Cratyle.net

Both memory and forget  are needed to create. Would we ever replace the old streets by new one, if we knew why someone has previouly built them? saw all lives that crossed them? Aknowledged how many serious or funny or great or tiny stories relate to them?

Memory and forget both fuel the discussion process. One could not build on other’s arguments without a memory of them.  At the same time, discussions would not progress if everyone kept in mind only the mass of past arguments that brought out the new ones.

This is maybe the reason why social medias and the current Web discussion tools are now placing such an emphasys on forget rather than memory. Blogging draw a lot of its value from the way new contents replace older ones. Twitter and friendfeed could be rightly labelled as “forget machines”. The wikis themselves, while aggregating the writings of the past, end up by totaly replacing them.

Due to this emphasis on forget, the Web has become a world of authors with almost no memory. Old contents are often not being deleted, but very few people have the intention and the capabilities to pick them up, give them a meaning or place them into broader picture

If the Web has an immense abilities to forget its own contents, what it needs now is a living memory content organizer.

So much thanks to Barberousse for his help in bringing back this old post to life