Slashdot Mirror
The End of Forgetting
Hugh Pickens recommends a long piece in last week's NY Times Magazine covering a wide swath of research and thinking in the US and elsewhere on the subject of the perils to society of recording everything permanently, and the idea that perhaps we ought to build forgetting into the Internet. "We've known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism, and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is, at an almost existential level, threatening to our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew. In a recent book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites the case of Stacy Snyder — who was denied a teaching certificate on the basis of a single photo on MySpace — as a reminder of the importance of 'societal forgetting.' By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.' In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded 'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.' He concludes that 'without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.'"
I got hit with a login when I tried to use the link in the summary but was able to surf to this link. You'll get a splash advertisement for the Economist or something but I'd wager most people would tolerate that more than logging in.
My work here is dung.
This article made me wish I had posted this as Anonymous Coward...
/thread
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.'
But what if there is no negative response to your behavior? I mean, in the situation quoted in the summary there was no illegal activity. A high school teacher went to a party and got drunk. Nothing illegal there. Sounds like she had some fun (the horror!). So let's assume no picture was taken and no picture was posted on MySpace and she wasn't terminated from her teaching position or dropped from her enrollment in teaching. What negative response would she receive that would stop her from ever doing that again?
None.
Because there shouldn't be a negative response to that. This is some scarlet letter bullshit where no laws are broken but you've offended someone's morals even though it was on your own time and therefore you should be fired. This isn't about forgetting on the web, it's about managing your public image. Some people are slow to catch on that if it's on the internet, the world can see it. So don't put your dirty laundry on the internet. There are plenty of bumps on the social side of things. Plenty of embarrassing social gaffs on sites like MySpace and Facebook but for things like forums and Slashdot it's great that everything is permanently remembered for reference in the future.
Really this is just the old Facebook privacy issue and their total abuse of their clients. Balancing features with privacy is nothing new -- it's just on a much much larger level now.
My work here is dung.
What needs to change is the social practice of judging ppl too harshely, not the storage value of the internet.
Maybe this kind of thing will cause a shift in people's opinions. Perhaps when people realize that everybody has made bad decisions in their life, everybody's got too drunk and done something stupid and nobody is perfect, the world will be a better place for it.
Using Google's advanced search to filter out old crap is a major advantage when searching for technical solutions. It means you only get recent fixes / hacks / workarounds / patches. Not all the old stuff that addressed problems with beta versions from 2005. This is one area where Google's search algorithm falls down - by ranking pages with more links, they promote old stuff over new stuff. While that is useful sometimes, I wish there was the option for a decay (or timeout) function into their page-rank algorithms to reward contemporary information.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If the internet remembered everything to begin with, the invention of deletion would be the revolution.
What use does remembering have if you can't distinguish what is important?
Nature is fully capable of remembering, yet it has built us to forget.
Mother nature knows best. Let go of what doesn't matter. Forgive and forget. We need to trust in the process (or whatever) that created us. Wanting to retain everything is simply being greedy, and no good will come of it.
Do what I do. I exist and consume services. I don't put my name against anything online. Even if you found me, you wouldn't know anything about me. It's bound to pay off once every second person has crap coming up when they are googled. I automatically eliminate at least half the competition this way.
The problem is that not everyone has been recorded on the Internet doing something which might meet the disapproval of others, even though everyone has done such a thing. Once no-one is able to cast the first stone, everyone's equal again.
The winners are only those who aren't caught - usually by chance rather than design - and those who have the influence to erase history.
Perhaps one day a student union of a first tier college will be enlightened and recommend that all its members take one photo of themselves naked cuddling a blow-up doll and holding a bottle of vodka. If this practice spreads like the spawn of Satan that was Facebook, suddenly employers will find that all their candidates have the naked-sheep-vodka pose. Demand > supply of Chrisian virgin angels. Attitude readjusted.
I realise this is all very well for me to say, but I've always known that this was the case and acted accordingly. On a simple level, I've never said anything online that I wouldn't say to my mother or I wouldn't be prepared to stand behind in future. There is no such thing as anonymity on the 'net, never has been. That's the reason why I don't have alt's. There isn't anything to gain.
I do recognise however that most of the non-geek audience won't have thought of this, and may be bitten, but them's the breaks IMO. The expectation of anonymity is no excuse for acting like an idiot. That said my hormones had already raged. Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.
