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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
The hazards of perfect memory in the digital age
Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we've searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.
In Delete , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger traces the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history, from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances. The written word made it possible for humans to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology and global networks are overriding our natural ability to forget―the past is ever present, ready to be called up at the click of a mouse. Mayer-Schönberger examines the technology that's facilitating the end of forgetting―digitization, cheap storage and easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software―and describes the dangers of everlasting digital memory, whether it's outdated information taken out of context or compromising photos the Web won't let us forget. He explains why information privacy rights and other fixes can't help us, and proposes an ingeniously simple solution―expiration dates on information―that may.
Delete is an eye-opening book that will help us remember how to forget in the digital age.
Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we've searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.
In Delete , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger traces the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history, from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances. The written word made it possible for humans to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology and global networks are overriding our natural ability to forget―the past is ever present, ready to be called up at the click of a mouse. Mayer-Schönberger examines the technology that's facilitating the end of forgetting―digitization, cheap storage and easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software―and describes the dangers of everlasting digital memory, whether it's outdated information taken out of context or compromising photos the Web won't let us forget. He explains why information privacy rights and other fixes can't help us, and proposes an ingeniously simple solution―expiration dates on information―that may.
Delete is an eye-opening book that will help us remember how to forget in the digital age.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
39 people are currently reading
939 people want to read
About the author
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
24 books105 followersVIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University. A widely recognized authority on big data, he is the author of over a hundred articles and eight books, of which the most recent is Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. He is on the advisory boards of corporations and organizations around the world, including Microsoft and the World Economic Forum.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
February 12, 2010
In 1914, my grampa was born in a shotgun tenement apartment adjacent to an alley in the Polish-Russian ghetto of Chicago. They didn't run the coal furnace at night. To keep the lead pipes from freezing, he remembers a splinter of lumber in the kitchen sink, balanced from the drain to the tip of the faucet, letting the water drizzle all night. He tells the story of a February morning his mom called him and his sister out of bed. The mattress they shared was made of straw and ticking. They threw off the layers of covers and bolted downstairs. He forgot something at the top of the stairs and returned to the room. There like a ghost in the crepuscular light was a cauliflower-plume of steam rising off the mattress. Another early morning story has my 8 year old grandfather in the basement flaming the water pipes with some kind of torch apparatus; he never described what it was, instead--with his knobby, weathered ninety year old hands--he gestured the movements along the ceiling, recalling as if holding a small torch with a fire at one end.
My grampa has hundreds of snippets of his youth. None of them about his alcoholic father, though, who lived into the 50's. Nothing will extract a word about his father. Zooming across memories of the Crash of '29 and deep into the Depression, my gramps worked in the Civil Conservation Corps (CCCs), hoboed on Burlington Northern, and played baseball on farm teams from Pennsylvania to Texas, South Dakota to Tennessee. He was crushed when the Army turned down his service application because he was deaf in one ear from pneumonia (just like George Bailey in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life). The Army was to be his ticket to warm clothes and three 'squares' a day. Nevertheless, from a farm team in Milwaukee he was pulled up to join the Washington Senators because he was, for a second season, batting over .400. This gets me to the photograph that makes my review relevant to Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.
There's a black-and-white photo in our family--the original having long disappeared--that I absolutely treasure. It's mounted on my wall with my grampa's signature underneath, George "Bingo" Binks. The ink displays the wobble in his hand in the 1990s. The picture is him leaning out of a dugout with blurry, empty stadium bleachers in back rising out the top of the photo. His clean white wool jersey, a big smile portraying his first season in the National League. He's so young. The photo is perfect--centered, bright with a Spring overcast, him looking diagonally above the level of the camera, an almost halo of light (probably from an unnecessary flashcan) making his outline sharp, the background grainy and trending toward sepia. He has dark hair. He has ethnic features about his face and some gingivitis so common to youth of that era. His figure emits the unrelenting joy of breaking the cycle of poverty and arriving at the genesis of his dreams, to smell the freshly-raked infield dirt, the echo of last night's game, and the view of a hollow stadium years from the first lighted, night game. In that crystal moment when the photograph was taken, "Bingo" Binks had no idea that on the other side of that lens, 70 years hence, he'd be placed on Facebook.
"Humans yearn to remember, although they mostly forget. To lighten this biological limitation, we have developed tools--from books to videos--that function as external memory for us. These tools have proved tremendously helpful, as they have made remembering easier and accessible to many more people than ever before. But until a few decades ago, these tools did not unsettle the balance between remembering and forgetting: to remember was the exception; to forget, the default." (p. 92)
I DON'T want my grandfather's picture on Facebook. I want that picture on paper only. Granted, it's a form of analog memory, but I want it preserved in the medium that he could have expected it to be passed for generations--as a photo! I don't want him exposed to digital-frenzy and social media. He's still alive, feeble--yes, dementia--yes, incontinent--yes, but he's never been online before, and never pursued a technology beyond what he discovered prior to 1977. The family always called him a caveman born too late; he preferred working with his hands (his post-MLB career was as a master mechanic at Union Pacific for 30 years); a quarter of his acre is still a garden; he makes his coffee by steeping Maxwell grounds in a pot and straining it with the back of a butter knife. His time-capsule picture, I want to stand between it and photoshop, and Flikr, and Tumblr, and thumbnail pictures, and all this crap that strips the genuineness--the one-ness--and rarity from it.
"Digital memory may offer important benefits, but not necessarily all the time. In some instances, people may succeed in gaming or otherwise altering digital memory to further their purposes. Other times, accessible digital memory may enhance short-term efficiency but expose individuals or society to potentially harmful consequences...How would information added over a person's lifetime be interpreted given that the contexts in which the individual information bits had been collected over the years and decades varied greatly?...perfect remembering exposes us to filtering, selection, and interpretation challenges that forgetting has mostly shielded us from." (p. 95)
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger has made a compelling dissection of our current state of digital memory and what ramifications it has for our cognitive understanding of time, culture, and privacy. I view the merits of digital memory with skepticism mostly because I'm a Luddite, a digital immigrant, and have eschewed the most trendy gadgets at Best Buy (my home computer is a speedy 2002 PC with a DSL connection--no MAC, no laptop, no iPhone or blackberry, no flat screen TV). Yep, I'm "Bingo's" caveman grandson. I can only imagine what the future holds for digital memory: storage, access, and durability. Schonberger accepts the risk to privacy, but assumes, through several different means, that the access to--and excess of--digital memory will be a self-restraining or self-correcting phenomenon. I'm not so hopeful.
" Unfortunately, human remembering is not a process of mechanistically retrieving facts from our past, but rather, as...the constant reconstruction of our past based on the present... Present influences play a much larger role in determining what is remembered than what actually happened in the past. While we are constantly forgetting and reconstructing elements of our past, others employing digital remembering can access the unreconstructed facts. Thus, as the past we remember is constantly (if ever so slightly) changing and evolving, the past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time. Likely these two visions will clash." (p. 106)
My grandfather doesn't have time remaining when his cellular memory will clash with a digital memory. He'll be gone. That picture in my home will not clash with his blog that may have blasted his baseball career after a particularly bad game performance; it won't clash with a fan's Flikr picture of him missing a throw to first base; it won't clash with several YouTube videos of him striking out; it won't clash with a fan's forum discussing a poor hitting streak; it won't clash with a Vimeo taking a quote out of context; it won't clash with a Twitter post about his removal from next game's batting line-up because he missed practice. No. His past is analogue and mostly protected. His history is my family's collective memory and that photo on my wall. The photo shows gramps as a superstar, and there's no digital information that will contradict that.
