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Returnable | Yes |
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Return Window | 30 days from delivery |
Refund Timelines | Typically, an advance refund will be issued within 24 hours of a drop-off or pick-up. For returns that require physical verification, refund issuance may take up to 30 days after drop-off or pick up. Where an advance refund is issued, we will re-charge your payment method if we do not receive the correct item in original condition. See details here. |
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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age Paperback – July 25, 2011
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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global access, and increasingly powerful software―and describes the dangers of everlasting digital memory, whether it's outdated information taken out of context or compromising photos the Web won't let us forget.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.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateJuly 25, 2011
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100691150362
- ISBN-13978-0691150369
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Winner of the 2010 Don K. Price Award, Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics Section of the American Political Science Association"
"Mayer-Schonberger deserves to be applauded and Delete deserves to be read for making us aware of the timelessness of what we created and for getting us to consider what endless accumulation might portend."---Paul Duguid, Times Literary Supplement
"In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we should be less troubled by the fleetingness of our digital records than by the way they can linger."---Adam Keiper, Wall Street Journal
"Mayer-Schönberger raises questions about the power of technology and how it affects our interpretation of time. . . . He draws on a rich body of contemporary psychological theory to argue that both individuals and societies are obliged to rewrite or eliminate elements of the past that would render action in the present impossible."---Fred Turner, Nature
"There is no better source for fostering an informed debate on this issue." ― Science
"A fascinating book."---Clive Thompson, WIRED Magazine
"As its title suggests, Delete is about forgetting, more specifically about the demise of forgetting and the resulting perils. . . . [Mayer-Schonberger] comes up with an interesting solution: expiration dates in electronic files. This would stop the files from existing forever and flooding us and the next generations with gigantic piles of mostly useless or even potentially harmful details. This proposal should not be forgotten as we navigate between the urge to record and immortalise our lives and the need to stay productive and sane."---Yadin Dudai, New Scientist
"Delete is a useful recap of the various methods that are--or could be--applied to dealing with the consequences of information abundance. It also adds a thought-provoking new twist to the literature."---Richard Waters, Financial Times
"Unlike so many books about the internet, which like to hit the panic button then run, Mayer-Schönberger stays around to offer a solution. . . . Mayer-Schönberger deserves to be applauded and Delete deserves to be read for making us aware of the timelessness of what we create and for getting us to consider what endless accumulation might portend."---Paul Duguid, Times Higher Education
"This book . . . is laid out like an invitation to such a sparring session. There you find the detailed arguments, spread out one by one. Get ready to highlight where you agree, note contradictions and arguments not carried through to their consequential end, and make annotations where you feel a new punch. The session will be worth the effort."---Herbert Burkert, Cyberlaw
"A lively, accessible argument . . . that all that stored and shared data is a serious threat to life as we know it."---Jim Willse, Newark Star Ledger
"A fascinating work of social and technological criticism. . . . The book explores the ways various technologies has altered the human relationship with memory, shifting us from a society where the default was to forget (and consequently forgive) to one where it is impossible to avoid the ramifications of a permanent record."---Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat Gazette
"Mayer-Schönberger convincingly claims that our new status quo, the impossibility of forgetting, is severely misaligned to how the human brain works, and to how individuals and societies function. . . . Can anything be done? Delete is an accessible, thoughtful and alarming attempt to start debate."---Karlin Lillington, Irish Times
"To argue for more forgetting is counter-intuitive to those who value information, history and transparency, but the writer pursues it systematically and thoroughly."---Richard Thwaites, Canberra Times
"Surprising and fascinating. . . . Delete opens a highly useful debate."---Robert Fulford, National Post
"Delete offers many scary examples of how the control of personal information stored in e-memory can fall into the wrong hands. . . . Lucid, eminently readable."---Winifred Gallagher, Globe and Mail
"Delete is one of a number of smart recent books that gently and eruditely warn us of the rising costs and risks of mindlessly diving into new digital environments--without, however, raising apocalyptic fears of the entire project. . . . [Mayer-Schonberger] is a digital enthusiast with a realistic sense of how we might go very wrong by embracing powerful tools before we understand them."---Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chronicle of Higher Education
"In this brief book, Mayer-Schönberger focuses on a unique feature of the digital age: contemporaries have lost the capacity to forget. Many books on privacy frequently mention, but never address in detail, the implications of an almost perfect memory system that digital technology and global networks have brought about. . . . An interesting book, well within the reach of the intelligent reader." ― Choice
"Clearly the conversation has begun, and Delete is well placed to contribute."---Matthew L. Smith, Identity in the Information Society
Review
"Delete is, ironically, a book you will not forget. It provides a sweeping but well-balanced account of the challenges we face in a world where our digital traces are saved for life. These issues transcend just issues of privacy but go to the heart of how our society and we as individuals function, remember, and learn. I highly recommend this most informative and delightful book."―John Seely Brown, University of Southern California, coauthor of The Social Life of Information
