Do we need to forget to truly remember?

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has spent his career exploring how technology shapes what we remember – and what we forget. A professor of internet governance at the University of Oxford and author of more than a dozen books, including the acclaimed Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, he has long argued that forgetting is as vital to our lives as remembering. Here, he reflects on why our digital age risks drowning us in memories.

Every picture tells a story. Some are iconic and create shared memories, but most bring back memories just for those that were present when the photo was taken. The image alone may be beautiful or evocative but it is only complete with the story that it is linked to. A story that the image helps us to remember.

Human memory is amazingly useful, but perhaps counterintuitively not only because of what we remember, but also what we forget. Our forgetting rids our memory of what our mind deems to no longer be relevant. This allows us to focus on what matters in the here and now.

We know about the importance of forgetting from research on a few humans that experience difficulties in doing so. When asked, they describe their comprehensive memory not as a blessing, but as a curse. As every moment of their past has apparently stayed in their minds, they feel tethered to what was – unable to act. Their overbearing past turns into a debilitating burden to live in the present. But it gets worse. For these individuals, as everything is remembered, no memory stands out. They feel like they’re drowning in an ocean of memories, big and small, banal and important, unable to differentiate – incapable of using their past to inform their present and plan their future.

Fortunately, for most of us forgetting comes naturally; it’s something we never have to actively do, our mind does it for us. We forget what our brain believes we no longer need. Sometimes, this leads to annoying moments: where did I leave the car keys? What was on the shopping list I forgot at home? But mostly, our forgetting works as intended, helping us to focus on the present.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t want to remember. Quite the contrary – certain moments in our lives are so powerful that we don’t want to forget them. Because these moments touched us, they encapsulate beauty or love, or because they offered an important lesson. Since humanity’s early days we have tried to hold on to these memories. Language, painting and script were all invented in large part to help us remember what truly mattered, and to pass on these memories to others. Later, photos and videos made us capture memories even more vividly.

But all these tools of remembering worked, because we continued to forget. Our preserved memories were important islands in a sea of human forgetting, the lighthouses that stood for more than nostalgia, that offered guidance and spoke to us. Committing to memory took time and effort, so we used it sparingly.

Our digital tools have shifted this balance. Today, it is somewhat costless to capture and preserve what we see or hear. Our smartphones act as near-unlimited containers for sight and sound – humans’ most prominent senses. Together we have created an almost unfathomable ocean of digital memories. Zetabytes of data are being preserved around the globe, seizing reality with ever greater detail. Technologists seem to think that memory is like a technical spec – that more is better. Recently, AI has taken digital memories a step further, transitioning them from the real to the imagined. Increasingly, we are engulfed by a tsunami of digital images that reflect not just what was, but what could have been.

Unfortunately, these developments miss the most crucial quality of memories: they exist because they are relevant, because they speak to us. It’s not the image itself that matters most, it’s the story the image evokes and makes us remember that we find compelling, moving and touching.

Instead of seas of irrelevant digital data that threaten to drown us, we need digital tools that mimic our brain and help us forget what’s no longer important. Over the past decade we have seen some social media platforms offer fleeting memories and embrace ephemerality. This is good news. But what’s even more encouraging is an increasing number of young people that make active and deliberate use of such technical tools of forgetting. And yet, the resurrection of forgetting alone is insufficient to battle the oceans of digital detritus. Equally importantly, we need peaks of meaning that combine selective images that continue to speak to us and stories we associate with them. Together they form the memories that truly matter, because they are relevant to who we are and what we do. 

It’s a crossroads in our digital lives – we can accept being battered by irrelevance or reclaim humanness by choosing the tools that are aligned with how our minds work, ridding us of the unimportant, and focusing us on the moments that make our lives worth living.