Digital Remembering

Evgeny Morozov reviews Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger:

Mayer-Schberger fails to recognize that it is reminiscencenot forgettingthat faces extinction in the digital age. As Facebook and Twitter prioritize the presentour most recent updates always appear first while older ones have a shelf-life of half an hourour digital lives are increasingly detached even from the most recent past. (The ubiquitous ADHD does not help either; Mark Helprin recently observed in The Wall Street Journal, “With the American attention span being what it is, time capsules are now retrieved 45 minutes after they are buried.”)...It would be disastrous to let the fears about digital forgetting blind us to the new possibilities for reminiscence created by digital remembering.