"An erudite and wide-reaching account of the role that forgetting has played in history―and how forgetting became an exception due to digital technology and global networks. Mayer-Schönberger vividly depicts the legal, social, and cultural implications of a world that no longer remembers how to forget. Delete deserves the broadest possible readership."―Paul M. Schwartz, Berkeley School of Law
"In a work of extraordinary breadth and erudition, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger broadens the 'privacy' debate to encompass the dimension of time. His concept of 'digital forgetting' reshapes how sociologists, technologists, and policymakers must define and protect individual autonomy as technology usurps the prerogatives of human memory."―Philip Evans, Boston Consulting Group
"Human society has taken for granted the fact of forgetting. Technology has made us less able to forget, and this change, as Mayer-Schönberger nicely demonstrates, will have a profound effect on society. We as a culture must think carefully and strategically about this incredibly significant problem. Delete will spark a debate we need to have."―Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
"Delete is a refreshingly philosophical take on the new dilemmas created by extensive digital documentation of our daily lives. Mayer-Schönberger's background in business and technology leads him to a creative and novel response to the challenges generated by persistent storage of data. Delete is a valuable contribution."―Frank Pasquale, Seton Hall Law School
From the Back Cover
"If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine. Mayer-Schönberger catalogs the range of social concerns that are arising as technology favors remembering over forgetting, and offers some approaches that might give forgetting a respected place in the digital world. Read this book. Don't forget about forgetting."--David Clark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Delete is, ironically, a book you will not forget. It provides a sweeping but well-balanced account of the challenges we face in a world where our digital traces are saved for life. These issues transcend just issues of privacy but go to the heart of how our society and we as individuals function, remember, and learn. I highly recommend this most informative and delightful book."--John Seely Brown, University of Southern California, coauthor of The Social Life of Information
"An erudite and wide-reaching account of the role that forgetting has played in history--and how forgetting became an exception due to digital technology and global networks. Mayer-Schönberger vividly depicts the legal, social, and cultural implications of a world that no longer remembers how to forget. Delete deserves the broadest possible readership."--Paul M. Schwartz, Berkeley School of Law
"In a work of extraordinary breadth and erudition, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger broadens the 'privacy' debate to encompass the dimension of time. His concept of 'digital forgetting' reshapes how sociologists, technologists, and policymakers must define and protect individual autonomy as technology usurps the prerogatives of human memory."--Philip Evans, Boston Consulting Group
"Human society has taken for granted the fact of forgetting. Technology has made us less able to forget, and this change, as Mayer-Schönberger nicely demonstrates, will have a profound effect on society. We as a culture must think carefully and strategically about this incredibly significant problem. Delete will spark a debate we need to have."--Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
"Delete is a refreshingly philosophical take on the new dilemmas created by extensive digital documentation of our daily lives. Mayer-Schönberger's background in business and technology leads him to a creative and novel response to the challenges generated by persistent storage of data. Delete is a valuable contribution."--Frank Pasquale, Seton Hall Law School
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
delete
The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital AgeBy Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerPrinceton University Press
Copyright © 2009 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15036-9
Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................................................ixCHAPTER I Failing to Forget the "Drunken Pirate"................................................1CHAPTER II The Role of Remembering and the Importance of Forgetting.............................16CHAPTER III The Demise of Forgetting—and Its Drivers......................................50CHAPTER IV Of Power and Time—Consequences of the Demise of Forgetting.....................92CHAPTER V Potential Responses...................................................................128CHAPTER VI Reintroducing Forgetting.............................................................169CHAPTER VII Conclusions.........................................................................196Afterword to the Paperback Edition..............................................................201Notes...........................................................................................211Bibliography....................................................................................231Index...........................................................................................245Chapter One
Failing to Forget the "Drunken Pirate"Stacy Snyder wanted to be a teacher. By spring of 2006, the 25-year-old single mother had completed her coursework and was looking forward to her future career. Then her dream died. Summoned by university officials, she was told she would not be a teacher, although she had earned all the credits, passed all the exams, completed her practical training—many with honors. She was denied her certificate, she was told, because her behavior was unbecoming of a teacher. Her behavior? An online photo showed her in costume wearing a pirate's hat and drinking from a plastic cup. Stacy Snyder had put this photo on her MySpace web page, and captioned it "drunken pirate," for her friends to see and perhaps chuckle over. The university administration, alerted by an overzealous teacher at the school where Stacy was interning, argued that the online photo was unprofessional since it might expose pupils to a photograph of a teacher drinking alcohol. Stacy considered taking the photo offline. But the damage was done. Her page had been catalogued by search engines, and her photo archived by web crawlers. The Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have forgotten.