"As we expand the use of external memory through digital remembering, we endanger human reasoning a number of ways...First, external memory may act as a memory cue, causing us to recall events we thought we had forgotten. If human forgetting is at least in part a constructive process of filtering information based on relevance, a recall triggered by digital memory of an event that our brain has 'forgotten' may undermine human reasoning. Second, comprehensive digital memory may exacerbate the human difficulty of putting past events in proper temporal sequence. Third, digital remembering may confront us with too much of our past and thus impede our ability to decide and act in time, as well as to learn. The fourth danger is that when confronted with digital memory that conflicts with our human recollection of events, we may lose trust in our own remembering." (p. 118)
In other words: Accessibility + Durability = no longer can you escape the past; the past follows you. Whore, drunkard, unemployed, misquoted, slandered and slanderer, these are event snapshots that will be translated anew every time they're viewed, especially 70 years hence, on MyFaceYouTwitFlikr. Nothing in context; open to judgement. Yeah, yeah, man, we got it, it's social media and we know the rules. We've learned not to talk to strangers and film ourselves having sex. Do you? Do you know the rules when you gesture to your great-grandkids telling stories with your knobby, weathered ninety year old hands? The words I use in this review will intractably be part of my profile forever. And yet, I can't stop. I can no more stop using the media at my disposal than my grandfather could stop his dugout picture from being snapped. Dilemma. Paradoxymoron.
So, I pick up Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age to see if there's some hope for future constraint, for a digital exit, to enjoy the privacy my grandfather has in burying his memories behind a picture. Schonberger provides options along 3 lines, actions by individuals, by laws, and by technology. He elaborates about Digital Abstinence and Digital Rights Management and Cognitive Adjustment; he speaks of Information Ecology and Privacy Rights and Full Contextualization. Bottom line up front, this stuff scares me. It's going to get a whole lot more intrusive, comprehensive, and egregious before it gets worked out between people, technology, globalism, and the State.
It won't happen, but in 2065 I'd like part of me rolled up seamlessly in a picture, probably the one from Alaska when I volunteered for the Forest Service and bivouacked deep in the maws of a coniferous forest rebuilding trails gullied out by avalanche. I want my kid's grandkids to see the full head of hair I had at 24 and my crystal smile at the genesis of my dreams. Yeah, they'll have this post (Hey kids!!--I've had a wonderful life), and myriad other uncontextualized material--evidence--they can piece together. That's okay. They can do that. It's part of the epoch in which I live. But I'm drawn back to that picture of my grandfather, and when I look as intensely as I can into the aura dabbled around his jersey, and about his hands comfortably gripping the base of a bat, and into his dark Polish eyes, I wonder which way it was meant to be. Should a man's life be the accumulation of every interaction he's made with government, every receipt of commerce, every keystroke on the internet, every pixel of surveillance footage? Or should some of that privacy be relegated to a few heirlooms, some icons, and a postcard from Bavaria, 1931?
I don't know.
New word: panopticon
My grampa has hundreds of snippets of his youth. None of them about his alcoholic father, though, who lived into the 50's. Nothing will extract a word about his father. Zooming across memories of the Crash of '29 and deep into the Depression, my gramps worked in the Civil Conservation Corps (CCCs), hoboed on Burlington Northern, and played baseball on farm teams from Pennsylvania to Texas, South Dakota to Tennessee. He was crushed when the Army turned down his service application because he was deaf in one ear from pneumonia (just like George Bailey in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life). The Army was to be his ticket to warm clothes and three 'squares' a day. Nevertheless, from a farm team in Milwaukee he was pulled up to join the Washington Senators because he was, for a second season, batting over .400. This gets me to the photograph that makes my review relevant to Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.
There's a black-and-white photo in our family--the original having long disappeared--that I absolutely treasure. It's mounted on my wall with my grampa's signature underneath, George "Bingo" Binks. The ink displays the wobble in his hand in the 1990s. The picture is him leaning out of a dugout with blurry, empty stadium bleachers in back rising out the top of the photo. His clean white wool jersey, a big smile portraying his first season in the National League. He's so young. The photo is perfect--centered, bright with a Spring overcast, him looking diagonally above the level of the camera, an almost halo of light (probably from an unnecessary flashcan) making his outline sharp, the background grainy and trending toward sepia. He has dark hair. He has ethnic features about his face and some gingivitis so common to youth of that era. His figure emits the unrelenting joy of breaking the cycle of poverty and arriving at the genesis of his dreams, to smell the freshly-raked infield dirt, the echo of last night's game, and the view of a hollow stadium years from the first lighted, night game. In that crystal moment when the photograph was taken, "Bingo" Binks had no idea that on the other side of that lens, 70 years hence, he'd be placed on Facebook.
"Humans yearn to remember, although they mostly forget. To lighten this biological limitation, we have developed tools--from books to videos--that function as external memory for us. These tools have proved tremendously helpful, as they have made remembering easier and accessible to many more people than ever before. But until a few decades ago, these tools did not unsettle the balance between remembering and forgetting: to remember was the exception; to forget, the default." (p. 92)
I DON'T want my grandfather's picture on Facebook. I want that picture on paper only. Granted, it's a form of analog memory, but I want it preserved in the medium that he could have expected it to be passed for generations--as a photo! I don't want him exposed to digital-frenzy and social media. He's still alive, feeble--yes, dementia--yes, incontinent--yes, but he's never been online before, and never pursued a technology beyond what he discovered prior to 1977. The family always called him a caveman born too late; he preferred working with his hands (his post-MLB career was as a master mechanic at Union Pacific for 30 years); a quarter of his acre is still a garden; he makes his coffee by steeping Maxwell grounds in a pot and straining it with the back of a butter knife. His time-capsule picture, I want to stand between it and photoshop, and Flikr, and Tumblr, and thumbnail pictures, and all this crap that strips the genuineness--the one-ness--and rarity from it.
"Digital memory may offer important benefits, but not necessarily all the time. In some instances, people may succeed in gaming or otherwise altering digital memory to further their purposes. Other times, accessible digital memory may enhance short-term efficiency but expose individuals or society to potentially harmful consequences...How would information added over a person's lifetime be interpreted given that the contexts in which the individual information bits had been collected over the years and decades varied greatly?...perfect remembering exposes us to filtering, selection, and interpretation challenges that forgetting has mostly shielded us from." (p. 95)
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger has made a compelling dissection of our current state of digital memory and what ramifications it has for our cognitive understanding of time, culture, and privacy. I view the merits of digital memory with skepticism mostly because I'm a Luddite, a digital immigrant, and have eschewed the most trendy gadgets at Best Buy (my home computer is a speedy 2002 PC with a DSL connection--no MAC, no laptop, no iPhone or blackberry, no flat screen TV). Yep, I'm "Bingo's" caveman grandson. I can only imagine what the future holds for digital memory: storage, access, and durability. Schonberger accepts the risk to privacy, but assumes, through several different means, that the access to--and excess of--digital memory will be a self-restraining or self-correcting phenomenon. I'm not so hopeful.
" Unfortunately, human remembering is not a process of mechanistically retrieving facts from our past, but rather, as...the constant reconstruction of our past based on the present... Present influences play a much larger role in determining what is remembered than what actually happened in the past. While we are constantly forgetting and reconstructing elements of our past, others employing digital remembering can access the unreconstructed facts. Thus, as the past we remember is constantly (if ever so slightly) changing and evolving, the past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time. Likely these two visions will clash." (p. 106)
My grandfather doesn't have time remaining when his cellular memory will clash with a digital memory. He'll be gone. That picture in my home will not clash with his blog that may have blasted his baseball career after a particularly bad game performance; it won't clash with a fan's Flikr picture of him missing a throw to first base; it won't clash with several YouTube videos of him striking out; it won't clash with a fan's forum discussing a poor hitting streak; it won't clash with a Vimeo taking a quote out of context; it won't clash with a Twitter post about his removal from next game's batting line-up because he missed practice. No. His past is analogue and mostly protected. His history is my family's collective memory and that photo on my wall. The photo shows gramps as a superstar, and there's no digital information that will contradict that.
