Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

With the shift to digital modes of storage (nowadays everyone has a flash drive, know how to burn a CD...), "have we forgotten how to forget ?" This is the main concern of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who has written a book: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. For most human history, every little thing we did was at a point forgotten, and from a social point of view it was a good thing; everyone has done stupid things that needed to be forgotten...Digital world has eliminated that forgiveness. Google caches copies of our blog postings (even this one !), social-networking (e.g. Facebook) sites archives all of our photos, messages... It's literally harder to erase information than to retrieve it. Why this is a problem ? According to the author, in addition with piling up unwanted and out of date informations the social implications are tremendous and everything thing we post could turn into a trap for a future career...(the author gives some examples in this video)

So the point is made: there is a true problem, but what are the solutions, what could be done in a world that relies on digital data ? According to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, people need to stop designing tools that automatically store everything instead we need to design tools that allow people to put "expiration date" on the data entered. The author gives an example with drop.io, this service is an on-line private sharing but what makes unique is when you're uploading a file it asks you to put an expiration date on it. With this solution the file is automatically deleted and the data on it...forgotten.

In my own opinion, I am more concerned about what social networking sites and web crawling sites want to do with those informations...In some case it's rather clear, for example with gMail Google displays ads according to the contents of your mail but what about social networking sites what are they gonna do with those infos (and by infos I mean our private life...). But this problem doesn't exist for everyone, in fact the existence of the problem in one's mind is conditioned on our relation with the digital tools. During last class we took a quick survey, the question was rather straight-forward "Is the standard default of remembering on the Internet a problem ?" and the results: 18 for yes and 12 for no, the class was nearly cut in half on this topic. Now it could be interesting to take a survey on a wider population and to study the results according to the age of the participants as kids tends to use a lot social networking.