ESPOSITO, Elena, 2002. Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1557. ISBN 978-3-518-29157-3.
Translated from the Italian by Alessandra Corti. With a preface by Jan Assmann.
Our society has lost the traditional meaning of memory of ancient and pre-modern societies: the idea that memory – even more fundamental than for preserving individual memories – serves to give order to the cosmos and to provide guidelines for thought and action. The forms and strength of this memory are related to the available communication media: from writing to mass media and recent electronic technologies. These media, which allow much more to be remembered and forgotten, demand increasingly complex social structures. But how then is the memory of our informatized technical society characterized?
Review note for Frankfurter Rundschau, 25.05.2002 perlentaucher 
The fundamental insight of Elena Esposito, inspired by Niklas Luhmann, is that memory by no means leads into the past: it only does so, always present, explains reviewer Niels Werber. There is a need for a divestment of memory, and for this there are archives and media that allow the past and possibly the forgotten to be updated again and again. This also applies to social memory, which produces nothing but present constructions of the past. Esposito attempts to think together cultural history, media, and the evolution of social forms of differentiation, which, as the reviewer points out, leads on the one hand to "brilliant insights," but on the other hand also to many a "forced abstraction." Esposito sees the present in the sign of the search engine: it networks, always only up-to-date, anew. Old memory models, registers and catalogs, have had their day. Whether or not this description is appropriate, says Werber, will be determined by the memory of the future, in which this book will or will not appear.