'without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.'
Forgiving should never be based on forgetting.
Forgive, yes - give another chance, people change, mistakes of the past should not be repeated.
Forget? - This is a guaranteed method to repeat the mistakes of the past.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If everyone was used to forgiving and forgetting because it was something available to them, they'll just have to get used to forgiving without forgetting. It'll happen to everyone at some point, and make everyone used to it. People at the outer edge will just have it bad.
I'd be appalled if anyone found out I used to program in Smalltalk.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
that I like this system, especially because nerds will probably know better, but the "socially adept" will probably be raped many times over the period of their lives about the time they got drunk, their vomit, their stupid tweetz, etcs. ha
I bet BP and politicians would back this "forgetting" thing...
I think in many ways it is better to have all this information stored forever. As with most decisions, the more information you have the more informed a decision you can make...
I think the argument that people forget and therefore can forgive is true, but I think we need to then adapt how we forgive. If we accept that people change, then it doesn't matter that we have a store of someone's past actions - we can let then 'reinvent' themselves while still knowing where they came from.
Right now that may be difficult, but that's because the internet is still a relatively new phenomena in Human history. As we progress, I assume we'll evolve to accept that all our actions are remembered indefinitely, and mature to not let past events completely out way current ones.
Maybe it's more of a problem with our two-faced, overly moralistic society. Instead of "forgetting" that other people started off young and exhibitionist, we should "remember" that many of the people bitching started off the same way too. And maybe those people should forgive other people when they realize they have their own faults. Or even better, not judge people according to their own personal moral codes.
>who was denied a teaching certificate on the basis of a single photo on MySpace
Could he not just log on and remove any damaging photos from his myspace before going for that all important work interview???
This sounds more like some noob not realizing the web is public domain.
If he really wanted the job, he could have changed temporarily his myspace to a marketing ad for the company he is trying to get into...show them he really is serious about getting the job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1
just another day at the races, by that read. almost nobody got hurt, only 1 lie was told. so, no need to change a thing. we feel 'better' about freedumb of the (bought&paidfor) mediahhaha already.
I only hope that I would forget that I can forget something.
It is not nice at all to notice you have forgot something important, you just can not recall the whole context.
But all data. We store data without regard for it's lifetime, filling up harddrives which then need to be backed up. In some cases, we have data which has existed for 15 years or more. We dare not delete it, because it might someday be useful, but in the meantime it takes up disk storage space which costs extreme amounts of money to maintain.
What we need is a built in expiration date, known to all. When the file is written to disk, it is done so with a default expiration date. When that date comes, it is naturally deleted. Perhaps different data sets have different dates.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What if you were arrested for shoplifiting in a small town where the newspaper publishes the daily arrest record online? Later you are convicted and your sentence includes getting your record expunged once you serve your community service. However, the record in the paper of your arrest is not. The town doesn't have the power to tell the paper to expunge your record. A background check might find that arrest, but not evidence of the outcome. Now you could lose jobs, security clearences all for something that is not supposed to exist. When your record is expunged, you are supposed to be able to answer no to having been arrested, but the internet says otherwise.
There is a computer scientist with a reasonable international reputation with the same name as me. Because I have no presence and he avoids pictures I have had a number of people assume that I am him!
One certainly does have to manage their public image on the interwebs. It's out there forever. I am a high school teacher. I do have a facebook account. And yes, Virginia, I do watch what's out there and what gets shared, tagged, posted, etc. I have asked friends and students to mind what they post and to take things down I don't want published. I don't know if it's a generational thing. I've telecommunicated since the days of 300 baud dialup and BBSes. I've largely kept my online persona in good repair. I do watch what I type because my students can find me online in a pinch, so I censor my tweets, etc. I don't know if kids are as concerned. Today's infrastructure for communication is way different for my students. Texts, tweets, FB postings, forums, and email are all acceptable forms of meaningful communication. Though I think kids mainly use email as a digital bridge between them and us old fogeys. But in the end, it all has to be managed, cuz people DO judge. It's common sense. S
What we need is to ensure you can say anonymous online, or at least not have to use your real name. Online identitites are easy to reinvent, real ones aren't.
the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites the case of Stacy Snyder -- who was denied a teaching certificate on the basis of a single photo on MySpace
.jpg or it didn't happen. And no I have not soiled myself by having a myspace account.