"As we expand the use of external memory through digital remembering, we endanger human reasoning a number of ways...First, external memory may act as a memory cue, causing us to recall events we thought we had forgotten. If human forgetting is at least in part a constructive process of filtering information based on relevance, a recall triggered by digital memory of an event that our brain has 'forgotten' may undermine human reasoning. Second, comprehensive digital memory may exacerbate the human difficulty of putting past events in proper temporal sequence. Third, digital remembering may confront us with too much of our past and thus impede our ability to decide and act in time, as well as to learn. The fourth danger is that when confronted with digital memory that conflicts with our human recollection of events, we may lose trust in our own remembering." (p. 118)
In other words: Accessibility + Durability = no longer can you escape the past; the past follows you. Whore, drunkard, unemployed, misquoted, slandered and slanderer, these are event snapshots that will be translated anew every time they're viewed, especially 70 years hence, on MyFaceYouTwitFlikr. Nothing in context; open to judgement. Yeah, yeah, man, we got it, it's social media and we know the rules. We've learned not to talk to strangers and film ourselves having sex. Do you? Do you know the rules when you gesture to your great-grandkids telling stories with your knobby, weathered ninety year old hands? The words I use in this review will intractably be part of my profile forever. And yet, I can't stop. I can no more stop using the media at my disposal than my grandfather could stop his dugout picture from being snapped. Dilemma. Paradoxymoron.
So, I pick up Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age to see if there's some hope for future constraint, for a digital exit, to enjoy the privacy my grandfather has in burying his memories behind a picture. Schonberger provides options along 3 lines, actions by individuals, by laws, and by technology. He elaborates about Digital Abstinence and Digital Rights Management and Cognitive Adjustment; he speaks of Information Ecology and Privacy Rights and Full Contextualization. Bottom line up front, this stuff scares me. It's going to get a whole lot more intrusive, comprehensive, and egregious before it gets worked out between people, technology, globalism, and the State.
It won't happen, but in 2065 I'd like part of me rolled up seamlessly in a picture, probably the one from Alaska when I volunteered for the Forest Service and bivouacked deep in the maws of a coniferous forest rebuilding trails gullied out by avalanche. I want my kid's grandkids to see the full head of hair I had at 24 and my crystal smile at the genesis of my dreams. Yeah, they'll have this post (Hey kids!!--I've had a wonderful life), and myriad other uncontextualized material--evidence--they can piece together. That's okay. They can do that. It's part of the epoch in which I live. But I'm drawn back to that picture of my grandfather, and when I look as intensely as I can into the aura dabbled around his jersey, and about his hands comfortably gripping the base of a bat, and into his dark Polish eyes, I wonder which way it was meant to be. Should a man's life be the accumulation of every interaction he's made with government, every receipt of commerce, every keystroke on the internet, every pixel of surveillance footage? Or should some of that privacy be relegated to a few heirlooms, some icons, and a postcard from Bavaria, 1931?
I don't know.
New word: panopticon
February 16, 2020
Ho letto questo libro per la tesi, sul telefono. Quindi non una lettura agevole e accompagnata da poco entusiasmo.
Il libro presenta in realtà un concetto molto interessante: il valore dell'oblio nella vita umana, l'importanza della capacità di dimenticare. Una capacità che la rivoluzione digitale inevitabilmente sta stravolgendo.
Ciò ha una serie di conseguenze, sul piano sociale, legale ed economico. La maggior parte di noi ignora del tutto le varie informative sulla privacy che ci troviamo "costretti" ad accettare senza neppure rendersi conto del valore che ogni nostra traccia lasciata su internet ha attualmente nel mercato.
Il libro è articolato in più livelli: in primo luogo viene spiegata l'importanza dell'oblio dal punto di vista sociale: ogni persona evolve nel corso della sua vita, pertanto azioni e pensieri del passato possono non corrispondere più al nostro attuale modo di essere.
Si passa poi ad illustrare le situazioni che hanno determinato questa scomparsa dell'oblio, passando ad un lato più tecnico l'autore di illustra tutti i vari risultati tecnologici acquisiti nel tempo e come questi condizionino le nostre scelte: dal tipo di acquisti che facciamo a ciò che decidiamo di condividere sui social.
Infine si passa alle soluzioni: da quelle attualmente in uso come le varie leggi sulla privacy, a possibili soluzioni future elaborate da vari esperti. Per ultima cosa l'autore esprime la soluzione che ritiene più agevole ed efficace dal suo punto di vista.
Credo che il punto debole del testo stia proprio i questi bruschi cambiamenti di materia. Pur avendo ad oggetto lo stesso problema si passa da un linguaggio antropologico ad uno tecnico-informatico ad uno giuridico. Se si ha la pazienza di affrontare una lettura così trasversale si rivela sicuramente un libro di estremo interesse. Devo però aggiungere che ritengo la soluzione prospettata dall'autore non realizzabile. Richiede una conoscenza del problema ed una sensibilità che la maggior parte degli utenti non ha e non si pone.
Nonostante lo sforzo che richiede io mi sento di consigliare vivamente la lettura a chiunque, perché è un argomento che ci riguarda inevitabilmente tutti, e proprio per la sua complessità è necessario aumentare la sensibilità dell'utente medio sul problema. Non possiamo trovare una soluzione se non siamo consapevoli dei rischi insiti in ogni traccia che lasciamo nel web. Che non significa una condanna generalista e sterile a suo utilizzo. Proprio l'importanza assunta dalla tecnologica nella vita di tutti i giorni ci impone un suo uso consapevole.
Il libro presenta in realtà un concetto molto interessante: il valore dell'oblio nella vita umana, l'importanza della capacità di dimenticare. Una capacità che la rivoluzione digitale inevitabilmente sta stravolgendo.
Ciò ha una serie di conseguenze, sul piano sociale, legale ed economico. La maggior parte di noi ignora del tutto le varie informative sulla privacy che ci troviamo "costretti" ad accettare senza neppure rendersi conto del valore che ogni nostra traccia lasciata su internet ha attualmente nel mercato.
Il libro è articolato in più livelli: in primo luogo viene spiegata l'importanza dell'oblio dal punto di vista sociale: ogni persona evolve nel corso della sua vita, pertanto azioni e pensieri del passato possono non corrispondere più al nostro attuale modo di essere.
Si passa poi ad illustrare le situazioni che hanno determinato questa scomparsa dell'oblio, passando ad un lato più tecnico l'autore di illustra tutti i vari risultati tecnologici acquisiti nel tempo e come questi condizionino le nostre scelte: dal tipo di acquisti che facciamo a ciò che decidiamo di condividere sui social.
Infine si passa alle soluzioni: da quelle attualmente in uso come le varie leggi sulla privacy, a possibili soluzioni future elaborate da vari esperti. Per ultima cosa l'autore esprime la soluzione che ritiene più agevole ed efficace dal suo punto di vista.
Credo che il punto debole del testo stia proprio i questi bruschi cambiamenti di materia. Pur avendo ad oggetto lo stesso problema si passa da un linguaggio antropologico ad uno tecnico-informatico ad uno giuridico. Se si ha la pazienza di affrontare una lettura così trasversale si rivela sicuramente un libro di estremo interesse. Devo però aggiungere che ritengo la soluzione prospettata dall'autore non realizzabile. Richiede una conoscenza del problema ed una sensibilità che la maggior parte degli utenti non ha e non si pone.
