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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.'"
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.
'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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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.
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!
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
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.
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?
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.