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The End of Forgetting

Posted by kdawson on from the you-can-always-say-i-don't-recall dept.

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.'"

23 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Working Non-Authorize Requesting Link by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  2. Posting is forever by Drakkenmensch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This article made me wish I had posted this as Anonymous Coward...

    1. Re:Posting is forever by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Don't worry, the internet does forget, and it forgets some of the best stuff, too. Back when I was an avid gamer thare was a very funny parody of Blue's News called "Yello There". A fellow names "Kneel Harriot" (who I later found out was a woman named Janet) updated it daily, and as far as I know there's only one instance of his site in the Wayback Machine at archive.org; "Kneel" and I often cross-posted, me using his character in stories at my site, the now-defunct "Springfield Fragfest" (which last time I looked was now a porn site). The only one one of his pages not missing is the one from the day people surfed to Yello There and found the Fragfest, and surfed to the Fragfest only to find Yello There.

      There are a lot of the old sites that are gone without a trace. Most of the Fragfest is gone. My other site (also now defunct), mcgrew.info, is completely gone as well, although I think I have it in a hard drive on a shelf somewhere.

      Somebody must have confused the internet with rock 'n' roll, because the internet does indeed forget. It just remembers a long time sometimes.

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    2. Re:Posting is forever by Shoeler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You know what occurred to me after reading the summary and your post? That it's not the forgetting part that needs to change. Indeed, to fundamentally change data retention policies across the ENTIRE INTERNET seems, at best, a dumb hopeless idea.

      However, to change the perception people have when they find that you don't have an un-scarred past seems to be a good and righteous thing to challenge.

      We as a society have this idea that keeps getting trashed that there are people out there who are as good as we want them to be. In my 36 years of experience, I've found only a small handful of people who are completely honest about who they are and were. In general people try to practice this selective forgetting so that they can "reinvent" themselves.

      Instead, why don't we just learn to not hype people to unachievable heights and realize they're as human as we are and made as many mistakes as we all did?

  3. Learning Without a Negative Response? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? by demonlapin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So don't put your dirty laundry on the internet.

      This is pretty easy. The problem is making sure other people don't put your dirty laundry on the internet.

    2. Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? by camperdave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is pretty easy. The problem is making sure other people don't put your dirty laundry on the internet.

      This could be especially problematic as surveillance becomes more and more popular. That, and the increased capacity to crack security (either through botnets, or exploiting weaknesses in algorithms)

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    3. Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      That's fine, except that I may not be the only one posting stuff about me.

      In the given example, the teacher could have been very careful not to put her drunk party photo online. But if someone else at the same party was less thoughtful, it could have had exactly the same effect, but completely out of her control.

      Even more worrying is the possibility of people deliberately destroying another's reputation. There's no shortage of people in this world with a grudge against someone else. It's quite easy to imagine an example where someone fails to get a job because of something someone has posted about them. It needn't even be true; a prospective employer isn't going to take time to give you the benefit of the doubt when there's plenty of other candidates. And the person in question may never even find out what it was that lost them the job; they just don't get to the next interview stage.

      And then there's the mistaken identity issue. Having googled myself a few years ago, I know of the existence of at least four other people who share my name (I have a fairly uncommon name). They're all quite different people and most of the time it's obvious which one of us a given web page is about. But not always. And especially in the age of 140 character tweets, it would be very easy for someone to take a reference to one of us and mis-interpret it as referring to another.

    4. Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? by Ephemeriis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Wrong.

      This isn't about managing your public image, and it doesn't matter if you don't put your dirty laundry on the Internet. If she hadn't posted that picture, somebody else might very well have done that, and the consequences would have been the same.

      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.

      The problem is that we're seriously blurring the line between public and private... Between our professional time and our personal time... Between our professional occupations and our leisure occupations...

      We've got some kind of new Puritanism going around. You have to uphold the professionalism of your position 24/7. There is no room these days for being human.

      Obviously we don't want our high school teachers showing up to work drunk. We don't want them drinking on the job. But she's a human being, and entitled to do whatever the hell she wants to in her off time.

      But now she can't. Because somebody might snap a picture of her getting drunk. And somebody might post that on the Internet. And then she might get fired from some other job.

      --
      "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
    5. Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem isn't that we need to forget, the problem is that we need to *forgive*. Before this "memory" we were able to live in a fantasy/delusional world where high school and college students were all saints and boy scouts. Now, for a younger generation, party pics are there to remind them that they weren't. I bet the very same people who denied this teacher her certificate did the exact same thing when they were young. But they want to pretend (to their colleagues, to their kids, maybe even to themselves) that they didn't. And what better way to do that than to take it out on some poor girl whose only sin was growing up in a time where there are more cameras and an internet around?

