Our society has lost the traditional sense of memory that characterized ancient and pre-modern societies: the idea that memory - even more fundamentally than for the preservation of individual recollections - serves to give order to the cosmos and provide guidelines for thinking and acting. The forms and strength of this memory are linked to the available communication media: from writing to mass media and the latest electronic technologies. These media, which allow for much more to be remembered and forgotten, require increasingly complex social structures. So how is the memory of our computerized technical society characterized? How much must it be able to forget in order to retain orientation in a chaotic and self-referential world, thus still being able to remember?.