I tried google images and I'm having trouble figuring which one I wouldn't hire. All of them? The woman posing with several different dogs? (how many does she own, anyway?) The woman singing in front of a well known german political party symbol? The woman wearing a pirate hat drinking from a "goodbur" cup? The woman posing (fully clothed) in a tutu? Then there's about ten other "Stacy Snyder" whom are smiling way too much, which you'd think would be OK for a teacher (unless of course they're the wrong race for racial quota reasons?)
Two other oddities. "cyberscholar" WTF is that? Also, in my youth, HR used to make fun of people whom submitted pictures of themselves posed in suit and tie with their resumes, don't they know we have to toss those out to prove we aren't discriminating based on race etc, but its OK for HR to look at all the pictures of women wearing pirate hats and hugging dogs?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
why not call it book burning? why not notice the association between the promotion of 'forgetting' with the release of the war crimes papers?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1
we always say we'll never forget what happened, then we allow it to happen again & again. it's in the manuals. may as well forget about everything, soon, again.
meanwhile (long enough to let your brain be re-soaped); the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If m
...In italy we tried to pass a law to make it illegal to write (news/internet/etc...) about illegal facts and refer to a single person after 2-3 years.
just to say, forgive and forget can be good (altrough it's not my opinion), but don't push it too far...
It sure would be nice if the gov't would "forget" the run-ins they had with me in my youth..
How is choosing to leave a photo of yourself skanking available online while applying to be a teacher about the intartubes "forgetting"?
Seems more to be about the broad being either very forgetful herself, or dim, or having poor judgement, any one of which should preclude her from being a teacher, quite in addition to the evidence of skankitude.
How is a picture of a person dressed as a pirate at halloween, holding a cup, evidence of skankitude? What are you like 8 yrs old? Afraid of girl cooties? Are you still smarting from that time that dog puppet made fun of your Darth Vader costume while waiting in line at the cineplex?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Everything posted is removed after interest has been lost in the subject.
It's quite the liberating and a zen-like experience to know the finity of your interaction.
In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten.
Um, no. In traditional societies, sins are remembered long past the lifetime of a person due to gossip, and continued gossip, and then oral history, their sins are immortalized in song, and eventually when people learned how to write, those songs were written down. To reinvent yourself in those days you used to have to move to another town. The only thing the Internet has done that is new is allow almost everyone on the planet access to every small town's gossip.
I do not agree with the outcome, but this has happened often enough that one would think most people would understand that you should exercise some restraint on your posts.
Most HS kids know that they need to control whats seen on their FB pages, and at 25 I would think this woman would have understood that also.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I am technically generation Y. I'm right on the border with generation X, so my first exposure to the Internet came at 1995 when I was in middle school. There is a marked difference between the older half and the younger half of gen Y in how we view the Internet. The younger half puts it all out there without any attempt to make it hard for busy bodies and ne'erdowells to connect the dots or find them. When people act like this culture of letting it all hang out online is something inherent to the Internet, I take great offense to that because I am old enough to remember how mainstream culture first interacted with the Internet and it was with a hell of a lot more sense than we often have today.
The fact is that society is getting dumber. Systematically dumber. I know this not just from watching how my own generation is starting to behave, but from listening to how my dad recounts how law enforcement **used to be**. He was a cop in the post-Vietnam era. He retired in 1996 and has very little good to say about how cops behave today. No common sense, no independent thought, no questioning whether following orders actually helps the rule of law. It touches everything. Our society is getting dumber, more legalistic and less capable of sensible behavior.
It's also getting a lot more judgmental. I think this is a natural reaction to people seeing all of this stuff that went on behind closed doors, but the fact remains that either people have to learn how to compartmentalize behavior (like disregard a politician's past, if they have what it takes to be an effect, informed leader) or actually dramatically reduce the visibility-by-internet of society.
the problem really is that we are still on the verge of change. the people making decisions like not hiring stacy are still holding to the old way of thinking. once we reach a point where those people have grown up with the internet, once they're lives are out there all the time too, this won't be an issue. we'll all have a greater understanding of indiscretion then.
Our culture will adapt to this new environment, so that indescretions imbuned on the internet will be less influential in determining a persons character.
