“Global forgetting” and extreme communicative events

Abstract

This essay describes the scientific evidence on the decline in memory and focus caused by the hyperstimulation of digital media – herein referred to as “global forgetting”. It is argued that this is not limited to individual psychoneurological aspects, but rather to contemporary sociocultural processes constituted and fed by convergent technical, political and economic vectors. The ethics of hyperstimulation through the use of powerful technical devices of communicative curation are discussed, which result in the erasure of references that constitute collective identity and facilitate the acceptance of disinformational narratives. In this context, we conceive of this dynamic of erasure and destruction of references as a positive sociotechnical process – and not just as a mere casual consequence.

We use the emblematic case of the “people’s radio” in the rise of Nazism, showing how extreme communicative events operate through dissent and opposition of anti-versions (historical/scientific denialism), based on disinformation that incites hatred (conspiracy theories) and simplifies complex scenarios in the construction of post-truths. We question the ethics of contemporary digital technologies that, in parallel, cultivate the emptying of individual and collective memory through “global forgetting” with the purpose of mischaracterizing the past and psychically mitigating the cognitive dissonance derived from contradictions with the factual.

We thus reject the thesis of fortuitous forgetting, as a mere gap or residue resulting from unrelated casual psychotechnical phenomena.

In summary, we point to the interconnection between “global forgetting”, denialisms and post-truths - interdependent in causalities, purposes and dynamics.