contemplect.

I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone.

Scientists are finding parallels between why babies forget misfortune and why crash victims can't remember the accident. A third study is uncovering the mechanism that prevents many teenagers from forgetting – causing adolescent anxiety, depression and addiction – and its similarities to post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history. We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.

‘I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Innovation is often meant to improve upon what came before. But sometimes the aim of progress is to help us appreciate what we already have, or pine for what we lost... People who have for the past fifteen years acclimated to the ephemeral and limitless nature of digital goods are reacquiring a taste for things that feel enduring, authentic, and worth keeping. In effect, we are harnessing today's technology to instill a sense of permanence in our lives.

We need the results of scientific work, once published, to stay as they were published.

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Our behaviors change, as do the things we like, yet every aspect of a person that is shared through these services goes toward creating what is intended to be a durable record, one that is catalogued and indexed for later viewing on Facebook or Google or Twitter. And permanence, by its nature, offers a pretense of truth. This Spotify stream and those Facebook photos and the links they shared are who that person really is, right? Or at least close enough?

Fear begins and ends with the desire to be secure; inward and outward security, with the desire to be certain, to have permanency. The continuity of permanence is sought in every direction, in virtue, in relationship, in action, in experience, in knowledge, in outward and inward things. To find and be secure is the everlasting cry. It is this insistent demand that breeds fear.

The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks… It is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting.

The Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.