Stacy later unsuccessfully sued her university. She alleged that putting the photo online was not unprofessional behavior for a budding teacher. After all, the photo did not show the content of the plastic cup, and even if it did, Stacy, a single mother of two, was old enough to drink alcohol at a private party. This case, however, is not about the validity (or stupidity) of the university's decision to deny Stacy her certificate. It is about something much more important. It is about the importance of forgetting.
Since the beginning of time, for us humans, forgetting has been the norm and remembering the exception. Because of digital technology and global networks, however, this balance has shifted. Today, with the help of widespread technology, forgetting has become the exception, and remembering the default. How and why this happened, what the potential consequences are for us individually and for our society, and what—if anything—we can do about it, is the focus of this book.
For some, Stacy Snyder's case may sound exceptional, but it is not. Dozens of cases of profound embarrassment, and even legal action, have occurred since then—from the attorney who cannot get the Internet to forget an article in a student newspaper more than a decade ago to a young British woman who lost her job because she mentioned on Facebook that her job was "boring." By 2008, more than 110 million people had individual web pages on MySpace, just like Stacy Snyder. And MySpace wasn't the only game in town. Facebook, MySpace's direct competitor, had created 175 million pages online for individual users by early 2009. Facebook and MySpace are primarily focused on the U.S. market (although this is changing), but the phenomenon is not a purely American one. Social networking site Orkut, owned by Google, has over 100 million users, mostly in Brazil and India. A good dozen other sites around the world account for at least another 200 million users. These numbers reflect a more general trend. The first years of the Internet surge, culminating in the dot-com bubble and its burst, were all about accessing information and interacting with others through the global network (call it Web 1.0, if you want). By 2001, users began realizing that the Internet wasn't just a network to receive information, but one where you could produce and share information with your peers (often termed Web 2.0). Young people especially have embraced these Web 2.0 capabilities. By late 2007, Pew Research, an American organization surveying trends, found that two out of three teens have "participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the Internet," with more girls creating (and sharing) content than boys. On an average day, Facebook receives 10 million web requests from users around the world every second. As professors John Palfry and Urs Gasser have eloquently detailed, disclosing one's information—whether these are Facebook entries, personal diaries and commentaries (often in the form of blogs), photos, friendships, and relationships (like "links" or "friends"), content preferences and identification (including online photos or "tags"), one's geographic location (through "geo-tagging" or sites like Dopplr), or just short text updates ("twitters")—has become deeply embedded into youth culture around the world. As these young people grow older, and more adults adopt similar traits, Stacy Snyder's case will become paradigmatic, not just for an entire generation, but for our society as a whole.
Web 2.0 has fueled this development, but conventional publishing—paired with the power of the Internet—has rendered surprisingly similar results. Take the case of Andrew Feldmar, a Canadian psychotherapist in his late sixties living in Vancouver. In 2006, on his way to pick up a friend from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he tried to cross the U.S./Canadian border as he had done over a hundred times before. This time, however, a border guard queried an Internet search engine for Feldmar. Out popped an article Feldmar had written for an interdisciplinary journal in 2001, in which he mentioned he had taken LSD in the 1960s. Feldmar was held for four hours, fingerprinted, and after signing a statement that he had taken drugs almost four decades ago, was barred from further entry into the United States.
Andrew Feldmar, an accomplished professional with no criminal record, knows he violated the law when he took LSD in the 1960s, but he maintains he has not taken drugs since 1974, more than thirty years before the border guard stopped him. For Feldmar, it was a time in his life that was long past, an offense that he thought had long been forgotten by society as irrelevant to the person he had become. But because of digital technology, society's ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory.