How many times do you hear a statement like, "he never drinks," being used as a euphemism for, "he is a moral and upstanding citizen" or something to that effect? Americans are being conditioned to think that going to a party and using drugs reflects negatively on a person. If the media is to be believed, then having a beer after work is something that you need to hide from your boss, friends, and family, and the only people who are going to join you are lonely and depressed.
Palm trees and 8
I mean, we can forget about war and all the bad things in life, because its not like we have painting and books depicting what happens or anything. Because we dont have a video of Bill Gates saying we only need 64kb of ram....
I think this guy got stung because he was stupid, but is now clever enough to realise he can make some money out it by becoming a "Expert on forgetfulness and the solidarity of the state of the internet". Que interviews with newspapers and tv stations.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
The issue isn't one of morality. The issue is that the vast majority of people do not follow the rules they espouse. That's why people hate the internet "memory." It exposes them for who they are, or at least who they used to be. The immediacy of information connects us with the past, and can help us make better decisions for the future. CIA coups used to be considered conspiracy theories, but now anyone can look at the source documents for themselves. News stories about what someone reportedly said are routinely dismissed, but a video of the same event makes refuting history much more difficult. In short, reality is much harder to dismiss for the people who are genuinely interested to find out what that is.
So, I'd rather not build in forgetting. I'd rather people learn to be more accepting of everyone and more skeptical of every asshole who wants to impose their morality on others. The ubiquity of distributed recording devices, and the network to freely share that media, is the most dangerous threat to the status quo since the scientific method, and for the same reason: it trades authority and mysticism for reality and results.
The reason humans forget things is because we are constantly learning new things. If older information is constantly reused, it is considered 'important' and we keep it around. Anything that doesn't matter gets pushed aside to make way for new things. Most of the time, we'll consider those things forgotten, yet we sometimes find that, under the right circumstances, remembering these is still possible. The internet works essentially the same way. If the only mention of you on the web is that time you got arrested for vandalism in high school, you can fix that the same way you'd fix a relationship with a high school classmate who only remembered that fact. Show them that you've changed by creating new content that paints you in a more positive light. Maintaining your public image is an important skill, and for certain positions, it even makes sense for employers to screen for it.
Why don't we just get rid of them? I mean who really needs to remember what everyone did long ago. That's SO yesterday.
The original article, and most of the posts here, can be used to illustrate another important issue: if one makes snap judgments based on partial information, it is easy to be misled. Following the links all the way to http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/Decision%202008.12.03.pdf (the judge's decision) reveals that the plaintiff failed to achieve a satisfactory rating during student teaching, which contributed to her not getting a teaching certificate. Snyder and Mayer-Schoenberger failed to include that inconvenient fact.
Perhaps before jumping into a stranger's fight (or, in this case, flaming about narrow-minded opposition to free speech), we should take the time to learn more of the facts.
The real problem is that we known deep down that we don't really change that much. (Oh, sure, we get older, and don't have as much wild sex as we used to or don't get drunk as often. But we still wish we could relive those glory days.) Rather than changing, most people reach a point where they prefer to justify their past behavior, rather than turn from it.
We're galled by the existence of those puritanical types who sit in judgement of us, and we would prefer that a record of our past not continue to exist because we know it still describes us today.
So this makes me think of my academic background. When I was first in college back in the early 90's I didn't do well. (I didn't care because I had no expectations of anything beyond a BA so who cares?) Anyway I got older and got bit by the physician bug. So 10 years after I got my BA I went back to school to take all of the premed course work. (I hadn't taken any of it as an undergrad) I was older and had all my shit together so surprise surprise I did extremely well on it and also did well on the MCAT. So given that were med schools willing to give me the benefit of the doubt since my undergrad coursework was 10-15 years old and that I was a different, far better student now? Of course not, as far as they care the ancient stuff(you know, courses taken when most of the other applicants were in middle school) counted just as much as the new stuff. (Actually more since I took more courses as an undergrad than as a post-bacc premed.) Oh how I wish they would "forget" or at least weigh the new stuff somewhat more heavily. (I mean since it was only a couple years old and in classes they cared about.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
This is about giving the elites a way to hide embarrassing items from their personal history.
Does this remove all the tagged photos on other people's accounts? What about posts you made on their wall? The results of tests and surveys you took?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just because we don't archive something doesn't mean everyone else wont. Facebook, google, the NSA... It's all going to be around permanently and there's nothing you can do about it, so I'd rather have it out there for everyone to see rather than build some BS system that gives people a false sense of security.