      We need a lot less sanctimony and a lot more "So he/she partied in college...but who didn't?"

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    6. Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? by Bluey · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  4. Traditional societies also forgot technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What needs to change is the social practice of judging ppl too harshely, not the storage value of the internet.

  5. On the other hand.... by wjousts · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:On the other hand.... by saihung · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No. What's going to happen is the self-righteous goody-goody people in our society who never drink, never screw, never do anything wrong at all are going to get even worse about judging those of us who know how to have a good time. And the rest of us are going to stay silent and pretend to agree, because we're petrified of being judged ourselves by puritanical pricks who seem to be in charge of everything.

    2. Re:On the other hand.... by wjousts · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It is not as if employers are unaware that people go to parties when they are in college, nor is it the case that employers are unaware of what happens at college parties...

      But that's kinda my point. Initially people are going to get screwed by it, but eventually employers will realize that they don't have a single candidate that doesn't have something embarrassing about them online and they will have to learn to accept it. No candidate is completely clean, so they'll have to stop being so judgmental.

    3. Re:On the other hand.... by cowscows · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not on its own, we'll have to wait until some more of the old people retire/die. For high school/college age kids right now, having pictures from a party on the internet generally isn't a big deal. Even if there isn't a really stupid one of you, there's probably at least a few photos of your friends being dumb that you've seen, laughed at, and gotten over.

      But that's a very unfamiliar phenomenon for people who grew up without the internet, and some people honestly just don't like things that are new to them, and don't much feel like changing their mind. Fortunately, those people get older and eventually no longer hold positions of authority, and progress slowly moves forward. We see this gradual change happening at almost every level of society, from serious things like tolerance of homosexuality, to more petty things, like dress codes at work. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty hard to stop.

      --

      One time I threw a brick at a duck.

    4. Re:On the other hand.... by quickgold192 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Who says that people who never drink, never screw, and never do anything wrong don't know how to have a good time, you self-righteous, judgmental prick?

    5. Re:On the other hand.... by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I wish I had mod points available, that's probably the most insightful thing said in this whole thread. I think it's always interesting how screwing up ones body with excesses in drink and partying is somehow more acceptable than enjoying things that aren't known to be damaging to the body.

      I'd chock it up to the fact that drugs are not something which people with a healthy, fulfilling life do. I'm sure some libertarian is going to argue that it is essential liberty, but it's really not. People wouldn't take the risk of drugs screwing up their lives if they were living a life that they really valued. Papering over that with drugs really isn't something that's going to change that.

  6. A boon for technical searches by petes_PoV · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  7. Forgiving without forgetting by SharpFang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    '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
  8. Forgetting isn't the problem by Joehonkie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:The media disagrees by david+duncan+scott · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you need a lab analysis to find the problem, how much of an impact can it be?

    --

    This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander

  10. Re:not enough recording by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    >How about people like me, who haven't one anything, let alone getting caught?

    There is NOBODY like that, no - not even you. EVERYTHING that exists, everything anybody has EVER done is offensive to somebody somewhere. You HAVE done something that somebody out there believes is wrong. It may not be on the internet but it's there. It's simply mathematically impossible to have never done anything that wouldn't offend somebody.

    If you'd spent your life in a cellar in the fetal position some people will say you are one lazy guy ! If you have a religion - thirty other religions would prefer to have nothing to do with you (at best), if you have no religion ALL the others will feel that way. If you drink - some people will be offended, if you do NOT drink - others will assume you're a self-righteous moralist and your promotion will be stumped as they'll assume you inable to take the CEO of your next big customer-corp to a stripjoint for the signing if that's what he's into (or for that matter, to figure OUT that this is what he is into).

    If you're a virgin, some people will think you're betraying your godly duty to reproduce. If you aren't - some will think you're a whore. If you're married to one woman and treat her well - some will call you a traitor to manhood. If you abuse her, others will hate you (rightfully so).

    If you're a racist - other races will hate you for it, if you're not - racists will hate you.

    Nobody, can possibly, go through life without doing anything that won't offend the morality of SOMEBODY. So just get over that illusion. The best you can hope for is that none of the people who would be offended by your choices are ever in a position of authority over you - or that if they are, you can avoid them knowing about it.

    Alternatively and this would be far better- we can try to lead the way toward the world the grandparent points out- to recognize this, and say: as long as somebody isn't breaking the law, what they choose to do on their own time has fuck-all to do with me - EVEN if I am a potential employer.

    --
    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *