2 july 2011, should I delete this blog ?

Sometimes you just read a fabulous thought-provoking article, like this. I have mused myself on the nature of memory, recalling vividly something bob dylan once said when refusing to be photographed, protesting that every picture takes away a piece of the soul. More accurate is a piece of your memory, as, like all parts of the body, memory cells have a finite existence, of some seven years. The brain therefore needs to make daily decisions on which memories to keep, and which will die. Looking at photos burns an old memory onto a new cell, skewing the brain's process. Viktor mayer-schönberger takes this a step further, by noting that in the digital age we CAN keep it all. So can others: quite literally, google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves. I thought immediately of the photos in my album, that I thought so carefully about taking, and arranged so painstakingly. Now we snap absolutely everything, and so have tens of thousands on the computer somewhere; and my album just stops about 3 years ago. I started this blog partly to remember thoughts I knew I'd forget, or never develop. Forgetting, says vms, the three seconds it takes to choose, has become too expensive for people. I found it a striking thought that we have lost the rather valuable capacity to forget. Now we walk around with everything, like a tortoise with a two-ton house, our every day burdened by our inability to delete, or to feel we have not rallied it sufficiently to our mind to make a decision. You can't know everything though, nor even remember all you once knew. No pity perhaps.