The Internet indeed does forget. Even the WayBack Machine can't help with everything.
Race results, runs, swims, triathlons, etc, quite often are only displayed through a database lookup. The caching engines that are simply following links have little hope in finding content that require POST style lookups.
I've had some success finding results from "wayback" if I can remember the race name and it happened to have it's own website (which not all races did in the mid 90's - some still don't). But for those races where all I have are vague memories of running a "5k somewhere in Denver in the 90's" - the Internet doesn't seem to remember any better than I do.
-CF
Ah, right, I see. If you image Google "Stacy Snyder" now, you'll find the innocent looking image that Snyder has left available. What you won't find is the skanked-up image that actually got her application rejected, which she has (belatedly) managed to elide from the 'tubes.
So, in fact, the 'tubes have forgotten the evidence. Wait... doesn't that completely refute the only shred of evidence behind the article? EPIC WIN for me, even if you noobs lack a mental cache.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Shouldn't we be responsible for the things we say and do? To let ourselves slip by when we have evidence of what makes us who we are is a way to prevent lying to yourself, especially if everyone else can see. I do think that there might be a legal recourse to prevent the impact of things you did when you were 16 to prevent losing an opportunity when your 30. A statute of limitations on information used to limit employment opportunities. Employment will not be denied due to race, religion, sex or informational history? Its a modern age, and we should have modern responsibilities that can contain modern technologies.
Rather then changing technology to something it is not suited for, maybe we should expect people to change? I think people will ( they already are!) start caring less about privacy and as a result they moral and behavioral standards will change. They old tart who snitched on the teacher dressed like bunny will eventually go. New generation couldn't care less about those things. Look how the notion of privacy has deteriorated - five years ago putting your name and resume on the web would have been unthinkable. Now even tarts have linkedin profiles. Give them a few years and they all dress like bunnies.
The solution is not to forget, but to ensure that people can't be discriminated against in this way. Employers should be permitted to look at past employment history and recommendations only. Personal information not explicitly granted by the individual should be off limits.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
we ought to build forgetting into the Internet
Bittorrent works fine for this, people seed what they think is good and dont see the crap. It effectively forgets the bad stuff.
On the human side, i used to wonder why the ancient greek philosophers where so great. But if you boil it down, its knowledge from about 500 BC to 500 AD that has been selectively filtered by humans since then, the good stuff gets remembered and eventually written down, the bad stuff doesnt.
Forgetting the crap is just as important as remembering the good stuff.
It may seem unfair, but I can assure you that employers type job candidates' names into Google and see what comes up.
At that point, the employer becomes judge and jury, potentially convicting you without a fair trial or even your knowledge.
Some might find dirt and dig deeper to realize it's someone else. Others will stop at the first red flag and shit-can the resume.
I've advised my kids of this but they won't listen and clearly no one's listening. Facebook and other similar sites are a disaster for privacy and personal freedom. And it's not Facebook's fault; it's the users posting incriminating pictures and comments that are at fault.
Telling someone to stop using Facebook is absurd. It's so wired into the psyche of its users that it's like detoxing a drug user. Yet getting off Facebook is the best possible you can do to protect your reputation.
The internet will never forget. You're better off not having things out there you'll regret later.
Fogetfullness...
At least have the (pro? con?) that not just the winners that write and rewrite history now. Put something in charge of writting what matter in what it happened (i.e. for old enough content, before deleting) and you will fall into the same again. The problem is not forgetting, is burying what is "true" with what is not.
Making The Internets "forgettable" is just putting a band-aid on torn limb.
Not to mention a flawed idea that sounds like something only a historical revisionist would come up with.
If anything there needs to be MORE transparency on EVERYONE'S actions. Particularly on actions of people in power and "deciders".
In time, such a practice might teach us to stop judging people only by their past mistakes and/or current status.
You know, not just ask "for that among you who is without sin to first cast the stone", but to give everyone a stone AND a bulls-eye on their forehead.
And then remind them of that other verse that goes "Don't judge, lest you be judged. And then I'll crack your fucking skull cause I too have a stone motherfucker. Amen.".
Naturally, there are those people who can't be reasoned with - but it's not like anything short of an actual stoning will work on them anyway.
