This project will produce a research agenda to study the emergent problem of the erosion of social forgetfulness, a problem that has received little attention, and yet, threatens a value fundamental to American culture and history. Today the rapid spread of information and communication technologies has been accompanied by a redrawing of the boundaries between the remembered and the forgotten, between that which is included and that which is excluded from the permanent record. As storage technologies have gained in practicality and dropped in price, the shift to an electronic medium has changed the default position from one of forgetfulness to one of remembering. The importance of this shift can be seen in recent policies that mandate that telecommunications operators, for law enforcement purposes, preserve data for increased periods of time; by technologies that, in order to provide businesses with sharp pictures of consumptions patterns and fraud, mine extended time series; and by the attention paid to metadata schemas whose goal is to increase the long-term value of these electronic memories. Commentators have typically portrayed the protection of forgetfulness as a matter of balancing individual privacy against such social goods as law enforcement, government efficiency, or national security. But in this form of analysis such social needs almost inevitably overpower the need of individuals. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, this project will proceed within a framework where collective needs for forgetting are explicitly balanced against collective needs for accountability. It will thus further an understanding of forgetting as a positive social good, one that may promote the development of the kinds of individuals necessary for democracy, rather than as a failure of memory and inclusiveness. To achieve these goals, the project will establish an intellectual agenda, identify a community of researchers, and develop a research program on the design of socio-technical infrastructures enabling forgetting and exclusion. An important component of this process will be an invitational interdisciplinary two-day workshop where researchers in the fields of policy, law, cognitive science, communication, and geography will discuss and delineate the contours of future research, theoretical, methodological, and empirical, in this area. These activities will lay the groundwork necessary for submitting a full research proposal to the Human and Social Dynamics program in 2007.
