Book review

In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, professor Mayer-Schonberger worries perfect memory in digital age will cause lots of problems. Selective forgetfulness keeps humanity from downing in our own memories, helps us deal with recorded data efficiently.However, with digital age coming, which is driven by four factors: digitization, cheap storage, easy retrival and gobal reach, recorded data becomes impossible to be forgotten. Two examples are cited to show why the result is horrible, a Canadian who was denied entry to the US in 2006 because in his 2001 article he mention his use of LSD in 1965 and a teacher whose drunk photo was shared on SNS was unable to get her teaching certificate despite she fullfilled the professional learning for teaching.

Mayer-Schonberger also puts aside his suggest to solve this problem: expiry date for information. He argues the core of the proposal is not automatically deletion, but the prompting of expiry date will remind human most of the information is not timeless but loses its vales as time goes by. Expiry date has two commen features: it aims changing the default from remebering back to forgetting, and it keeps remind us of information's temporal nature.

In our Research Method class, 18 in 30 persons agreed unforgetfulness of digital society was really a problem, while the rest considered it as a tiny thing. For me, if all the data is recroded on web server and could not be deleted, it will be a nightmare. I can not imagine individual would be evaluated according to what they have done ten years ago. Everyone may make mistakes in our way of growning up, but internet will record all our trivial deficiency even our brain has forgiven us by forgetting them. If a choice of forgetting or remembering is given before publishing, that maybe comfort me, but it is still not a perfect solution. As we all know, the information on internet is open and easy to reach. Yes, it could be deleted when the date arrives, but what will happen if the information has been spread out before expiry date arrives. It makes no sense to introduce expiry date to some extent. What's more, who can define expiry date? The publisher of the information? Or anyone who is concerned with the information? If the two subjects conflict what should be done? So it may be a good idea to add expiration date, but is it practical? I really doubt it.

Nevertheless, I myself insist perfect memory violates displine of nature and we should keep close eye on this issue. I really don't want someone comes to me and says "I know what you did last summer" in the future.