Much of Stacy Snyder's pain, some say, is self-inflicted. She put her photo on her web page and added an ambiguous caption. Perhaps she did not realize that the whole world could find her web page, and that her photo might remain accessible through Internet archives long after she had taken it offline. As part of the Internet generation, though, maybe she could have been more judicious about what she disclosed on the Internet. This was different for Andrew Feldmar, however. Approaching seventy, he was no teenage Internet nerd, and likely never foresaw that his article in a relatively obscure journal would become so easily accessible on the worldwide Net. For him, falling victim to digital memory must have come as an utter, and shocking, surprise.
But even if Stacy and Andrew had known, should everyone who self-discloses information lose control over that information forever, and have no say about whether and when the Internet forgets this information? Do we want a future that is forever unforgiving because it is unforgetting? "Now a stupid adolescent mistake can take on major implications and go on their records for the rest of their lives," comments Catherine Davis, a PTA co-president. If we had to worry that any information about us would be remembered for longer than we live, would we still express our views on matters of trivial gossip, share personal experiences, make various political comments, or would we self-censor? The chilling effect of perfect memory alters our behavior. Both Snyder and Feldmar said that in hindsight they would have acted differently. "Be careful what you post online," said Snyder, and Feldmar added perceptively "I should warn people that the electronic footprint you leave on the Net will be used against you. It cannot be erased." But the demise of forgetting has consequences much wider and more troubling than a frontal onslaught on how humans have constructed and maintained their reputation over time. If all our past activities, transgressions or not, are always present, how can we disentangle ourselves from them in our thinking and decision-making? Might perfect remembering make us as unforgiving to ourselves as to others?
Still, Snyder and Feldmar voluntarily disclosed information about themselves. In that strict sense, they bear responsibility for the consequences of their disclosures. Often, however, we disclose without knowing.
Outside the German city of Eisenach lies MAD, a megadisco with space for four thousand guests. When customers enter MAD, they have to show their passport or government-issued ID card; particulars are entered into a database, together with a digital mug shot. Guests are issued a special charge card, which they must use to pay for drinks and food at MAD's restaurant and many bars. Every such transaction is added to a guest's permanent digital record. By the end of 2007, according to a TV report, MAD's database contained information on more than 13,000 individuals and millions of transactions. Sixty digital video cameras continuously capture every part of the disco and its surroundings; the footage is recorded and stored in over 8,000 GB of hard disk space. Real-time information about guests, their transactional behavior, and their consumption preferences are shown on large screens in a special control room resembling something from a James Bond movie. Management proudly explains how, through the Internet, local police have 24/7 online access to customer information stored on MAD's hard disks. Few if any of the disco's guests realize their every move is being recorded, preserved for years, and made available to third parties—creating a comprehensive information shadow of thousands of unsuspecting guests.
For an even more pervasive example, take Internet search engines. Crawling web page by web page, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Search, Ask.com, and a number of others index the World Wide Web, making it accessible to all of us by simply typing a word or two into a search field. We know and assume that search engines know a great deal of the information that is available through web pages on the global Internet. Over the years, such easy-to-use yet powerful searches have successfully uncovered information treasures around the globe for billions of users. However, search engines remember much more than just what is posted on web pages.
In the spring of 2007, Google conceded that until then it had stored every single search query ever entered by one of its users, and every single search result a user subsequently clicked on to access it. By keeping the massive amount of search terms—about 30 billion search queries reach Google every month—neatly organized, Google is able to link them to demographics. For example, Google can show search query trends, even years later. It can tell us how often "Iraq" was searched for in Indianapolis in the fall of 2006, or which terms the Atlanta middle class sought most in the 2007 Christmas season. More importantly, though, by cleverly combining login data, cookies, and IP addresses, Google is able to connect search queries to a particular individual across time—and with impressive precision.
The result is striking. Google knows for each one of us what we searched for and when, and what search results we found promising enough that we clicked on them. Google knows about the big changes in our lives—that you shopped for a house in 2000 after your wedding, had a health scare in 2003, and a new baby the year later. But Google also knows minute details about us. Details we have long forgotten, discarded from our mind as irrelevant, but which nevertheless shed light on our past: perhaps that we once searched for an employment attorney when we considered legal action against a former employer, researched a mental health issue, looked for a steamy novel, or booked ourselves into a secluded motel room to meet a date while still in another relationship. Each of these information bits we have put out of our mind, but chances are Google hasn't. Quite literally, Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves.