Nonostante lo sforzo che richiede io mi sento di consigliare vivamente la lettura a chiunque, perché è un argomento che ci riguarda inevitabilmente tutti, e proprio per la sua complessità è necessario aumentare la sensibilità dell'utente medio sul problema. Non possiamo trovare una soluzione se non siamo consapevoli dei rischi insiti in ogni traccia che lasciamo nel web. Che non significa una condanna generalista e sterile a suo utilizzo. Proprio l'importanza assunta dalla tecnologica nella vita di tutti i giorni ci impone un suo uso consapevole.
January 2, 2018
Good overview of memory x privacy issues, current solutions, and their strengths/weaknesses. Slip to the table on p. 168 to preview the latter. Proposes expiration dates for information as a way to reintroduce forgetting without necessarily addressing power imbalances or other privacy challenges. An interesting idea whose preservation implications are underdeveloped (at least in this book - haven't looked into anyone responding to this work). Speaking as an archivist, forgetting is 100% in line with what we do, so a blanket exception to honoring expiration dates would be too uncritical a stance. Chapters 5 & 6 highlight changes in public attitudes towards tech giants since 2009: are we now experiencing a real erosion of trust with implications for the future of forgetting? Again, people are probably writing about this.
November 10, 2024
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger published his book, "Delete," in 2009 when digital surveillance was nowhere near the current level. Those were heady days when most people jumped on the digital bandwagon without bothering about privacy, data protection, or the dangers of the cyber world.
This book's lessons are valid today, even though fifteen years have passed since its first publication. I grew up as a proud member of, possibly, the last analog generation, and forgetting was part of our culture.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger starts the book by stating that forgetting is part of human nature. Remembering events requires effort, hence the widespread use of phrases like, 'dredging up old memories.' Words like 'dredging' connote effort and imply energy expenditure. We remember when we needed to. In his book, the author quoted a few cases of people with perfect memories, preventing such people from living in the present.
If humans are a bundle of memories, no one should wish to have perfect memory. However, machines do not forget in the digital age, and with their massive computing and file retrieval capabilities, the past can bite hard.
As Viktor Mayer-Schonberger argues, why shouldn't we advocate and demand that the digital world forget our past? He analyzed six approaches in his book and acknowledged that no single approach is perfect as a standalone solution. He also recognized that the regulatory world must move fast, or else it will be impossible to keep pace with the rapid changes in the digital sphere.
Finally, he recognized that the user's responsibility for managing their privacy, removing traces, and being circumspect while living in the digital universe.
With virtual and augmented reality becoming more commonplace, and AI technology flooding our lives, a second edition will be required. The challenges we will encounter due to these technologies is on top of the issues we faced a decade ago.
This book's lessons are valid today, even though fifteen years have passed since its first publication. I grew up as a proud member of, possibly, the last analog generation, and forgetting was part of our culture.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger starts the book by stating that forgetting is part of human nature. Remembering events requires effort, hence the widespread use of phrases like, 'dredging up old memories.' Words like 'dredging' connote effort and imply energy expenditure. We remember when we needed to. In his book, the author quoted a few cases of people with perfect memories, preventing such people from living in the present.
If humans are a bundle of memories, no one should wish to have perfect memory. However, machines do not forget in the digital age, and with their massive computing and file retrieval capabilities, the past can bite hard.
As Viktor Mayer-Schonberger argues, why shouldn't we advocate and demand that the digital world forget our past? He analyzed six approaches in his book and acknowledged that no single approach is perfect as a standalone solution. He also recognized that the regulatory world must move fast, or else it will be impossible to keep pace with the rapid changes in the digital sphere.
Finally, he recognized that the user's responsibility for managing their privacy, removing traces, and being circumspect while living in the digital universe.
With virtual and augmented reality becoming more commonplace, and AI technology flooding our lives, a second edition will be required. The challenges we will encounter due to these technologies is on top of the issues we faced a decade ago.
December 29, 2021
Such an excellent first chapter, with high-level, colorful and personal thoughts on the implications of being flooded with (and adding to the flood of) online information. But, a total snooze fest beyond that. Don't get me wrong -- this book has some clever thoughts further along, but it 1) struggled to move beyond an only moderately interesting, generally predictable and anecdote-driven assessment of cancel culture 2) got super technical, focusing on computer hardware and other media changes... which was fun for me in some ways but won't land this book in the popular section of the library any time soon 3) very repetitive... probably was a great long essay before it was a book.
3.5 imo. 3/5 as a read for fun, and wouldn't recommend. 4/5 if you care about media studies, would recommend with an asterisk that you should have a particular curiosity for media hardware changes in personal data creation and storage (where things really slowed down).
3.5 imo. 3/5 as a read for fun, and wouldn't recommend. 4/5 if you care about media studies, would recommend with an asterisk that you should have a particular curiosity for media hardware changes in personal data creation and storage (where things really slowed down).
November 23, 2022
An intriguing book that looks at the dark side of our move towards remembering everything, aided by cheap digital storage. Mayer-Schönberger argues that eternal digital memory harms us in 2 ways: it exacerbates power imbalances by granting information about us as individuals to powerful corporations and institutions, and it impairs our personal and societal abilities to live in the present.
Prescient despite being a decade old at this point, which is a little depressing that we haven't made any progress here.
Prescient despite being a decade old at this point, which is a little depressing that we haven't made any progress here.
March 8, 2017
Ce livre, bien qu'il soit extrêmement intéressant et soulève des questions qui m'interpellent fortement, a eu un terrible effet soporifique sur ma personne...
January 24, 2012
I like the idea of this book, but I didn't like reading it. His argument is that by keeping everything that we've done online that we risk two things: first, that adolescent foibles and drunken late nights will be held against us potentially forever, and second that to forget makes us in some way more human and we have to retain that. To be honest I skimmed almost everything regarding the second argument and so may be stating it poorly.
While it is in fact the case that it's easier to find out people's shady secrets when you can find them online, I don't think this has changed society in any fundamental way. All human cultures have some sort of taboos that if people break they try to keep it quiet. Modern American culture doesn't have the same sort of shame culture that Ancient Rome, Victorian England, etc. had anyway. I am sure I am wrong, but most cases of blackmail are for criminal offenses, not drinking pictures or sexual escapades. Now that DADA has been lifted this will probably take care of a lot of one of the remaining huge incentives to keep sexuality quiet--not that this doesn't exist in a hundred other little ways in other arenas. Either way, there are things that people want to keep secret for sure, but a lot of other things that just aren't a big deal for other people to know.
But I digress. It is well known by now that before job hunting you better clean up your digital image. I don't see that as a problem. You can easily live a private life about which your employers know nothing, digitally or physically. The major issues arise when it comes to the intersection of personal and professional--what if you use your social media accounts for work purposes, for instance? Standards for institutional social media are changing, partly due to these sorts of conflicts. Some organizations push for more open communication, some shut it down completely.
He proposes some solutions to these problems such as digital abstinence and expiration dates for information. They are already technically possible, but I didn't buy his argument that it was necessary to even worry about the problem. There have been a number of books on this topic lately, and this is just not the best treatment of it.
While it is in fact the case that it's easier to find out people's shady secrets when you can find them online, I don't think this has changed society in any fundamental way. All human cultures have some sort of taboos that if people break they try to keep it quiet. Modern American culture doesn't have the same sort of shame culture that Ancient Rome, Victorian England, etc. had anyway. I am sure I am wrong, but most cases of blackmail are for criminal offenses, not drinking pictures or sexual escapades. Now that DADA has been lifted this will probably take care of a lot of one of the remaining huge incentives to keep sexuality quiet--not that this doesn't exist in a hundred other little ways in other arenas. Either way, there are things that people want to keep secret for sure, but a lot of other things that just aren't a big deal for other people to know.
