Just got in from a really interesting talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Why is this a problem? In addition to swamping us with unwanted, outdated information we'd all rather forget (high school yearbook photos, the phone number of the guy who took you on that one awkward date) it's made forgiveness more difficult. When someone does something stupid on the internet (and/or real life), the evidence is permanently retrievable, and potentially problematic forever. Every tasteless Halloween photo could be a potential career landmine. This is hardly news - even the President's concerned about it. But what can we do?
In his talk, Mayer-Schonberger outlined a few ways we might react to this harsh new reality. One is to self-censor - to watch yourself 24/7 so you never do or say anything stupid (Mayer-Schonberger calls this "digital abstinence"). While self-censorship is feasible on the internet, it's not really feasible in meatspace - we're all human beings, and we make mistakes. But increasingly, meatspace is documented on the internet, so to truly keep your internet record clean, you'd have to constantly self-censor in daily life as well.
Alternatively, you could hope that we all just "get used to" the new reality (what Mayer-Schonberger calls "cognitive adjustment.") This is the argument I commonly hear from my peers - that as Facebook, etc., become ubiquitous, employers will realize that everyone does stupid things, and accept that stupid party snapshots aren't really that relevant to job skills or career potential. We hope.
While Mayer-Schonberger didn't rule out cognitive adjustment, he also didn't trust it to solve the problem. Instead, he advocates reintroducing forgetting-as-default, by creating automatic expiration dates for everything from emails to photos. Drop.io is an example of this kind of management tool. You'd have a lot of control over when your data expire, so you wouldn't lose important things, but by actively managing the lifespan of your data, Mayer-Schonberger hopes, you'd be much more aware of their durability. The take home message: in the rush to outsource our memories to digital media, we can't neglect the capacity to forget.
Mayer-Schonberger will be speaking tomorrow at Princeton, if you're around. He will also be in Seattle and at Berkeley in the coming weeks. See his website for more details. Otherwise, you can listen to an interview he did with CBC.
More on Mayer-Schonberg at Wired and Times Higher Education.
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While the idea of creating automatic expiration dates seems to work there are a few problems that crater it.
The ease of copying data will kill it unless everything (including browser caches) accepts the removal time. Not going to happen.
Mayer-Schonberger addresses the copying problem - basically, he suggests that the important thing is that, if expiration of data is the norm, it will go a long way to re-adjusting our social norms and expectations. Sure, someone COULD easily cache that Facebook photo of you - but they'd have to make some deliberate effort to do it.
Right now online, stuff isn't being saved because someone wants to save it (Internet Archive excepted), it's being saved because the default is to save everything. But you can imagine a world in which you have to pro-actively archive things or they'll disappear.
Multi-platform compatibility is also a challenge, but again, you can imagine if this were a priority for Google, it could be made to work. The question is, who's going to put a priority on forgetting?
As a paleontologist, my first instinct is to say "NOOOOoOOO!!"
We should be asking ourselves, not only about the immortal undesired pictures in facebook, but what should we remember. There's a magnificent short story of Jorge Luis Borges called Funes, the memorious. The main character is a man who forgets nothing, as the Internet, hence he doesn't have time to think or make abstractions of the world. What should we remember? What should we forget? There's a particular focus on choice, and, at the bottom of it all, this is questioning our intelligence (now submerged in the always available infinite information of the web).