Remember, some things are best forgotten

(or, remembering SB)

I’m catching up with Guardian Tech Weekly’s and just listened to this one which includes an item about “the significance of a Columbia University study about the cognitive effects of Google”, or to paraphrase: the importance of the Internet forgetting things.

This is something I used to consider a lot, in my digital artist phase, and the podcast recalled for me, with surprisingly vehement annoyance, an art project I tried but failed to get off the ground some time around 2000, where I designed a virtual space (it was hoping to be an artwork, so I couldn't just call it a website could I!?), that forgot stuff.
My idea was that I would fill a database with my memories (sounds, images, external links), display them in a virtual space (...on a website), then invite users to rearrange and overwrite them, forming new ideas and associations that would reflect the collective memory of the users.
I hoped it would be fun, playful, and maybe contribute to some reflection about the nature of memory and how new technologies might cause that to change.

The idea was very well received by the funding body I was hoping would help out on the financial side until the friend on the panel who had asked me to submit an idea, but who clearly missed the point, rejected it on the following grounds: 'Why would anyone be interested in your memories?'.

Firstly, thanks for the implied insult that my life to that point was so incredibly dull in your estimation;
and secondly, that was the whole bloody point.
Even the owner of a memory can lose interest in it after a while, and it would be good for it, after it’s moment in the sunshine, to fade slowly into the background, until it was finally, gently, forgotten.

Ironically this whole episode is one of those memories I would like to leave behind but which clearly seems to be stuck festering in a dark, bitter, corner of my mind.

A further irony is that I can’t find any of the emails that went between us at this time, so perhaps the Internet is finally running my project and forgetting my memories...