But I digress. It is well known by now that before job hunting you better clean up your digital image. I don't see that as a problem. You can easily live a private life about which your employers know nothing, digitally or physically. The major issues arise when it comes to the intersection of personal and professional--what if you use your social media accounts for work purposes, for instance? Standards for institutional social media are changing, partly due to these sorts of conflicts. Some organizations push for more open communication, some shut it down completely.
He proposes some solutions to these problems such as digital abstinence and expiration dates for information. They are already technically possible, but I didn't buy his argument that it was necessary to even worry about the problem. There have been a number of books on this topic lately, and this is just not the best treatment of it.
November 25, 2016
The worst of its kind. -_-
I picked it up because the title attracted me. I like the term "DELETE" so much . But yeah "Looks are DECEPTIVE."
Okay what I expected from the book reading its title, it totally failed to give me that. :/
It was more like a history or sociology book [ the evolution of press , disk drives blah blah -_- ]
A boring one to waste my time on it :3 বাংলাতে রচনামূলক প্রশ্নের উত্তর লিখার মতন একটা বই :3
And one thing the writer mentioned " In Islam, printing (instead of a scribe’s copying)
was seen as blasphemy, mocking the glory of God, and thus prohibited." - I wonder from where did he find such wrong information[ as far as I know no such thing exists in Islam] & I couldn't make any sense of the reference he mentioned . :/
I picked it up because the title attracted me. I like the term "DELETE" so much . But yeah "Looks are DECEPTIVE."
Okay what I expected from the book reading its title, it totally failed to give me that. :/
It was more like a history or sociology book [ the evolution of press , disk drives blah blah -_- ]
A boring one to waste my time on it :3 বাংলাতে রচনামূলক প্রশ্নের উত্তর লিখার মতন একটা বই :3
And one thing the writer mentioned " In Islam, printing (instead of a scribe’s copying)
was seen as blasphemy, mocking the glory of God, and thus prohibited." - I wonder from where did he find such wrong information[ as far as I know no such thing exists in Islam] & I couldn't make any sense of the reference he mentioned . :/
June 10, 2024
By now (2024), Mayer-Schonberger's argument is based upon some quite dated material about the internet and the social media panopticon. The first half of the book is largely read with horror as witless victims have their reputations ruined by long-forgotten media posts, and we see that the reach is growing, even spreading further than MySpace accounts.
So let's set all the dated stuff aside, and focus instead on, perhaps a vital two chapters of Mayer-Schonberger's six chapter book: the underlying paradigm changes from "perfect memory" and the possible solution he proposes.
On the first, he suggests two dynamics that are still very much at work, and in even greater ways than he foresees back in 2008: power over information and time. He argues effectively that so long as information is held in imbalance of power (either in quantity of information or political power), privacy and social-economic integrity are not safe. We individuals will never "know" as much about Meta or Amazon or Google or The-Next-Great-MegaCorp-or-Gov't as they do about us. And they profit and grow in power from this imbalance. Today, we come to this issue far too late and only in the guise of weak anti-monopoly laws. He also says that since our concept of time is changed (having, in effect, perfect memory of our pasts), our ability to maintain relationships is altered. It's difficult to at first imagine why forgetfulness is essential to mental health, but then we have both arguments from biology and psychiatry to explain it easily enough. It's very nearly a survival strategy. But now our personal and social traumas are at beck-and-call (or not called).
Each of these issues should be cause for serious debate and discourse in our culture, but worse than our author supposes, we have instead dove headlong into the pool of ignorance, especially on this last point, apologizing with the most vapid of accusations: "Social media is a problem for our youth."
And this leads to his own proposal, and it is simple enough: Have what is essentially an expiration tag on data, much as we might for spoiling food. Companies can only hold our data for so long, those terrible middle school poems will only stay with me for 10 years of embarrassing stories and then vanish utterly. This is an easily achievable goal and, while it will not solve all of the issues, Mayer-Schonberger offers plenty of other options that would work in tandem.
But here's the most important take-away from this book: the solutions proposed do exactly what has not been happening, opening a dialogue for what is happening to our mental and social health as technology inevitably continues to "perfect" our cultural memories, to inundate us with so much needlessness, that we can no longer sort what is vital from what is trivial, personally and politically.
This is a dry and dated read, but still vital for all of that.
So let's set all the dated stuff aside, and focus instead on, perhaps a vital two chapters of Mayer-Schonberger's six chapter book: the underlying paradigm changes from "perfect memory" and the possible solution he proposes.
On the first, he suggests two dynamics that are still very much at work, and in even greater ways than he foresees back in 2008: power over information and time. He argues effectively that so long as information is held in imbalance of power (either in quantity of information or political power), privacy and social-economic integrity are not safe. We individuals will never "know" as much about Meta or Amazon or Google or The-Next-Great-MegaCorp-or-Gov't as they do about us. And they profit and grow in power from this imbalance. Today, we come to this issue far too late and only in the guise of weak anti-monopoly laws. He also says that since our concept of time is changed (having, in effect, perfect memory of our pasts), our ability to maintain relationships is altered. It's difficult to at first imagine why forgetfulness is essential to mental health, but then we have both arguments from biology and psychiatry to explain it easily enough. It's very nearly a survival strategy. But now our personal and social traumas are at beck-and-call (or not called).
Each of these issues should be cause for serious debate and discourse in our culture, but worse than our author supposes, we have instead dove headlong into the pool of ignorance, especially on this last point, apologizing with the most vapid of accusations: "Social media is a problem for our youth."
And this leads to his own proposal, and it is simple enough: Have what is essentially an expiration tag on data, much as we might for spoiling food. Companies can only hold our data for so long, those terrible middle school poems will only stay with me for 10 years of embarrassing stories and then vanish utterly. This is an easily achievable goal and, while it will not solve all of the issues, Mayer-Schonberger offers plenty of other options that would work in tandem.
But here's the most important take-away from this book: the solutions proposed do exactly what has not been happening, opening a dialogue for what is happening to our mental and social health as technology inevitably continues to "perfect" our cultural memories, to inundate us with so much needlessness, that we can no longer sort what is vital from what is trivial, personally and politically.
This is a dry and dated read, but still vital for all of that.
August 22, 2018
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
In an increasingly digital age where the relative cost of storage has dropped rapidly, becoming less expensive than paper circa 2005, VKM's intriguing monograph focuses on the issue of personal reputation management and whether it is desirable or practical to assert the right to control what others publish or share about us. Positive information may be an asset, but can also lead to a loss of privacy and personal security, whereas negative information or an unfair, inaccurate or dishonest portrayal may result in lost employment, freedom of choice and personal relationships. Additionally where others may know more about us than we realize, this may give them an unfair manipulative advantage, and shape our behaviour in ways that we might not otherwise desire.
"Delete" poses some difficult ethical questions, for example, should we be held to be the same person we were when we were younger. What ownership should one have over personal information collected by others that is is also part of their life experience. Can we trust governments or corporations to be benevolent or continue to be benevolent with personal information. To what extent can property rights be extended to information.
VKM does propose a number of remedies, most of which he recognizes as being imperfect. At one end of the scale is digital abstinence, not completely doable inasmuch as others may take (and tag) pictures and data about us. Another is a form of DRM where all information about us is tagged so that we can retrieve (and obsess) over it, and legally contest the accuracy and use, or digital aging so that material about us is automatically forgotten after a period of time. He also notes that we may have lost the option of previous generations - exit, that is leaving one society for another town and starting all over again. With the theme of Les Miserables in mind - could Jean Val-Jean have become the mayor of Montreiul if the French Government had been able to digitally track him? To that point VKM presents a real world case the Nazi's using the Netherlands' citizenship files to round up over 73% of Dutch Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust. (pp 141). Taking Delete's scenario further, the amount of collected data may so vast that in order to make it meaningful to ourselves and others we may need digital agents just to keep track and manage our online personas.
