What is Adaptive Forgetting

Mass and partial forgetting in electronic hive minds (shared consciousness enabled through socio-technical spaces, social media, and information and communications technology [ICT]) is conceptualized as something gradual and organic based on the functions of human memory and accelerated in other cases, depending on the adaptive needs of the EHM. How EHMs form, the proclivity to certain attitudes, favored meta-narratives, the exposure to a wide range of ideas (vs. filter bubbles), and other aspects affect what is retained and what is forgotten. This sheds some light on how some EHMs may coordinate to maintain memory on “critical issues” and “issues of facts” and the roles of those who act as “folk” historians and commemorators and the roles of technology as affordance/enablement and constraint. This work focuses on the hard effort of maintaining collective memory in the ephemera of transient EHMs. Methods for identifying blind spots and invisible spaces in memory in EHMs are suggested, and this method is applied in a walk-through of a portion of a star-based fandom and followership-based EHM. This chapter explores some of the nature of forgetting in EHMs.