The advantages of amnesia – The Boston Globe
"Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story "Funes the Memorious," about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form – or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. "What you do online is potentially there forever," says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. "Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo – but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere."
The personal costs of this reality are clear, but there may be broader social costs as well. "What a lot of people forget – no pun intended – is that forgetting is hard-wired," says Mayer-Schönberger. "Cognitively and sociologically, we’ve never had to develop the capacity to forget or to put things in temporal perspective, because forgetting was built in biologically."
We are basically designed to forget individually but the shared consciousness has continued over time .We have had tons of accumulated information which will continue to grow even if we forget our individual masses of information .This is perhaps what we call our culture or heritage.