An excellent starting point for ethical debate and a great choice for a book club or school discussion from middle school on up. Recommended.
In an increasingly digital age where the relative cost of storage has dropped rapidly, becoming less expensive than paper circa 2005, VKM's intriguing monograph focuses on the issue of personal reputation management and whether it is desirable or practical to assert the right to control what others publish or share about us. Positive information may be an asset, but can also lead to a loss of privacy and personal security, whereas negative information or an unfair, inaccurate or dishonest portrayal may result in lost employment, freedom of choice and personal relationships. Additionally where others may know more about us than we realize, this may give them an unfair manipulative advantage, and shape our behaviour in ways that we might not otherwise desire.
"Delete" poses some difficult ethical questions, for example, should we be held to be the same person we were when we were younger. What ownership should one have over personal information collected by others that is is also part of their life experience. Can we trust governments or corporations to be benevolent or continue to be benevolent with personal information. To what extent can property rights be extended to information.
VKM does propose a number of remedies, most of which he recognizes as being imperfect. At one end of the scale is digital abstinence, not completely doable inasmuch as others may take (and tag) pictures and data about us. Another is a form of DRM where all information about us is tagged so that we can retrieve (and obsess) over it, and legally contest the accuracy and use, or digital aging so that material about us is automatically forgotten after a period of time. He also notes that we may have lost the option of previous generations - exit, that is leaving one society for another town and starting all over again. With the theme of Les Miserables in mind - could Jean Val-Jean have become the mayor of Montreiul if the French Government had been able to digitally track him? To that point VKM presents a real world case the Nazi's using the Netherlands' citizenship files to round up over 73% of Dutch Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust. (pp 141). Taking Delete's scenario further, the amount of collected data may so vast that in order to make it meaningful to ourselves and others we may need digital agents just to keep track and manage our online personas.
An excellent starting point for ethical debate and a great choice for a book club or school discussion from middle school on up. Recommended.
May 3, 2018
I am reading this book in 2018 and this book was written in 2009. Technologically we have moved far beyond the references in this book, and it is a bit dated in that respect. However the topic is more relevant than ever, especially in the age of social media and our willingness to pour our personal information into these platforms and maintain digital records of our lives. The book does provide some thought-provoking arguments in favor of being in charge of our digital footprint with the author arguing that our ability to have this easily accessible digital footprint at our fingertips all the time hinders our ability to naturally forget portions of our life, as we're biologically designed to do. This inability to forget makes it difficult for us to make objective decisions and accept the condition that humans evolve and change. This digital footprints are not forgotten and seemingly innocent events from 20, 30, even 50 years ago can come back to haunt us, affecting everything from our ability to travel to our ability to maintain employment and maintain healthy relationships. The author argues that humans are designed quite on purpose to be forgetful, that we commit to memory those things that are most necessary for our survival, such as the muscle memory of riding a bike, remembering how to climb or build a fire. The author proposes rather than becoming a luddite or engage in digital abstinence we learn to control our digital footprint, not only in terms of what information we give to third parties, and what information we post online, but also issues like determining how long to keep documents and photos on our home computers. The solution proposed is to not fear creating in the digital universe, but to also set expiration dates for elements of our digital lives. This book has certainly given me pause. I'm a librarian and my first thought is always to archive everything. I love how easy it is to archive EVERYTHING in a digital world. I'm thinking of all the digital elements in my life now and realizing that I SHOULD let some of them go. Sometimes just because you can, doesn't mean you should. How many bad memories have I carried around with me in vivid detail because I have an archive of email and chat sessions and online documents. I sense some purging in my future.
February 15, 2023
Can I delete and forget that I read this book?
I've had this book on my to-read shelf for 9 years (!). If I had read it earlier, I probably wouldn't feel how much the concepts in it have aged. That aside, the main idea is something I had thought of before, from a personal perspective, do I really want what I put out there to be there by everyone to see, long after I'm gone? (the irony of this review. Ha!)
The delivery of the idea was incredibly dry. From chapter summaries to the conclusion section, the author basically wrote a 200-page peer-reviewed article, minus the peer-review.
I've had this book on my to-read shelf for 9 years (!). If I had read it earlier, I probably wouldn't feel how much the concepts in it have aged. That aside, the main idea is something I had thought of before, from a personal perspective, do I really want what I put out there to be there by everyone to see, long after I'm gone? (the irony of this review. Ha!)
The delivery of the idea was incredibly dry. From chapter summaries to the conclusion section, the author basically wrote a 200-page peer-reviewed article, minus the peer-review.
November 28, 2024
A non fiction book, I know, crazy.
This was an interesting take on digital memory and the authors perceived threat to natural human forgetfulness. At points, thought provoking, if a little bit dated.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the idea of infinite digital memory doesn’t allow us to retain the human ‘virtue’ of forgetting.
I believe that despite our ability to access almost limitless information we still have to expend time and resources (not to mention just actually remember) to access those digitally archived ‘memories’.
If anything it’s gotten harder to remember than to forget.
This was an interesting take on digital memory and the authors perceived threat to natural human forgetfulness. At points, thought provoking, if a little bit dated.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the idea of infinite digital memory doesn’t allow us to retain the human ‘virtue’ of forgetting.
I believe that despite our ability to access almost limitless information we still have to expend time and resources (not to mention just actually remember) to access those digitally archived ‘memories’.
If anything it’s gotten harder to remember than to forget.
July 2, 2023
更多是对世人的警醒和倡议，但我其实很怀疑，那些信息泄露很厉害而不自知的人其实也未必会关注此类咨询，反倒是我这样对个人隐私比较在意的人会思考和关注这个问题。
回到这个问题本身，我想一是与他人保持拒绝，不仅仅是现实生活中，不要透露太多自己的个人讯息，在互联网上就更加要注意，很多人的私生活被曝光其实素材都是自己主动上传的。
我个人能想到的一些做法是：
1.注销不必要的账号，停止使用某些公司的数字服务。
2.不使用图文类社交媒体，不要上传会暴露过多个人信息的照片。
3.使用更加复古的工具。比如用纸笔写日记而不是在社交媒体上写博文，打电话或是线下见面而不是在即时通讯软件上聊天。
4.各个社交平台的id和头像各不相同，不要让人轻易追踪到自己。
回到这个问题本身，我想一是与他人保持拒绝，不仅仅是现实生活中，不要透露太多自己的个人讯息，在互联网上就更加要注意，很多人的私生活被曝光其实素材都是自己主动上传的。
我个人能想到的一些做法是：
1.注销不必要的账号，停止使用某些公司的数字服务。
2.不使用图文类社交媒体，不要上传会暴露过多个人信息的照片。
3.使用更加复古的工具。比如用纸笔写日记而不是在社交媒体上写博文，打电话或是线下见面而不是在即时通讯软件上聊天。
4.各个社交平台的id和头像各不相同，不要让人轻易追踪到自己。
October 11, 2018
The premise of this book lured me in. In this digital age we are now faced with never forgetting any, an important human trait. Unfortunately a lot of this book went off on tangents (some interesting tangents mind you) and as such really never fully hit the mark for me.
March 13, 2017
Before digital age, remembering was MORE expensive than forgetting. Not anymore. This book diligently probes the, often counterintuitive, ramifications of that. Insightful and incisive
September 14, 2018
Very textbook-ish. "In chapter one, I talked about this... Now in chapter two I'll talk about this other thing..." Nothing really new for me in here.
