The End of Forgetting 329
Hugh Pickens recommends a long piece in last week's NY Times Magazine covering a wide swath of research and thinking in the US and elsewhere on the subject of the perils to society of recording everything permanently, and the idea that perhaps we ought to build forgetting into the Internet. "We've known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism, and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is, at an almost existential level, threatening to our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew. In a recent book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites the case of Stacy Snyder — who was denied a teaching certificate on the basis of a single photo on MySpace — as a reminder of the importance of 'societal forgetting.' By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.' In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded 'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.' He concludes that 'without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.'"
Working Non-Authorize Requesting Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Posting is forever (Score:3, Informative)
And places like web.archive.org is caching things as well. It's amazing how quickly Google picks up new pages for search results these days.
Re:Mother nature knows best. (Score:3, Informative)
Distinguishing between what is important and what is not can be achieved also by attaching weight metadata to any information. That weight can be correlated with the age of the information too.
Nature has no Moore's Law built into it.
Storage capacity is following in close steps behind volume of created information.
Mother Nature has limited resources. Human genome can be gzipped to under one gigabyte. Human brain uses compression so lossy it allows for recognition, but not of anywhere near to precise duplication of memories. Electronic memory CAN remember everything, simply because there's enough of it and it's cheap enough.
And forgiving based on forgetting is as careless and dangerous as is classifying information as less important by deleting it.
Re:Posting is forever (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the Slashdot snapshot from 1998 [archive.org] - Note that web.archive doesn't serve some of the older images, but site content and style is preserved :)
Re:Posting is forever (Score:3, Informative)
But it does hide them from his prospective employer, unless he plans to work for Facebook itself.
Re:On the other hand.... (Score:3, Informative)
[...] the self-righteous goody-goody people in our society who pretend to never drink, never screw, never do anything wrong at all [...]
You had an empty set. Corrected for you.
Oh, we're watching, all right. (Score:4, Informative)
In America, we have passed laws that list people for the rest of their lives as felons, creating a permanent underclass that can only aspire to the very lowest forms of employment. Even then, they are accepted only if they are unopposed by higher class citizens. These people completely lose the ability to participate in the vast majority of attempts to better themselves.
These listings directly affect not only employment opportunities, but also credit scores, insurance rates, privacy (in many ways) and where people are allowed to live.
This society is learning how to use memory and identification together as the broadest, most effective cudgel possible. We have wholly abandoned the idea of rehabilitation in favor of retribution.
We are well into the process of hardcore stratification; worries about what might end up on a myspace page are part and parcel of the classing-is-good attitude that our society has assumed.
Because our society almost never revisits law, this situation is unlikely to reverse under almost any imaginable circumstance. Our citizens (and so our politicians) are pathologically unable to generalize in the way that our founders did, and so are perfectly willing to abandon any liberty or degree of freedom for any hint of safety, or what they perceive as safety, but isn't -- and that includes creating a hopeless underclass that lives under bridges.
Re:Learning Without a Negative Response? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem isn't that this picture was posted. The problem is that the school board over-reacted to something that really had absolutely no bearing on her ability to teach.
Also wrong.
While I agree about the general point your making, this woman should not be your torchbearer for this cause. The "Drunken Pirate" picture was just one example of many issues this student-teacher had, and not even the most egregious. Bad classroom management (yelling "shut up!" at the students), unprofessional conduct (telling them about an encounter with her ex-husband while on a date with her boyfriend), blurring personal-professional boundaries (telling her kids about her MySpace account), poor grammar skills (while teaching an English class!), inability or unwillingness to prepare for the lessons, making up answers to students' questions, etc.
The picture wasn't even the main thing the school took issue with. Nor was its "Drunken Pirate" caption. Along with the picture, she posted a public note talking about problems she had with her supervising teacher as the real reason she wouldn't apply at the school after completing her student teaching. Reading the judge's ruling [washingtonpost.com] (or even just the findings of fact) on this case puts it in a whole new light.