Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (New in Paper) Review

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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (New in Paper) ReviewIn this interesting but not always persuasive book, lawyer and policy analyst Viktor Mayer-Schonberger asserts that being able to forget stuff is a requirement for human social evolution.
For anyone who misplaces his spectacles or keys, this may seem surprising, but Mayer-Schonberger makes the case for it in at least some aspects of daily life. He concentrates on old resentments, which may cripple us if brooded over too long.
Maybe. Further, he claims that the digital revolution has made it impossible for us to usefully forget.
He presents a couple of examples: One is a Canadian psychologist who wrote a research paper in a journal mentioning his use of LSD in the '60s. American immigration officials, using Internet search, matched his name and - declaring him to be a dangerous drug user - denied him entrance.
This seems to me less a problem of too much remembering than of too stupid governors, but Mayer-Schonberger does explain in great detail about how much information the combination of digital speed and cheap memory can store. And even create, by data mining.
It doesn't have to be information you put on the Internet, either. Insurance companies routinely get records of most of the prescriptions pharmacies sell, and they can reconstruct much of your medical history - a history that is otherwise legally supposed to be private.
This part is plenty scary, whether there is a problem with not forgetting or not.
Mayer-Schonberger then leads us through various legal and technical fixes to the problem of too much memory too long. The Europeans have taken a hard-line view of privacy. This leads to absurd results: German universities are not allowed to reveal who they have awarded degrees to.
This much of "Delete" is must reading, unless you've lived in a cave the past 20 years.
The remainder, the frankly controversial part of "Delete," is only interesting if Mayer-Schonberger has already persuaded you that not forgetting is a problem.
He proposes, as a partial and initial defense, a policy of sunsetting or expiring digital data.
This is problematic. He uses the example of yesterday's newspaper. However, the uselessness of yesterday's paper resides in the fact that we have not yet had time to forget what was in it. A copy of a 100-year-old paper is worth more now than it was when fresh.
Imagine how useful it would be socially if 150 years ago the whole world had had as many newspapers as America or Europe, and if they had published daily temperatures. We could save billions in trying to reconstruct past climate and maybe trillions if the result showed that global warming has been overstated.
Similarly, in the United States, we consign census data to only temporary oblivion, keeping it secret for decades but then throwing it open for research useful to both sociologists and geneaologists.
So there is a throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater aspect to Mayer-Schonberger's solution.
Also, we now know that when we call up memories, we distort them when we restore them to our brains. Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated this conclusively 40 years ago (her book "Eyewitness" ought to be read by every person called to jury duty), but Mayer-Schonberger does not mention her. He does refer to a Harvard colleague who has made similar studies more recently, but they seem not to care about such things as accuracy of testimony about past events.
It may be well to forget past insults but then again, maybe not.
Mayer-Schonberger writes, "Forgetting is at least in part a constructive process of filtering information based on relevance."
Whether that's a bug or a feature depends on circumstances.Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (New in Paper) Overview

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