Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Delete

In Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger presents a well-constructed argument in relation to the ever-expanding shift towards digitalising every aspect of our lives. The book unfolds in three stages. First, Mayer-Schönberger sets out to establish how and why our digital age has made it so that ‘forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default’ (p. 2). He details at length the functions human memory serves, and why impediments to forgetting are problematic. Next, the author examines elements considered to be at the heart of his argument in Delete, that the digitisation of memory and the barriers it presents for ‘forgetting’ affect two important aspects of human life—what he calls the ‘power’ and ‘time’ dimension. And last, Mayer-Schönberger attempts to answer what society can do in response to this shift towards an externalisation of our memories. Delete starts with a chronicle of...

Argument (complex analysis) · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Data mining · Dimension (graph theory) · Epistemology · Forgetting · Power (physics) · Relation (database) · Virtue · Computer Science · Digital Media and Philosophy · Mathematics · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology