[Sigia-l] The Art of Forgetting...

[Ziya Oz]

"As humans we have the capacity to remember ­ and to forget. For millennia
remembering was hard, and forgetting easy. By default, we would forget.
Digital technology has inverted this. Today, with affordable storage,
effortless retrieval and global access remembering has become the default,
for us individually and for society as a whole. We store our digital photos
irrespective of whether they are good or not - because even choosing which
to throw away is too time-consuming, and keep different versions of the
documents we work on, just in case we ever need to go back to an earlier
one. Google saves every search query, and millions of video surveillance
cameras retain our movements. In this article I analyze this shift and link
it to technological innovation and information economics. Then I suggest why
we may want to worry about the shift, and call for what I term data ecology.
In contrast to others I do not call for comprehensive new laws or
constitutional adjudication. Instead I propose a simple rule that reinstates
the default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia, and
I show how a combination of law and technology can achieve this shift."


Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

<http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-022>

Implausible or a mirror of the design process: constraint-based omission?

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Ziya

In design, interaction is the last resort.