BOOK OF THE DAY: KARLIN LILLINGTONreviews Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital AgeBy Viktor Mayer-Schönberger Princeton University Press, 237pp, $24.95
IT’S THE “information age” – that we all know. But the sheer volume of that information, much of it all about us, is staggering.
For example, we now ask Google to search for this or that more than a billion times a day. We ask Facebook to do something for us 10 million times a second (yes, a second). We upload and download, blog and tweet, e-mail and post, sell and buy online. As a result, we disclose much that is sensitive and personal – and which is going to live online, cached and archived, attached firmly to our names, in databases we may not even know about, forever.
Add to that all the digital data that others hold about us – banks, mortgage lenders, healthcarers, supermarkets, schools, universities, airlines, and every place online we have bought something. All of us have a shadow digital self, existing in computer memory and in the fibre-optic byways of the internet.
What does it mean for us to be digitally immortal? To have such scattered, out-of-context chunks of information, often posted by us in an indiscreet, silly or youthful moment, waiting to define how others, from employers to law enforcement to dating partners, see us?
In Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that the long memory of the internet and computers is more than just a privacy issue. It is, he says, a societal – and a deeply human – concern.
It isn’t just an issue of whether the information attached to our name is true or not – though anyone who has been impugned in a blog or on profile sites such as Facebook, or been the victim of identity theft, will know the damage that can be inflicted.
The challenge is more fundamental and worrying. Mayer-Schönberger convincingly claims that our new status quo, the impossibility of forgetting, is severely misaligned to how the human brain works, and to how individuals and societies function.
“From the beginning of time, for us humans, forgetting has been the norm and remembering the exception,” he writes.
“Today, with the help of widespread technology, forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default.”
In the past, our personal records lay in difficult-to-access paper files, our pictures or our remarks were rarely shared beyond a near circle, our spats and embarrassing actions were eventually forgotten.
But now, our digital histories never go away, and can be collated, searched, data-mined, examined and re-examined. The digital revolution has led to cheap storage, easy retrieval and global access. Our shadow selves and our past thoughts, activities and deeds are forever on call. Mayer-Schönberger quotes JD Lasica: “Our pasts are etched like a tattoo into our digital skins.”
Mayer-Schönberger believes we are beginning to experience an anti-democratic “chilling effect” on activities and speech because we fear the consequences of a casual action, a posted image, or a heartfelt stance.
He argues this inability to forget transfers power from the surveyed to the surveyors, and challenges our very humanity, the underlying “forgetfulness” that enables us to learn, reason, change, grow and act. And all this is setting aside the fact that those with particular skills can modify digital records so that the online memory is actually false.
Can anything be done? Delete is an accessible, thoughtful and alarming attempt to start debate.
Karlin Lillington writes about technology for The Irish Times