Is The "Digital Era" Overriding Our Ability to Forget?

We're entering a new stage of human society, a defining part of which could be losing a vital flaw: the ability to forget.  We've all heard stories of people reaching out of Facebook to destroy careers. The permanence of digital records could mean we might be heading for Strange Days where the inability to forget paralyzes our ability to move forward.

The benefits of permanent records are unquestionable: despite all our attempts to turn it into a hell of advertising and porn, the internet is an essential research tool with an ever-increasing amount of information available.  Multi-million dollar programs work to scan ancient, crumbling tomes into electronic form before they're lost for ever.

The key point is the different grades of information: the last text of the Sumerian people should probably be preserved, but the stupid stuff you thought everyone should know as a teenager should probably be forgotten.  This problem is posed by services like Facebook and Deviantart, which actively make it difficult to permanently delete your account - because if everyone suddenly did, they'd be out of work.

The main defense against almost every kind of problem is people not being stupid to begin with - but since that's also the solution to war, famine and the economy we don't hold out much hope of it being engaged here either.

It's an important change, and like all the new circumstances created by technology we're stumbling through by trial and error rather than actually working out what we should actually do.  There's no doubt we'll make it through: but whether we end up benefiting from perfect recall or paralysed by a web of regrets remains to be seen.  Movies like Strange Days deal with the importance of forgetting, while books like Delete ask the same questions. (Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is due out in September).

But don't worry if you don't know those - you'll find out for yourself anyway.

Luke McKinney

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html

Comments

[Michael]

This is a wonderful time and age that encourages people to have the will and develop the ability to engage in reconciliation of past events we would otherwise operate on top of. Perhaps hiding from our past will one day be a thing of the past. Here is to completing the past, and living in the moment!

[Jeremy]

Just google yourself and you'll spend the next 30 minutes deleting accounts that for some reason gave you an identity page with your name, age, location, and other information that for some reason was indexed in google - and more likely than not you will probably find a privacy button hidden somewhere in those accounts that would have prevented it. Those accounts will disappear from googles index, but not anytime soon.

[Graham]

The ability to forget has been lost thanks to computers? Hogwash! You need only look at elections to realize how easily people forget what happened not two years ago, let alone every four, even in the face of substantial issues that were, at the time, very relevant.

What you mean to say is that it is not humans that have lost the ability to forget, it is what we submit to the digital world that has the ability to survive in perpetuity.

[sky]

This won't be the case in the next 5 years or so. researchers now are coming up with a new technology for the internet which, when a person enters a comments, updating the status in facebook or twittering , the message will 'expire' in 24 hrs, 1 month or 1 year depending on the user's pref.

So the digital age (in future) is somewhat self-destructive.

[Andrew]

The technology for deleting comments after an amount of time is stupidly simple. In fact, if nobody on the planet has come up with it yet, we don't deserve to have computers.

Also, what kind of crackpot has a problem with us not being able to forget? Why did we invent writing? Why does religion exist?

These things exist solely because of our obvious flaw that we forget. We forgot how to build half the things people invented two thousand years ago during the Roman Empire (and before), and suffered an enormous period in history where people just didn't do things for themselves. Forgetting is part of human nature that we don't really need to function. In fact, we need to remember even better than we do now. How do we prevent things like mass genocide from happening? It's by not remembering how it happened, and not letting it happen again.

What we need is the control over ourselves to prevent us from being bogged down in those memories. Living by remembering the past 90% of the time isn't good. However, neither is not remembering at all. If we don't remember the principles our country was founded on, or how to be nice to other people in the same world as us, that's even worse than living in the past. Then, we get to live in a future where the past doesn't affect our actions, and prevents us from moving forward because one guy sits at the top on some premise as silly as "Divine Kingship" where everyone else gets stepped on for one person's good. Forgetfulness is death, remembrance is the potential for a better life.

[lizzy]

I am into this idea of the virtue of forgetting, and I do think society is walking towards an obsession with memory. Yes we have available tools for remembering in the past, such as archives, books and etc however to reach those was much more complicated than it is today. Remember Nietzsche and the idea of the active forgetting? Forgetting is a memory process just as important as remembrance, they both need to exist in order for a happy life. In fact, forgetting is what impulses life... criativity, development. All great thinkers and revolutionary were people who had the ability to forget... and to create something new, and not be stcuked in the past.