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...
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.
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.
'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.
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I'd be appalled if anyone found out I used to program in Smalltalk.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."