The Right to be Forgotten in Post-Scarcity Culture

Abstract

My aim here is not to consider European legislative attempts to introduce a ‘right to be forgotten’ in terms of their strictly legal aims to limit the use of personal information in current data processing systems and offer data subjects additional control over the fate of their personal data. Rather, my perspective is one developed from the view of Digital Memory Studies: to treat the RtbF, in an extended, symbolic sense, as symptomatic of a sense of a loss of control over hyperconnectivity — a generalized compulsion to be continually connected via increasingly portable and pervasive digital networks.