April 1, 2025
spunti interessanti, la questione della data di scadenza su tutte le info digitali, ma come ogni libro di etica dell'informatica poteva essere più corto di cento pagine
October 21, 2025
The irony of me adding this book to a site that I freely give my data to so that I don’t forget I read it …. Yeah…
October 9, 2015
This book is not going to be to everyone's liking because it divides into two distinct section. In the beginning, the book deals with large, abstract ideas about human history and memory. The author argues that in the analog world, forgetting was the norm and remembering was hard because it was difficult to store information in an easily accessible and permanent form. The author's discussion here is fascinating, as he points out how analog information slowly decays as it is copied (think of the hiss in a cassette recording of a previous cassette tape or the blurriness of a mimeograph of a mimeograph), the medium for storage disintegrates over time, and information in these forms is hard to index. By contrast, in the digital realm remembering becomes the default because digital information is easy to back up and cheap to store. In addition, deleting digital information requires effort: As anybody who has let a huge electronic photo library build realizes, it takes time to go through all those photos and decide which ones to keep. Forgetting is no longer effortless.
Mayer-Schonberger then argues that there are serious social problems associated with this change that most people have failed to fully understand. Perhaps his largest concern is that perfect digital memory will freeze how someone is perceived because a perfect record of a person's past deeds or misdeeds will create an illusion that we know the person's character and thereby deny the reality that people change over time. He also believes that perfect memory will overwhelm us with meaningless data that will make it hard to decide how to act. He also points out that some information is more easily digitized than others, so the digital record is incomplete and will distort our decision-making when we assume its comprehensiveness. Here I thought he missed an opportunity to talk about the general trend toward quantitative analysis at the expense of qualitative analysis. These two trends--quantitative analysis and the rise of digital computing and digital memory--obviously are mutually reinforcing.
I found the first part of the book to be a fascinating and insightful, if also unsettling, read. Perhaps because of my background in philosophy, I enjoyed his big-picture cultural analysis.
The second part of the book is rather different. Here he comes back to Earth and looks at some proposed solutions, ultimately favoring a modest and speculative proposal for expiration dates for digital records. This part of the book is thematically related to the first but gets deeper in the weeds than many readers might be expecting after the 30,000-foot analysis of the first part of the book. This part of the book is probably of interest to a narrower group of readers and in some ways seems more targeted to academics or professionals in the field than to a general readership, unlike the first part of the book that could appeal to anyone interested in culture and history.
Mayer-Schonberger's writing is exceptionally clear and well-organized but can be repetitive. Whether that is a good thing depends upon how you're reading the book. If you're tackling it over a long period of time or are listening with distractions to the audio book, the repetitions and reminders of what has come before are useful, but if you are reading it in a couple of sittings, you might prefer a leaner style. By the way, I "read" this book mostly be listening to the audiobook, which has excellent narration.
Overall, I liked the book and found it gave me a new lens for thinking about the increasing prominence of computers in society.
Mayer-Schonberger then argues that there are serious social problems associated with this change that most people have failed to fully understand. Perhaps his largest concern is that perfect digital memory will freeze how someone is perceived because a perfect record of a person's past deeds or misdeeds will create an illusion that we know the person's character and thereby deny the reality that people change over time. He also believes that perfect memory will overwhelm us with meaningless data that will make it hard to decide how to act. He also points out that some information is more easily digitized than others, so the digital record is incomplete and will distort our decision-making when we assume its comprehensiveness. Here I thought he missed an opportunity to talk about the general trend toward quantitative analysis at the expense of qualitative analysis. These two trends--quantitative analysis and the rise of digital computing and digital memory--obviously are mutually reinforcing.
I found the first part of the book to be a fascinating and insightful, if also unsettling, read. Perhaps because of my background in philosophy, I enjoyed his big-picture cultural analysis.
The second part of the book is rather different. Here he comes back to Earth and looks at some proposed solutions, ultimately favoring a modest and speculative proposal for expiration dates for digital records. This part of the book is thematically related to the first but gets deeper in the weeds than many readers might be expecting after the 30,000-foot analysis of the first part of the book. This part of the book is probably of interest to a narrower group of readers and in some ways seems more targeted to academics or professionals in the field than to a general readership, unlike the first part of the book that could appeal to anyone interested in culture and history.
Mayer-Schonberger's writing is exceptionally clear and well-organized but can be repetitive. Whether that is a good thing depends upon how you're reading the book. If you're tackling it over a long period of time or are listening with distractions to the audio book, the repetitions and reminders of what has come before are useful, but if you are reading it in a couple of sittings, you might prefer a leaner style. By the way, I "read" this book mostly be listening to the audiobook, which has excellent narration.
Overall, I liked the book and found it gave me a new lens for thinking about the increasing prominence of computers in society.
March 1, 2017
Interesting, if occasionally long winded, read for those interested in the origins of the right to be forgotten.
March 13, 2011
Do we know what we're doing to our future selves by saving a permanent record of our digital memories, conversations and information to hard drives and the internet? Is it even our own choice to do so anymore? The author brings up some provocative ideas- about the digital age bringing a significant change to how we use 'external storage devices' (books being an older form) to extend our own faulty animal capacities to remember.
One scenario describes us forming our own surveillance network, not only in space but through time - what he calls a "temporal panopticon", based on that prison designed by Jeremy Bentham to give prisoners the feeling of being under constant surveillance, encouraging them to always keep their behaviour in check. Things that would have once been forgotten (a drunken Facebook photo) come back to haunt our future selves in ways we couldn't have predicted, so we end up self-censoring, putting on our best digital public face just in case. This sounds slightly paranoid and perhaps we must all just learn how to become more candid, or learn how to read digital material with more caution (maybe cultivate a shared sense that people change over time even if their documents don't).
I like a lot of the ideas in the book, though I feel the author could have found more convincing real-life examples of the possible dangers of sharing information. Also, the way he sums up of the points made in conclusions at the end of each chapter felt a bit tiresome, reading like a student essay at times, or a powerpoint presentation.
I did come away re-thinking how much control we have over what we are doing on the internet though. It might be easy to say "well, I have nothing to hide, so who cares?" until all of the information collected and shared by companies over your lifetime are used by future public/private organisations to affect your pension, your access to health coverage or insurance, etc. The idea of having to defend your own life memory against a (more trusted?) digital memory of your life - this might turn out to be more of a concern than just ending up on a junk-mailing list we didn't sign up for.
One scenario describes us forming our own surveillance network, not only in space but through time - what he calls a "temporal panopticon", based on that prison designed by Jeremy Bentham to give prisoners the feeling of being under constant surveillance, encouraging them to always keep their behaviour in check. Things that would have once been forgotten (a drunken Facebook photo) come back to haunt our future selves in ways we couldn't have predicted, so we end up self-censoring, putting on our best digital public face just in case. This sounds slightly paranoid and perhaps we must all just learn how to become more candid, or learn how to read digital material with more caution (maybe cultivate a shared sense that people change over time even if their documents don't).
I like a lot of the ideas in the book, though I feel the author could have found more convincing real-life examples of the possible dangers of sharing information. Also, the way he sums up of the points made in conclusions at the end of each chapter felt a bit tiresome, reading like a student essay at times, or a powerpoint presentation.
I did come away re-thinking how much control we have over what we are doing on the internet though. It might be easy to say "well, I have nothing to hide, so who cares?" until all of the information collected and shared by companies over your lifetime are used by future public/private organisations to affect your pension, your access to health coverage or insurance, etc. The idea of having to defend your own life memory against a (more trusted?) digital memory of your life - this might turn out to be more of a concern than just ending up on a junk-mailing list we didn't sign up for.
February 22, 2017
Possibly an unfair rating as this wasn't a topic I normally would be interested in. Nice ideas but seemed a bit idealistic. The reason I read it, however, makes me comfortable giving it two stars...I just can't envision my students enjoying it.
