The Relevance of Relevance: Forgetting Strategies and Contingency in Postmodern Memory

We live in a “search engine society”. Underlying this self-description of post-modern society there is the crucial dependency of social memory from archives. Apart from moral and legal concerns, search engines are sociologically intriguing subject because of their close connection with the evolution of social memory. In this contribution I argue that search engines are non-semantic indexing systems which turn the circular interplay between users and the machine into a cybernetic system. The main function of this cybernetic system is to minimize the deviation from a difference, that between relevant and not-relevant. Through mechanical archives, post-modern social memory can cope with increasing knowledge complexity. The main challenge in this respect is how to preserve the capability of discarding in order to produce information.