, wide-ranging legal and technological controls on mediated communication and uses of information. These claimsand controls have effectively restricted opportunities for unmonitored communication and reframed anonymous communication and information use solely as a means to evade supervision and accountability.

In Places to Read Anonymously we will argue that for a right (such as speech or reading) to exist, there must be a place to exercise it. In contrast to the focus on privacy andproperty rights that dominates most studies on the subject, the authors contend that anonymity is still a legitimate and important method for protecting freedom of thought, expression, the right to read, and democracy. Emphasizing cultural practices and beliefsabout what is noticed or not, and what is remembered or forgotten, in particular social contexts, they propose that such contexts constitute places, or ecologies of attention and forgetting, that may encourage or discourage anonymous inquiry and debate, and thus intellectual freedom. Drawing on four historical case studies of traditional "places to read,"the authors illustrate how these places have changed over time, and identify key features of such places that may support anonymous inquiry, communication, and information use.

Trying to Remember Technologies and Techniques of Forgetting: Information and its Social and Psychological ConsequencesRonald E. Day

If there is any meaning to the cultural term, “modernity,” it must be related to the event ofa culture of remembering and forgetting. Psychoanalysis forefronts forgetting in the

activity of primary repression as the origin of a mature, but always neurotic, self.Nietzsche, as sort of the harbinger for 20th century Western existence, premised the willto forget as the final triumph of the will to power, that is, as the “joyous science” ofcontinuing on despite the awareness that the meaning of one’s life is that of repetition.According to Walter Benjamin, the cultural symptom of modernity is that of thefragmentary nature of experience. We can forget because what can be forgotten orremembered is not part of a whole of experience. Forgetting is possible, as well asmodern memory (in the form of an archive of equivalent fragments), because experienceis understood as informational fragments of documentary evidence. Nietzsche and Freudalready assume that experiential memory is recall (which largely, it is not).

This presentation describes some of those classic technologies of information andcommunication in terms of this fragmentariness of experience, or as Benjamin and afterhim, Nunberg), calls it, “information”: newspapers, television, and what the Frenchdocumentalist, Suzanne Briet, described as “documents”-- that is, the products ofdocumentary techniques. Briet asked, what is the relation between documentarytechniques and “substitutes for lived experience”? One classical answer might be that ofremembering, but equally, from a Benjaminian perspective, we could say, that offorgetting. Information can, thus, appear as a synonym for forgetting, and moderninformation and communication technologies can appear as technologies of forgetting,even as they are proclaim themselves technologies of remembering. From an historical,as well as a social perspective, the question for our age is whether modern and newinformation and communication technologies help us forget or help us remember or both?And, this question becomes even more acute in an age of the digital, “attention economy”where, as the Italian theorist, Franco Berardi suggests, cyberspace outstrips cyber-timeand leaves our attention scattered in states of practical schizophrenia and psychologicalnumbness. Here, historical “forgetfulness” is not just a metaphor borrowed frompsychological discourse, but the latter is, at least in part, the product of the former. Withthe historical development of information as the forgetting of historical developmentaccording to fragmentary and simulated forms of remembering, are we left with necessaryfictions of always new beginnings or with psychotic breakdowns of community and self?And, does this modernist perspective persevere at the end of modernity and in the face ofecological catastrophe, or has it simply collapsed into disbelief and entertainment (or as inthe French, divertissement)? In this paper I will discuss this and more.