JSTOR Daily – Forgetting is beneficial for the human brain. But the internet has made it harder to let go of painful or problematic memories. “Every year, some thousands of sites—including ones with unique information—go offline. Countless further webpages become inaccessible; instead of information, users encounter error messages. Where some commentators may lament yet another black hole in the slowly rotting Internet, I actually feel okay. Of course, I, too, dread broken links and dead servers. But I also know: Forgetting is important. In fact, as I argued in my book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” all through human history, humans reserved remembering for the things that really mattered to them and forgot the rest. Now the internet is making forgetting a lot harder…”