November 6, 2009, 11:58 am
The Virtue of Forgetting
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Books and Articles, Technology
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of the newly published Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, points out that for humans, forgetting is an important way of organizing and prioritizing information. Digital storage, however, has made forgetting almost impossible — yet what is stored is devoid of context and may not apply to the individual of the present.
In an interview with Nora Young on the CBC radio show Spark 90, Mayer-Schönberger elaborates on the cognitive issues of memory and what this means for Google, social networking web sites, and other digital spaces:
Now today there are few human beings who, for biological reasons, cannot forget. What sounds like a blessing, they certainly do remember where they parked their car in a shopping mall. It turns out that they have tremendous difficulties in acting in time, in deciding in time, because they remember all their bad, failed decisions in the past, and therefore hesitate to make a decision in the present.
Because they’re forever tethered to the past, they can’t act, they can’t stay put in the present, and they can’t imagine the future. I fear that with digital comprehensive memory, we might resemble these human beings, and we might lose our ability to act in time….
[I]f you ask young people who share a lot of information on social networking sites, and YouTube, Flickr, and so forth, they still are concerned about their informational privacy…. The problem is in a lot of circumstances, young and older people don’t realize when they share information on the Internet that this information not only is shared with potentially everybody, but that this will also remain accessible potentially for a very long period of time.
Once we begin to become aware of these implications, once we begin to acknowledge and understand that digital memory is comprehensive and enduring, we may become extremely more cautious in what we do online.
Mayer-Schönberger proposes that online information be associated with an expiry date, an idea that is being adopted by some social networking sites:
What I want is a world that is teeming with information sharing and information exchange, of experiences being shared among people, but also a world in which we are aware that information is not endless, but has a life span, just like the yogurt in our refrigerator might expire over time.
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