Forgetting what we remember

Bill Moyers writes:

We live in a time "characterized by a refusal to remember." Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell's novel, "1984."

Yet it's a contemporary commonplace that nothing is ever forgotten on the internet:

The third Internet safety tip for teens is to remember that nothing is ever forgotten or deleted from the Internet.

We are perpetually alerted to the fact that our traces remain, never to be lost. Efforts to delete old posts and comments, ill-uploaded photos, videos that might have been funny at the time, are likely futile, recoverable somehow, by someone, somewhere.

How do we understand these two ideas: the loss of memory and its unavoidability? Inconvenient facts disappear, yet they are always present, never erased. 

It seems to me that factoids persist, little elements, scraps, nuggets, but lose their matter, that is, they lose the larger setting that made them matter (or even not matter), that made them stand out from or remain absorbed in the manifold. The little nuggets become unchained, disarticulated, loosened from their prior ideological context, available to be mashed up, recombined, reinserted into another setting. And the thing is, we never know what part of our lives, what statements, what retorts, might return and how they might return. So it's not even like we are haunted by past mistakes that refuse to die but rather haunted by the possibility that words and acts that were previously insignificant will return with a significance we can't foresee.

Factoids persist: bailout, unemployment, war, 9/11, yet they are mashed up into different combinations, inserted into differing ideological matrixes. This sort of recombination has been associated with the avant garde (as if the avant garde were left, an 'as if' that refuses the more complex histories and settings of art). In new media, it still seems to be presumed to be progressive and new, a way to combat the Right, a presumption itself dependent on a prior forgetting.

Comments

[Dale]

Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that the very plenitude of factoids, fragments, and decontextualized representations make remembering difficult. The more nuggets of material are out there in the Internet archive, the more difficult it is to trace a narrative that would bind them together into complex aggregates -- there are simply way too many choices to make.

These nuggets look back at us, mute, poker-faced, and neutral, refusing to divulge their "secrets," which are in fact etched right on their surface. It's just that those secrets only take on signification once they're reinscribed in a narrative, and with the surfeit of choices, we may accidentally incribe the "wrong" narrative, trace the wrong trajectory back through the archive.