Only, if you were to dig around in their closets you will surely find similar or worse skeletons.
And tossing hypocritical stones is just an exercise in pointlessness and waste of time and energy.
Or was that hypothetical stones?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
In America, we have passed laws that list people for the rest of their lives as felons, creating a permanent underclass that can only aspire to the very lowest forms of employment. Even then, they are accepted only if they are unopposed by higher class citizens. These people completely lose the ability to participate in the vast majority of attempts to better themselves.
These listings directly affect not only employment opportunities, but also credit scores, insurance rates, privacy (in many ways) and where people are allowed to live.
This society is learning how to use memory and identification together as the broadest, most effective cudgel possible. We have wholly abandoned the idea of rehabilitation in favor of retribution.
We are well into the process of hardcore stratification; worries about what might end up on a myspace page are part and parcel of the classing-is-good attitude that our society has assumed.
Because our society almost never revisits law, this situation is unlikely to reverse under almost any imaginable circumstance. Our citizens (and so our politicians) are pathologically unable to generalize in the way that our founders did, and so are perfectly willing to abandon any liberty or degree of freedom for any hint of safety, or what they perceive as safety, but isn't -- and that includes creating a hopeless underclass that lives under bridges.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh.. Just what we need. Make the internet like talking to Abe Simpson.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
But hang on a minute. It isn't the puritanical pricks who are posting those photos; I personally would never post any picture of anyone in a public place without their permission (if it's evidence of illegality, go to the police.) It's...the people who "know how to have a good time". And who are the people who post inappropriate images out of a desire to bully or mock? Check. Perhaps someone needs a slight values reassessment.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
EPIC WIN for me, even if you noobs lack a mental cache.
EPIC FAIL, dipshit.
http://www.podcastingnews.com/2007/12/30/myspace-party-pic-cost-stacy-snyder-job/
was she drunkenly flashing her tits to a camera and then posting it online? doing something illegal, and then stupid enough to post it for the world to see?
yeh, someone that stupid is exactly who i don't want influencing my kids, let her flip burgers with the rest of the waste in this society...
hey, the pope used to be a nazi, now he's pope.... (don't look at me, i didn't vote for him)
society doesn't forget... it forgives apparently...
p.s. if a future employer of mine is reading this, and you're not going to hire me because you can't seperate the interwebs from the "real world" then fuck you, i don't want to work for you anyway...
What we should have is 'societal ignoring' of things that are irrelevant to the situation at hand. You know, things like credit history or a piss test for a burger flipper at MickeyDees.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
So long as you did COBOL for money, you're allowed. People got rich writing COBOL. Smalltalk though...has anybody ever earned any money from it (teaching excluded)?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Seriously, it is feasible.
The problem is not so much about forgetting. It's about controlling the archives.
I had a very interesting case recently regarding a form for a government beaurocracy. They changed some details in the form and they wiped the old edition off the planet. The only reason I knew of the change is because I had printed it earlier. Pity I never saved a PDF of the original form.
I wrote a lot of stuff in the 1980s and 1990s under my full name. We just had university accounts then under true names. When the "public" got accounts they of course searched for what little was on the net in the early days my dumb shit came up. For example, usenet used to be wiped every 30 days due to disk space. Who thought google would keep that online forever? I only participate under partial names now.
This is ridiculous and perfectly expendable; whoever wrote that piece of shit does not have a problem with people remembering what he did, he has a problem admitting his own mistakes. Also, what bullshit is 'if forgetting is impossible forgiving becomes difficult'. Forgiving is not about forgetting!
Life is what it is, you don't get a restart button, the Internet copies life. Poor you.
in which things seem to be changing that are not actually changing, rather the only thing changing is your perceptions (and assumptions)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350875&cid=29231109
what you perceive to be changing, in absolute truth, is not changing in the slightest. point of fact
and your anecdote about your dad's era as a cop is especially laughable, as the era your dad was a cop was marked by much corruption, the thin blue line, the cops functioning as a sort of mafia etc. ever hear of serpico?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
crap like that was embarassing enough that police departments were cleaned up of their internal graft and corruption. of course that shit still goes on today. just to a lesser extent than your dad's era
so if anything law enforcement has been cleaned up in recent years and has been more accountable (and, in no small part, crime has fallen from the era your dad was a cop). in other words, in the short term, law enforcement has improved in quality from your dad's era (as a function of crime statistics). in other words, your anecdote about your dad's opinion of what is happening with police today versus his era is the exact reverse as you describe it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.'
it isn't just our past actions, but our future ones. in a society where everything is recorded permanently, how will we be able to function? to make the mistakes necessary to learn, grow, and understand ourselves?
in a past slashdot article (http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/06/20/1722255/Why-Being-Wrong-Makes-Humans-So-Smart?art_pos=7), human intelligence and ingenuity has been arguably linked to our ability to make mistakes. if we are striving to be perfect all the time, are we still being human?
