Over at Spirits Dancing, Hilary Talbot wonders if the realtime web should be able to forget:
In real life forgetting is a way of filtering out what is not important, or that which we don’t care to remember. We act on the assumption that much of what we say and do will not be remembered either by us or others. Forgetting seems to me to be both a filter to enable us to remember what is important, and a kind of safety valve. Our heads would likely burst if we were able to search and remember everything.
This is also the subject of a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age:
Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.
Viktor argues that the web should forget, and his proposed solution is “expiration dates on information.” Later next month, Nora will interview Viktor Mayer-Schönberger about how this might work, and what gets lost when digital technology allows us to have perfect recall. We’ll post the interview here then, but in the meantime, what do you think?
How long should the web remember? Have you been haunted by the digital skeletons in your internet closet? Leave your comments below.
[via voices.allthingsd.com, hat tip to domideas]
[original image by freeparking]
just read a great article on this in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-0…
Drop.io's deletion of files that are 1 year of age unless otherwise specified by a user is an intriguing idea.
I saw that the other day. I have become intrigued by a related idea: that in an age when storage is cheap and we can–and do–document the minutiae of our lives, are we in danger of losing the distinction between 'recording' and 'remembering'…
I have mixed opinions on this. On one hand, there are some things we would just as well forget, like our high school days, or some goofy thing we did similar to some scenes in National Lampoon's "Animal House".
On the other hand, if we picked and choose what to forget, we would have a fragmented history of who we are. Sure, the web can filter out the bad, but it can also filter out the good, and that is not necessarily a great thing.
When it comes to personal memories and experiences, NO ONE (not even the powers that be) can take THAT away from you.
I'm always going to ask the governance question: Who gets to decide when something should be expired?
When you tell me something it is *ME*, not the person speaking, that decides when something expires from my own brain. If it is the sender, not the receiver, then this becomes in technology something very different than what we have in real life.
We need to discuss unintended consequences of how one might choose to implement any given type of system, especially if we are allowing the senders any control. Is there metadata that says "please expire this" set by the sender, or would someone (likely a politician trying to be less accountable) propose a DRM system such that our technology disregards the instructions of the owners of the technology in order to delete things.
Remember: content, digital or otherwise, is passive. It can contain instructions, but cannot execute them alone. Executing these instructions eithor requires the agreement of the owner of some computing hardware, or it requires that someone other than the owner be in control of that hardware against the interests of the owner. This isn't "magic", and when discussing these things we need to always talk in terms of science and not science fiction.
There are many well-intentioned justifications for revoking control over technology from their owners, and all of them end up having far more harmful unintended consequences than the "benefits" of the intended consequences.
This question of the web forgetting is too complex to answer yes or no. I have been thinking about this for some time and a few years ago came up with the concept of a persistence continuum to try to get my head around it. In this context I take 'the web' to mean any data transmitted electronically. Roughly I tried to relate how long data should be kept to the formality surrounding its creation. Overly simplified, immediate messaging data should not be retained after the conversation has ended and documentation of formal projects should be kept until deemed out of date or of no historical value.