Remembering To Forget

 

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I went to a talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger at the RSA yesterday about his new book - 'Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In The Digital Age'. The talk focused on how the digital age is one of perfect remembering. A characteristic that empowers, but which can also have unforeseen consequences. Once it's on the web it can be there for good - crawled, cached, traceable, attributable. Google remembers our searches, Facebook remembers, Amazon remembers, places we interact and transact become places where our data is captured, tracked, stored.

Perfect digital remembering has profound implications not only because things which are sometimes best forgotten can be recalled, but because it challenges some very human norms: remembering has always been hard, now its easy; forgetting has always been the biological default, now remembering is the default. And if you've read Nudge, you'll appreciate how powerful defaults can be in affecting human behaviour. Remembering used to be expensive, now it's cheap. The web is undoing our capacity to forget.

Mayer-Schonberger argues that this comes with some inherent dangers. Those with control over historical data will have disporportionate power. Old information can be extracted without the benefit of its contemporary context, and recontextualised in new and inappropriate ways. Perfect remembering is a burden that humans were not made to carry - we could be tethered to a complex past, become lost in detail, unforgiving, overdependent. Human's natural ability to forget has enabled us to make decisions relatively unencumbered by the detail of the past, and to be filled with the possibility of second chances.

So the solution, argues Mayer-Schonberger, is to reintroduce forgetting. And he suggests doing this by allowing a prompted option for an expiration date on data. It may not be a perfect solution, he says, making binary decisions (you either remember it or you forget it) about data when human forgetting is a gradual process, but he hopes to at least change the default and to cause us to reflect and to make a choice. "Let's remember to forget", he says.

It was a challenging presentation, and all the better for it IMHO. I've found a version of it given by Mayer-Schonberger to Google (oh, the irony) last month which I've posted below, so I recommend you take a look. So do I think he's right? Hmmm, well. I think he touches on some issues that we haven't even begun to properly think through yet. And a lot of his concerns seem extremely valid. But I wonder about his solution. And rather than thinking about what we might gain, I found myself reflecting on what we might lose. Natural enough I suppose, but creating new combinations and contexts is one of the foundations of contemporary digital culture. This could dilute. But perhaps I'll reserve final judgement until I've read the book.

Comments

[glen]

nice post

The problem with the binary model of remembering/forgetting is that there is an assumption that 'digital' representations of experience are the same as, for example, digital representations of music. A CD of music may be 'perfect' for the human ear, but an account of experience on a blog or indexed through Twitter does not capture experience, it is merely a trace of experience.

Mayer-Schonberger's examples are not about remembering or forgetting in any human sense of the term, but the digital infrastructure that 'counts' humans. They are 'counted' on massive searchable databases. This has nothing to do with 'memory' on any human scale. It is a historico-technological transformation of memory on a much larger social scale. He is confusing two orders of temporal relation involving memory -- societal and personal.

[Alex J]

Reminds me of the line from Lost Highway: "I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened"

[Yulia]

Remembering has nothing to do with forgiving,understanding does. It is hard to believe that this option of expiring the data is even a valid one as some things one simply can't control. A better approach would be, one should be less concerned so much about the data around him, but rather then thinking about who he is and what he has to say.

[Jonas Lind]

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger brings up an extremely interesting topic. However, I do believe that there is another way out of the trap of perfect memories. If we had a more forgiving and relaxed culture, these things would be less damning if they resurfaced 20 years later as a reminder of some embarrassing teen age shenanigans. I do believe that outside of the US/UK, these problems are less important. Just think about France and infidelity by senior politicians. More info at my blog post about this at:

http://www.mobileforesight.com/2009/11/delete-book-about-internet-and-forgetting/