Remember that cool webpage you visited ten years ago with that neat factoid you'd like to reference?
What was the web address? Can you find it again now?
Does the original web host even still exist? Geo-cities, or something. . ?
It HAS to be cached somewhere. . , right? If you spend the next hour beating your head against the keyboard, you *might* be able to find it again.
I don't know about you, but pulling up old data from the web feels to me a LOT like trying to dredge up old memories from my brain.
-FL
I've got you now!
Remembering is wonderful. Forgetting creates balance. The problem is when memory and forgetfulness are influenced by unbalanced, unchecked forces. In that regard internet is almost instantly better than tv, because you and I can contribute more. That we are unconsciously passing on our own brainwashed influences is of concern, but the hope is this will diminish with the new generation that learns to seek knowledge instead of being spoonfed.
Ray Stevens Mississippi Squirrel - GoodyGoody's , 1-0.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Who decides what's remembered and forgotten? Why even study History then? Yes, let's forget about The Holocaust, the Iraq war or the financial sector meltdown. What about your first marriage? How about the Moon landings - as long as we're into forgetting things.
Hiding and/or forgetting things doesn't make them go away. Growth and Forgiving are about remembering yet moving forward anyway.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I see no reason not to remember all things. And as for people with bad incidents in their past that is just fine. After all if everyones' bad moments are recorded others may also notice that one person has a lot less bad moments than others. Or a seemingly shocking nude photo becomes meaningless when almost all of the teachers have nude photos on the net.
Instead of the notion of allowing people to escape from their past would it not be better, even for children, to really, deeply know that all mistakes will travel with them throughout their lives. The idea being that if people can not escape past errors then they will tend not to make errors.
[..] the idea that perhaps we ought to build forgetting into the Internet.
Back in the heady days of the Dot-Com Boom, before the Crash, a friend and I almost set up a dot-com site that would advertise write-only storage. We even had the patter written up for a mocked web site, ready to go into production.
The site would have advertised our high-tech write-only "/dev/null" storage to allow our users the ability to store as much information as they liked. There was no limit on quota, or file type. You could upload MP3s, documents, whatever to our "/dev/null" storage system. We'd award prizes (from advertisers) to the top uploaders each month.
The only catch, and we were very open about this, was that the system was truly write-only. You could write anything you wanted to the system. But you couldn't read it back. Ever. Sure, we'd track what files (filenames, type, etc.) you uploaded to the system - but you could never read them. Such was the forward thinking of the "/dev/null" storage.
Our site encouraged users to upload things that society didn't really need to remember anymore. Things like instructions on how to build an atomic bomb, or whatever. Put it into our "/dev/null" system, delete your local copy, and it's gone forever. Or at least, that was the concept of the site. :-)
(Ultimately, we canned the idea due to bandwidth costs.)
It's just like I always say: You wouldn't have a problem with this sort of thing if you were perfect like me...
That is all.
IMHO forgetting is not useful, and even nocive, at least from a point of view: public opinion already has extremely short-termed memories, specially when government actions are involved. These are already good enough at reinventing themselves for us to blindly embrace the idea that indiscriminate forgetting is a sensible choice. Todays news should not wrap tomorrows sandwiches, but get ripped off and crystallize into recent history.
Back to judging normal people, forgiving is great, but again should have nothing to do with forgetting.
Excuses in advance for my english!
They are just good at hiding it. But they're not even that good. Take, for example, the current fashion of outing conservative, anti-gay Republicans as gay. These people aren't puritans, they're just self-loathing, and it's gotten damn easy to catch them at being hypocrites.. so easy that it's become a cliche that if you sound like a conservative white male, you're probably cruising me.
