Human knowledge is based on memory. But does the digital age force us to remember too much? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we must delete and let go.

“In his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Victor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, writes: “Time is quite simply a very difficult dimension of human memory for humans to master.” (…)

“Since the early days of humankind,” he writes, “we have tried to remember, to preserve our knowledge, to hold on to our memories and we have devised numerous devices and mechanisms to aid us. Yet through millennia, forgetting has remained just a bit easier and cheaper than remembering.” (…)

The overabundance of cheap storage on hard disks means that it is no longer economical to even decide whether to remember or forget. “Forgetting – the three seconds it takes to choose – has become too expensive for people to use,” he writes. If Mayer-Schönberger’s stepdad had taken digital photographs, his stepson wouldn’t have had to bother thinking about which to delete. (…)

The dream of overcoming human memory’s fallibility was expressed by HG Wells when, in the 1930s, he wrote of a “world brain” through which “the whole human memory can be … made accessible to every individual”. Today, perhaps we have that world brain, and it is called Google. Mayer-Schönberger sounds an Orwellian note about this: “Quite literally, Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves.” (…)

That inability to forget, Mayer-Schönberger argues, limits one’s decision-making ability and ability to form close links with people who remember less. “The effect may be stronger when caused by more comprehensive and easily accessible external digital memory. Too perfect a recall, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past behind.”

And not being able to leave our past behind makes humans, he argues, more unforgiving in the digital age than ever before. In 2006, Vancouver-based psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar was crossing the Canada-US border to pick up a friend from Seattle airport – something he’d done many times before. This time, though, the border guard searched online and found that in 2001 Feldmar had written in an academic journal that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. As a result, Feldmar was barred entry to the US. “This case shows that because of digital technology, society’s ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory.”

In the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham envisaged a prison called a panopticon in which guards could watch prisoners without them knowing whether they were being watched. In the 20th century, Michel Foucault argued that the model of the panopticon was used more abstractly to exercise control over society. In the 21st century, Mayer-Schönberger argues that the panopticon now extends across time and cyberspace, making us act as if we are watched even if we are not. He worries that this “perfect memory” will make us self-censor. “That’s becoming standard. In the US most colleges have a mandatory class on how to clean up your Facebook account.” (…)

In my home country of Austria, the DNA database keeps samples of everybody who left traces at a crime scene. It even means there are two classes of people – suspects and non-suspects and the class of suspects includes those who have been mugged or raped who have their DNA samples on the database.” (…)

Mayer-Schönberger writes in the new edition of Delete: “Digital memory, in reminding us of who she was more than 10 years ago, denied her the chance to evolve and change.” This story, he argues, typifies how digital memory denies us the capacity to forgive.

Once lost, it’s difficult to reconstruct. Germany’s lawmakers tried prohibiting HR departments from Googling job applicants – thereby compelling institutional forgetting. “It was impossible to operationalise. They couldn’t stop HR department workers Googling at home, for instance.” (…)

“Nine out of 10 Americans want the right to force websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about them. And for US digital natives [those born after the introduction of digital technology] the figure is 84%.” (…)

What Facebook does to human identity. “In the analogue era, it was relatively simple to keep your lives separate. If my main leisure pursuits were being in the golf club and in an S&M circle, it was essential that no one at the former knew about the latter. Facebook, by not allowing you to have two accounts, problematises that separation. The response is that individuals employ strategies to hack the system – almost all my colleagues have two Facebook accounts, to keep different parts of their lives boxed in.” (…)

He suggests that users, when saving a document they have created, would have to select an expiration date in addition to the document’s name and location on their hard disk. “Expiration dates are about asking humans to reflect – if only for a few moments – about how long the information they want to store may remain valuable.”

This chimes with Harvard cyberlaw expert Jonathan Zittrain’s idea that we should have a right to declare reputation bankruptcy – ie to have certain aspects of one’s digital past erased from the digital memory. (…)

Mayer-Schönberger is now researching what he calls “institutions of remembering”. “We set up institutions of memory to help us remember important things – such as the Holocaust, for example. But with Google and Flickr and other sites offering seemingly comprehensive memory, we might be prompted to devalue these established institutions of memory. They risk being drowned out by stuff online. My fear is that the digital age, while benefiting us enormously, impoverishes us too.”

— Stuart Jeffries, Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, The Guardian, 30 June 2011

See also:

☞ Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
☞ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: Delate, The Virtue of Forgetting (video lecture)
☞ Jeffrey Rosen, The Web Means the End of Forgetting, NYT, July 21, 2010