Read
December 31, 2011Humans forget. That’s the norm. For thousands of prehistoric centuries that’s all there was to it because nothing was written down. Then came writing, and history, and for about forty historic centuries humans developed “external memory”: mechanisms such as books that enabled us to remember across generations (and to communicate at great distance). Still, forgetting remained the norm because most ideas weren’t recorded.
But in this century, with the rise of the Web, more and more of our words (and other creations) are saved—potentially forever. "In the digital age," Mayer-Schonberger asserts, "in what is perhaps the most fundamental change for humans since our beginning, the balance of remembering and forgetting has become inverted… remembering has become easier [and in commerce even cheaper] than forgetting."
Four recent technological developments drive this shift: digitization, cheap storage, easy retrieval, and global reach. The implications for our lifestyles, our relationships, and our careers are enormous. The philosophical implications are even greater.
Mayer-Schonberger observes that, somewhat counterintuitively, forgetting performs an important function in human decision-making. It is part of what anchors us to the present and enables us to grow. (Consider: could any marriage survive a perfect memory?) He advocates that we “remember to forget”—partly through shifts in social norms, laws, and technical architecture—and that we reclaim the understanding that good information is preferable to unlimited information. Most of our thoughts, like most of our things, aren’t worth saving forever. Ultimately he argues for an expiration date for information, to shift the default back from indefinite retention to deletion after a certain amount of time.
This is a provocative and timely book that, ironically, you won’t soon forget. (Jeff B., Reader's Services)
But in this century, with the rise of the Web, more and more of our words (and other creations) are saved—potentially forever. "In the digital age," Mayer-Schonberger asserts, "in what is perhaps the most fundamental change for humans since our beginning, the balance of remembering and forgetting has become inverted… remembering has become easier [and in commerce even cheaper] than forgetting."
Four recent technological developments drive this shift: digitization, cheap storage, easy retrieval, and global reach. The implications for our lifestyles, our relationships, and our careers are enormous. The philosophical implications are even greater.
Mayer-Schonberger observes that, somewhat counterintuitively, forgetting performs an important function in human decision-making. It is part of what anchors us to the present and enables us to grow. (Consider: could any marriage survive a perfect memory?) He advocates that we “remember to forget”—partly through shifts in social norms, laws, and technical architecture—and that we reclaim the understanding that good information is preferable to unlimited information. Most of our thoughts, like most of our things, aren’t worth saving forever. Ultimately he argues for an expiration date for information, to shift the default back from indefinite retention to deletion after a certain amount of time.
This is a provocative and timely book that, ironically, you won’t soon forget. (Jeff B., Reader's Services)
August 24, 2010
Great book, would have given it 5 stars, but I found the last third a bit boring. Other than that, I would definitely recommend it!
In our computer age, there is no forgetting. Google, for one, stores and saves our searches, caches pages, so nothing is forgotten! Is this a good thing? Not when you are passed over for the job you just applied for because of a questionable photo you posted online years ago! It does work when you are seeking information, as we now no longer have to memorize everything....
"Now a stupid adolescent mistake can take on major implications and go on their records for the rest of their lives."
Medical records that are stored online are also susceptible to being leaked, as are our credit card numbers which are regularly stolen. When we change our address with the Post Office, they share that information with several third parties, whether we want them to or not.
"In an age of digital remembering, these leakages have become the rule rather than the exception - and the consequences are pervasive."
"Negative consequences of digital remembering will rarely impact us now; they will instead return to haunt us in future years. Persuading people to forego a concrete present benefit in order to avoid potential future troubles is a hard sell."
In our computer age, there is no forgetting. Google, for one, stores and saves our searches, caches pages, so nothing is forgotten! Is this a good thing? Not when you are passed over for the job you just applied for because of a questionable photo you posted online years ago! It does work when you are seeking information, as we now no longer have to memorize everything....
"Now a stupid adolescent mistake can take on major implications and go on their records for the rest of their lives."
Medical records that are stored online are also susceptible to being leaked, as are our credit card numbers which are regularly stolen. When we change our address with the Post Office, they share that information with several third parties, whether we want them to or not.
"In an age of digital remembering, these leakages have become the rule rather than the exception - and the consequences are pervasive."
"Negative consequences of digital remembering will rarely impact us now; they will instead return to haunt us in future years. Persuading people to forego a concrete present benefit in order to avoid potential future troubles is a hard sell."
March 3, 2016
I saw a reference to this recently, and it reminded me that I must say something about it. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger discusses the fact that, for the first time in history, the balance between remembering and forgetting has been altered. Our default state is to forget stuff, but now we, through our technology, can remember everything.
As he says,
A society that never forgets, may stop forgiving. That unfortunate photo of yourself, or that article you wrote whilst a student, may come back to haunt you years, even decades, later.
Such a situation leads people to self-censor, not just in the here and now, but with one eye on the future. It reminds me of a science fiction story I read in which crime was effectively eradicated because the police used cameras that could go back in time to record actual events instead of people's recollections of them.
Mayer-Schönberger's suggestion is that we should remember to forget. Technology can help us by prompting us to specify expiration dates for the data we store.
I'm not sure that will ever happen, and I suspect that what will save us in the end is te fact that as technology changes it becomes harder to access things created with older technology. But it's a fascinating hypothesis.
As he says,
A society that never forgets, may stop forgiving. That unfortunate photo of yourself, or that article you wrote whilst a student, may come back to haunt you years, even decades, later.
Such a situation leads people to self-censor, not just in the here and now, but with one eye on the future. It reminds me of a science fiction story I read in which crime was effectively eradicated because the police used cameras that could go back in time to record actual events instead of people's recollections of them.
Mayer-Schönberger's suggestion is that we should remember to forget. Technology can help us by prompting us to specify expiration dates for the data we store.
I'm not sure that will ever happen, and I suspect that what will save us in the end is te fact that as technology changes it becomes harder to access things created with older technology. But it's a fascinating hypothesis.
May 20, 2010
A very easy-to-read book on how technology has flipped our culture from one of remembering only important things to remembering everything. The examples aren't very academic and, therefore, easily accessible to most readers. A nice introduction to the concept, but I found some of the suggestions too simplistic. The first part of the book outlining the way our culture has adapted to our bad memories was more interesting than the end chapters on how we can reintroduce forgetting into our technology. I found the last part of the book on instituting the use of time-based or event based metadata to delete a digital object flawed. I followed the reasoning for installing a self-destruct button on digital objects (privacy, protection, space concerns, more in keeping with our mental construction), but I can agree to a self-destruct button for objects as there's no foolproof way to measure an object's importance within our time.
January 24, 2013
This book is basically about privacy and the internet. The main thesis is, that due to the exponentially lower costs of digital storage, everything now posted online is archived and retrievable. The good and the bad can instantly be found by potential employers, lovers and the law. The author presents how we got to where we are and ideas for dealing with this, possibly life-altering technological dilemma. Ultimately, Mayer-Schonberger proposes that we place an expiration date on online information. His final argument is deeply flawed (which he himself admits). Frankly, I was hoping for commentary on how the idea that we don't need to remember anything because of the storage of knowledge impacts the cognitive process. Oh well.
February 20, 2016
Overall, Mayer-Schönberger does make a good case for reviving forgetting and offers a number of solutions to make digital memory less robust. However, to the structure his analysis, he relies on the 1980s terms such as "the information rich" and " the information poor" that obscure material unequities behind networked power.
I also find the author's repeated references to Soviet Union baffling, as if ideological manipulation did not happen in the West during the Cold War. The book is about digital forgetting and remembering at the present moment, and a closer look at some of the undemocratic state practices in contemporary liberal countries would be more relevant.
I also find the author's repeated references to Soviet Union baffling, as if ideological manipulation did not happen in the West during the Cold War. The book is about digital forgetting and remembering at the present moment, and a closer look at some of the undemocratic state practices in contemporary liberal countries would be more relevant.
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