Ask your self what day is it today? Did you come up with the answer by checking your electronic device such as your mobile phone, or did you seem to find the answer by remembering yesterdays date? Well if you remembered because of yesterdays date congratulations, because it may not be long before naturally remembering something will be the thing of the past, at least that’s what Mayer-Schonberg claims in his book, Delete: Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.

 Forgetting is a scary concept; no college student would want to forget what he or she studied for on a test, and no man would dare forget his anniversary. So wouldn’t remembering everything be great? Of course, however, it is theoretically impossible to remember everything in our lives.  Depressed? Well don’t be, because that’s where online digital memory such as the “cloud,” come into play by storing much of our lives good or bad memories. In Schonberg’s book, the human use of ‘external memory’ has been used for centuries, either by carvings on a wall, writing in scrolls or the basic diary entry. However, Schonberg notes, “Even though we have may have stored it, analog information that cannot be retrieved easily in practical terms is no different than being forgotten. In contrast revival from digital memory is vastly easier, cheaper, and swifter . . .”

Digital memory sounds great then, its fast, cheap, and easy to use. Just by going on your e-mail or Facebook you can find and be reminded of your last message you sent to that important person, or the obnoxious pictures of your spring break in Mexico. However, don’t be fooled Schonberg points out the nasty side of our growing use of digital memory by using the story of Stacy Snyder. Snyder was aspiring to become a teacher, but then her dream fell short when her mentors found a picture she posted on her MySpace page showing herself in a drunken state. She was then barred from becoming a teacher due to her past, ultimately making her want to forget what the Internet didn’t.

Today’s society is now an information-crazed culture, where to know more is better. The notion of knowledge excites us and pushes us to store and find more things, although even when its not justified. For example, the book alludes to governments using personal information to keep tabs on people for national security. Many would find this act intrusive and/or undemocratic. The same can be said when you go to a club in Victoria, where by a swipe of you I.D. the computer brings up all your personal information and stores it in a massive external hard-drive. This can also be seen as a good thing as the government can closely monitor alleged criminals or a club can keep out a thug, but ultimately it is seen as “societies ability to forget has become suspended.”

With ever growing reliance on digital memory, it is starting to make people think twice about the way they use it. Many people may now stop posting pictures or material that maybe unpleasant to other viewers on vulnerable digital memory services, in fear of its future repercussion or scrutiny. The major impact of such action is that it counters the exact purpose of digital memory, to not forget memories by uploading them digitally. The book points out; the concern of moderating material can lead to an un-natural “perfect memory.” To counter such un-natural memory, Schonberg suggest that to balance what we digitally remember, is to set an expiration date on the memories we capture, whether it be images, or texts.  The owner would ultimately decide whether how long to keep the item be only a year, to perhaps fifty years for very memorable items. Schonberg’s idea is for the operator to think about the act of forgetting rather than relying on a computer to remember for us. However, to counter this argument, the expiration date theory could be abused. Take for example, if this technology was around during the Second World War especially in the hands of the German Nazi’s what would happen to images and texts of the Holocaust or other atrocities? Ultimately not having an expiration on specific past events has led to us remember significant events far greater if we were to put on an expiration date.

Schonberg’s book Delete ultimately opens the thought of possible future human functioning by relying on the growing development of digital memory to serve as unlimited memory. This unlimited memory will not only deprive us from using are cognitive memory, but it will lead us into a path of forgetting to ‘forget.’