Delete:
The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
By Victor Mayer-Schönberger, Princeton University Press, 237pp.
Future Files:
A History of the Next 50 Years
By Richard Watson, Scribe Publications, 302pp
Reviewed: 21 November 2009
Most readers show more interest in better remembering than in better forgetting. But Mayer-Schönberger, an ex-Harvard Public Policy academic now based in Singapore, believes that our world of digital information storage and retrieval is at serious risk of remembering too much for our own good.
He says mental and social health depend on a reliable process of forgetting. Decisions we make should not be over-influenced by past events whose context is no longer relevant. What’s more, if we are aware that our words and actions will be relentlessly recalled, we inhibit our natural responses to the present.
To argue for more forgetting is counter-intuitive to those who value information, history and transparency, but the writer pursues it systematically and thoroughly. Humans learned useful ways to externalise, preserve and communicate memory with pictures, then oral language, then writing. This generation has moved orders of magnitude into the out-sourcing of memory through information technologies of formidable capability.
It is now cheaper to store digitised information for ever rather than spend the time to selectively delete documents, images and communications whose ephemeral purpose has long been met.
So is it fair that a person’s job prospects or personal relations can be blighted by the retrieval of some injudicious photograph or email sent across the Internet decades earlier, in a context that has long changed? This book asserts that we all should have the right to re-make ourselves over time and shed the past.
For the individual, the author suggests that perfectly-retrieved digital memories actually impede decision-making. Sometimes, it’s actually harmful to remember accurately how we or others felt and acted at specific times in the past. His favoured solution is to time-stamp all digital information with an expiration date controlled by its “owner”.
Good luck with that.
Richard Watson’s Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years is promoted as a provocative book, and it certainly succeeded with this reviewer. Spanning society, technology, business, entertainment and business, Watson brandishes a fire-hose of snappy analyses and predictions, any of which could kick off a robust argument in a pub or over a dining table.
The value of this book is not any single prediction you could put your money on, but rather a persistent prodding to think and argue about possible projections from where we are today. And so, about possible consequences of how we act today.
Richard Thwaites has worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and former Department of Communications, IT and the Arts.
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