I’m proud to present a Q&A transcript with the New School for Social Research’s Professor Kate Eichhorn, author of The End of Forgettting.
We spoke earlier this year to discuss who gets to tell their own story in the age of social media, what are the consequences to such stories being shared, and what power do we have to forget or be forgotten in this new digital era? This conversation formed the basis for an instalment of “Scripturient”, my column in Information Professional magazine, but now you can read a Q&A expanding on that text, below.
Matt: When did the idea for The End of Forgetting coalesce?
Kate: Prior to working on this book, I had been thinking about and writing about archives for many years. There was a moment when I literally asked myself, what’s after archives? I immediately thought, it’s forgetting. But all of my colleagues who work in archives were very quick to remind me that the archive and forgetting are inextricably linked. So, this book was a kind of natural extension of my earlier work on archives. But the book, while not a personal book, is informed by personal circumstances. On the one hand, when I started working on the book, my kids were maybe 11 and 13, so I was certainly thinking about the tween girls and their relationship to social media. As a parent, I also started to think about how different my life would have been had I been on social media when I was their age. I am almost certain that I would have either said or done things I would have regretted and that there would have been consequences.
Read more
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 