Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Forgetting a virtue? Absolutely. Think about it - imagine if you could remember every moment of every day of your life - how would you separate what was meaningful (signal) from what wasn't (noise). Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's book cites the life story of a woman who has that ability - and she hates every second of her life.  Human psychology is designed toward forgetting - not because our brains have limited capacity but because some things (traumas, for example), need to be forgotten lest they ensnare us. WE are designed for repression as a survival mechanism. So what happens, asks Mayer-Schonberger, when digital technology (think lifebloggers) makes perfect memory possible, on the one hand, and forgetting (think finding a compromising photo from 10 years ago, or a youthful membership in a sectarian organization) impossible? Bad things, he says, and he's dead right. "First, comprehensive digital memory may exacerbate the human difficulty of putting past events in proper temporal sequence. Second, digital remembering may confront us with too much of our past and impede our ability to decide and act. Third, when confronted with digital memory that conflicts with our human recollection of events, we may lose trust in our own remembering... As digital remembering relentlessly exposes discrepancies between factual bits and our own human recall, what we may lose in the process is trust in the past as we remember it". This point is almost Proustian - what do we prefer, a video of Swann's life or the beauty and drama of the memories, triggered by a madeleine, not an "enter" key? Can digital remembering, of any sort, substitute for the wave of associations (2500 pages worth) of memories triggered by the madeleine? Could anything be worse than having to revisit every one of our failures, our fears - at every hour of every day? I'll hit that "delete" button, thanks.