Google has announced that it will no longer keep individualized records forever, but anonymize them after a period of nine months, thereby erasing some of its comprehensive memory. Keeping individualized search records for many months still provides Google with a very valuable information treasure it can use as it sees fit. And once the end of the retention period has been reached, Google's pledge is only to erase the individual identifier of the search query, not the actual query, nor the contextual information it stores. So while Google will not be able to tell me what terms I searched for and what search results I clicked on five years ago, they may still be able to tell me what a relatively small demographic group—middle-aged men in my income group, and owning a house in my neighborhood—searched for on the evening of April 10 five years ago. Depending on group size, this could still reveal a lot about me as an individual. And in contrast to Stacy Snyder and Andrew Feldmar, few of us know that Google keeps such a precise record of our searches.
Google is not the only search engine that remembers. Yahoo!, with about ten billion search queries every month, and the second largest Internet search provider in the world, is said to keep similar individual records of search queries, as does Microsoft.
Search engines are a powerful example of organizations that retain near perfect memory of how each one of us has used them, and they are not shy to utilize this informational power. But other organizations, too, collect and retain vast amounts of information about us. Large international travel reservation systems used by online travel web sites, like Expedia or Orbitz, as well as by hundreds of thousands of traditional travel agents around the world, are similarly remembering what we have long forgotten. Each and every flight reservation made through them is stored in their computers for many months, even if we never actually booked the flight. Their records can tell six months after we planned our last vacation what destination and flight options we pondered, or whom we wanted to come along (although that person may never have made it, and may never have known she was considered). They remember what we have long forgotten.
Credit bureaus store extensive information about hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens. The largest U.S. provider of marketing information offers up to 1,000 data points for each of the 215 million individuals in its database. We also see the combination of formerly disparate data sources. Privacy expert Daniel Solove describes a company that provides a consolidated view of an individual with information from 20,000 different sources across the globe. It retains the information, he writes, even if individuals dispute its accuracy. Doctors keep medical records, and are under economic and regulatory pressure to digitize and commit decades of highly personal information to digital memory. And it is not just the private sector that aims for perfect memory. Law enforcement agencies store biometric information about tens of millions of individuals even if they have never been charged with a crime, and most of these sensitive yet searchable records are never deleted.
Neither is the United States alone in creating a digital memory that vastly exceeds the capacity of our collective human mind. In the United Kingdom alone, 4.2 million video cameras survey public places and record our movements. So far, limits in storage capacity and face recognition capabilities have constrained accessibility, but new technology will soon be used to identify individuals in real time (as the BBC reports—this referenced technology is rumored to have been pioneered by Las Vegas Casinos).
Instead of protecting citizens from overbearing surveillance and memory, policy makers are compelling private sector data collectors to perfect the digital memory of all of us, and keep it easily accessible for public agencies from the intelligence community to law enforcement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from deleteby Viktor Mayer-Schönberger Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Princeton University Press; Revised edition (July 25, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0691150362
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691150369
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,083,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #198 in Computer & Internet Law
- #257 in Science & Technology Law (Books)
- #2,465 in Law Specialties (Books)
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About the author
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (born 1966) is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is also a faculty affiliate at Harvard's Belfer Center. Mayer-Schönberger is the co-author of "Framers" (with Kenneth Cukier and Francis de Vericourt), the acclaimed "Reinventing Capitalism" (with Thomas Ramge), the international bestseller "Big Data" (with Kenneth Cukier), and the awards-winning 'Delete".
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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.
I think if the author revised younger audience -- middle school/high school age -- it should be required reading. It should be a text book for that age group.
Telling this history Mayer-Schönberger draws a picture of ever growing body of information about us, as individual members of society, and the way we may interact with it, even if in an indirect way. One of his favorite examples is the story of Stacy Snyder who was denied her teaching certificate because of a picture she had posted on MySpace of her dressed as a drunken pirate. The gist of the argument, if I read it correctly, is that while it becomes easier and cheaper to collect and store information about us and our behavior, we, as individuals, are losing more and more control over that information (once you or somebody else posts your picture online, you no longer have control over where it may appear, who may see it, and in what context). He labels it in terms of remembering and forgetting - if in the past it was difficult and costly to remember and easy and cheap to forget, this balance has reversed.
These days it is so easy and cheap to remember that we start losing our ability to forget. The repercussions of this development are that the accessible, durable, and comprehensive digital record of our past directly impacts the way we conduct and make decisions in the present. For example, I know that once this post will be published, it will become a permanent record of my take on "Delete". Knowing that, I should probably be very careful with what I say about it, because it may impact my future interaction not just with Viktor (with whom I am currently working), but also with other potential readers of this post. I may choose to self censor myself, to present a biased view, or abstain from publishing it altogether. The point is that my behavior today is guided by the uncertainty about the future uses of this information - on the one hand I know it is there to stay, probably attached to my name, but on the other hand, I have no idea who, when, and under what circumstances will use and interpret this post.
