by Clive Thompson
Wired Magazine, Vol. 10, July, 2009
In an age of unlimited memory, the most important act is remembering not to remember.
HAVE WE FORGOTTEN how to forget? Viktor Mayer-Schonberger worries about this. The association professor of public policy, who is affiliated with Harvard, has written a fascinating book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, due out in September. In it, he argues that technology has inverted our millenia-old relationship with memory. For most of human history, almost everything people did was forgotten, simply because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But there was a benefit: “Social forgetting” allowed everyone to move on from embarrassing or ill-conceived moments in their lives. Digital tools have eliminated that amnesty. Google caches copies of our blog postings; social-networking sites thrive by archiving our daily dish. Society now defaults to a relentless Proustian remembrance of all things past. The downsides are obvious. We live with a nagging fear that something we say or do online will come back to haunt us years later. (Just ask anyone who’s been Google-vetted at the start of a relationship.) “We become enormously more cautious with what we say or do,” says Mayer-Schonberger. And society suffers when people stop taking risks. So what’s the solution? Mayer-Schonberger argues that we need to stop creating tools that automatically remember everything. Instead, we need to design them to forget. As it turns out, software developers are beginning to do just that: They’re becoming architects of oblivion. A good example is Drop.io. It’s one of many new “private sharing” services that let you upload a file–a picture, a video, whatever–and get a special URL you can give to select friends or workmates. Photographers, for instance, use it to send photos to clients when they want to keep the images under wraps.
But here’s what makes Drop.io unique: When you upload a file, the service asks you to put an expiration date on it. It could be a month, a few hours, even “after five people have seen it.” If you don’t set a date, the default is one year. And when that time arrives, the file is deleted. (more…)
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