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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.
The problem isn't that this picture was posted. The problem is that the school board over-reacted to something that really had absolutely no bearing on her ability to teach.
Also wrong.
While I agree about the general point your making, this woman should not be your torchbearer for this cause. The "Drunken Pirate" picture was just one example of many issues this student-teacher had, and not even the most egregious. Bad classroom management (yelling "shut up!" at the students), unprofessional conduct (telling them about an encounter with her ex-husband while on a date with her boyfriend), blurring personal-professional boundaries (telling her kids about her MySpace account), poor grammar skills (while teaching an English class!), inability or unwillingness to prepare for the lessons, making up answers to students' questions, etc.
The picture wasn't even the main thing the school took issue with. Nor was its "Drunken Pirate" caption. Along with the picture, she posted a public note talking about problems she had with her supervising teacher as the real reason she wouldn't apply at the school after completing her student teaching. Reading the judge's ruling (or even just the findings of fact) on this case puts it in a whole new light.