To better understand this idea, I think it is helpful to focus on some aspects of socio-psychological functioning of information, which Mayer-Schönberger discusses in length in the book. One of those aspects is interpretation. The bits and bytes in themselves do not mean much, unless we interpret them (similar to the idea of data in knowledge management). It is through interpretation that the information gains meaning and thus also social functions. This leads to another important aspect, which is context. In different contexts we will interpret the same information differently and this is one of the dangers of digitized memory - information is recorded in a certain time and in a given context, but when it gets retrieved at a different time and in a different context, it will likely have different meaning. Thus we are losing control over the interpretation and meaning of the digital information about us and our behavior. When we, as individuals, are losing control over the information, we are becoming powerless compared to other actors (like the state and the corporate world) who have the capacity to collect, store, and retrieve information about us, thus making them even more powerful (they know more about us than we know about them and they control the interpretation process of information about us). Another aspect of this is the negation of time, which threats our ability to make rational decision in the present. Instead of focusing on the big picture, we are focusing on managing the mundane details of our lives, because those are recorded and stored and will have impact on us in the future.
The shift of control over information and negation of time are at the heart of Mayer-Schönberger's concern with digital remembering. The rest the book is dedicated to analysis of potential responses to this concern and finally a proposal of an alternative solution. The book lists six different potential responses, each addresses either the power or the time aspect of digital remembering on one of the three levels: individual, law, and technology. The six solutions are digital abstinence, information privacy rights, digital privacy rights (sort of a DRM for personal information), cognitive adjustment, information ecology, and perfect contextualization. Each one of the approaches has its merits, but each one also has its drawbacks either at the conceptual or practical levels.
Mayer-Schönberger suggests expiration date for information as his solution to the negative effects of digital remembering. On the face of it, this is a rather straight forward idea - we need a piece of meta-data attached to each bit of information, which will determine how long this bit of information should be retained. Of course, his suggestion is much more nuanced and he goes into various scenarios of different ways in which information can be forgotten or partially forgotten, but I hope my one-line explanation carries over the gist of the argument. Mayer-Schönberger acknowledges in his book that expiration date addresses the time-related aspect of digital remembering, but it does little at the "power" front. In fact, the "power" is supposedly influenced indirectly, as by allowing automatic deletion of information the powerful side in the interaction is giving up some of its powers (if my power stems from having information about you and being able to mine it for my purposes, giving up the control over when this information is deleted, is equivalent to giving up part of my power).
I think that the main weakness of the expiration date argument lies not in the fact that it focuses primarily on the "time" aspect of the issue, but in the fact that it puts great hopes into the agency of the user. The idea of expiration dates gives user the power to decide for each and every piece of information how long they want to retain it. However, I am still slightly skeptical whether the user will use that power, because it comes with a cost. This idea assumes that (1) people want to make a decision about each bit of information they process and (2) they are capable of estimating the usable time span of each and every bit. I am not sure that people are that zealous about managing their information and are that thoughtful about the future prospects of its use. Just imagine if you had to decide for each one of the 300 pictures from your last trip, how long you want to retain it... wouldn't it be easier just to keep them all? ... just in case?
However, I think the main task of "Delete" is not offering a practical solution, but undertaking a rather ambitious conceptual and educational task - bringing the idea of "finitness of information" (p.171) into the public consciousness. There may be numerous socio-technical solution to the negative effects of digital remembering, but you need a well stated argument to start thinking in that direction. I think this is what "Delete" is trying to achieve.
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Won't we eventually come to the realization that we aren't all saints? Mayer-Schonberger might also be taken to task for exactly the same fault: his argument about art and culture is astonishingly ahistoric, but it does not mean that some long cherished ideas about the public space are not in danger. It is this that brings us to a different conclusion: given the initial freedom of cyberspace has now been colonised by the corporates, won't the real effect of this behaviour be to eliminate the individual from the Internet except as a corporate actor?
A problem for this poor student is that their name will be permanently linked on the Internet to what she did one night out with her friends, accessible to anyone, future in-laws and employers (a few career options will be probably out of bounds). The book highlights such problems and predicts its social impact.
It raises the next big pressing issue about personal data, how old information can be used against us.