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The paper grapples with the cultural implications brought about by the "right to be forgotten" ruled by the European Court of Justice in May 2014. The main argument developed at length in this paper is that we are witnessing a momentous shift in the order of social memory, from an old-age paradigm of anamnesis characterized by a will to memory against the background set by a default of forgetting towards a paradigm of public amnesia characterized by a quest for privacy against an ever-expanding digital memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the twin premises of the historicity and mediality of memory -- individual and collective alike --, this study makes an analytic incursion in the history of memory in terms of the technological media of storing knowledge about the past, i.e. a media-history of memory. The paper aims, in the opening act, at shedding light on the inextricable relationship between memory and the bio-cultural technology available for preserving knowledge, and thus saving the past from oblivion. The study moves on to trace out the succession of the different "technological regimes of memory" emerged in human history, examining how the technology of memory influenced both the formal structure and the modus operandi of collective memory, that is to say, both its structural framework and its regime of functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective memory, despite its status as patrimonial notion within sociological tradition, recently escaped this rigid disciplinary straitjacket, becoming a cardinal concept in the contemporary discourse of social sciences and humanities. Understanding the nature of collective memory cannot be reached before clarifying the relation between memory and history. This paper analyzes the different configurations under which the relationship between history and collective memory evolved throughout time. The central argument advances the idea that collective memory crystallizes at the area of confluence between history and mythistory, taking historical facts from the former, and organizing them according to the mythical logic of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]