This applies to all kinds of sins. Human frailty and ego being what they are, you will find plenty of examples of the public teetotaler who gets drunk at home and beats his wife, the anti-drug mom who's hopelessly addicted to Oxy, the pro-censorship nut who's into rape porn, and so on. And technology being what it is, their private sins will soon become part of their permanent record, too. The people they hurt will out them to get revenge or force them to get treatment. It only takes one uploaded video to make your private sin public for eternity.
Worry less about what puritans will do and more about how to forgive your loved ones when you find out what they're really like.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It sounds to me like this guy wants the Internet to become 4chan. No thanks.
Sure. But for how long and for how much? A number of long term societal trends mean we're supposed to be responsible for everything we say and do forever and at great consequence.
For how long? Forever. That's just how things are.
For how much though... you say "at great consequence". But in a world when every single person has youthful indiscretions recorded for all time, people in the long run simply will not care about old stuff that comes up. We are just in a transition phase now where not every 50 year old has stuff online covering most of his life - it's a very different world when that is the case.
This is the very definition of the "interesting times" phrase the chinese curse alludes to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's just like I tell my kids: You wouldn't have to worry about stuff like this, if you were perfect like me.
That is all.
A photograph is perhaps the most egregious kind of recording medium possible. A photograph captures only a single microsecond out of a continuous, and often protracted and convoluted, development in time. A photograph is *necessarily* always out of context because the associated developmental stream is completely ignored.
This is why detached images make excellent propaganda tools. They can mislead easily and elegantly.
But any intelligent and aware recruiter (Is there such an animal?) should understand this shortcoming completely and therefore not rely on photographic records as evidence of a candidate's worthiness. To do so is a sign of extreme naivete.
"Do you realize that this atrocious behavior is going on your PERMANENT RECORD?"
So now the old teachers' threat is real.
We are the 198 proof..
I'm surprised I didn't see any reference to 1984 (the one by George Orwell, not the one by G-d).
As more of our information becomes on-line-only, it potentially becomes much easier for someone to edit out things they dislike (i.e. change history). If we actively enable web-forgetting, the ability of someone to rewrite the facts as they see fit becomes much greater. Frankly, that scares me far more than the potential loss of privacy.
Is anyone else reminded of the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
From the scenario described above, the problem isn't that the Internet preserved the memory of a youthful mistake; the problem is that a potential employer made a hiring decision on the basis of that mistake. Hiding the truth is an imperfect solution to an unjust world; a just human world would never forget, but would understand and forgive, when there has been an effort to make amends.
In fact, I think we could argue that deliberate forgetting, instead of making amends, is part of the problem. Some people are better at hiding the truth than others. And come to think of it, for a lot of potential employers, someone skilled at hiding their own past is likely someone skilled at hiding their employers' mistakes.
Take a look at the big black splotch in the Gulf of Mexico as a reminder of the consequences of forgetting mistakes and going on as if they hadn't happened.
Stacy Snyder was not denied a teaching credential solely for posting a picture on MySpace. You can read the reasons in the judge's decisions (PDF).
Starting on page 6, Mid-Placement Evaluations, we find Ms. Snyder:
- had “problems with discipline and also with content” ... would “make up an answer” or “give the wrong answer” to student questions about literature or grammar.
- "had difficulty maintaining a formal teaching manner"
- was "ignorant of basic grammar, punctuation, spelling, and usage"
- on several
- left too many students behind as a result of ineffective lessons.
- efforts to “share her personal life” with the students crossed into “unprofessionalism.”
- told an English class that her Valentines Day had been “ruined” when she encountered her former husband while dining out with her boyfriend.
As for the MySpace photo, it would have been less of a problem if Ms. Snyder had not directed her students to visit her MySpace page (something else she was instructed not to do (page 8)). The photo, along with a letter of apology featuring many grammar mistakes, was the last straw that led to Ms. Snyder without a teaching credential.
Surely, there are better examples of people being harmed by inadvertent disclosures on the internet.
Just as society evolved to make it it illegal to discriminate against people because of their ethnicity or belief structure, society will probably evolve just as easily to make discrimination on the basis reasonably distant past acts illegal, too. There is already precedent for this sort of approach in some jurisdictions - the statute of limitations. A good law might deem post data older than 5 years in a social context and 10 years in a career or education context irrelevant and make it unlawful to be used in assessment of your fitness as a person.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1