Go ahead and forget it (2)
Tommy Lee Jones and his partner, Will Smith, federal agents, carried a memory-eraser while protecting earth against extraterrestrial creatures in the terrific 1997 comedy Men in Black. Whenever civilians happened to glimpse aliens, Jones and Smith activated the eraser and the civilians instantly forgot what they saw. It was for their own good, so they wouldn’t panic.
A fan of Men in Black will find it hard to avoid recalling those scenes while reading Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s surprising and fascinating book on computerized memory, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press).
In the last two decades, a vast sea of computerized data has risen around us, unbidden. Because digital storage is so cheap, and search engines so powerful, computers now know far more about many people than the people themselves know. And they will know this, apparently, forever. If an indiscreet photograph of a 19-year-old appears on the World Wide Web, someone will be able to find it when the 19-year-old is 29 or, for that matter, 59. The follies of youth, digitalized, become permanently inescapable.
Mayer-Schönberger, an Austrian lawyer and professor of public policy who taught for 10 years at Harvard before moving to the University of Singapore, begins his book with a story about a woman who was refused her degree from a teacher’s college in Pennsylvania because she appeared drunk on Facebook. Things like that, he said, happen often.
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Internet privacy: how much are you happy for the world to know?
Popularity: 2% [?]
Male, retired and the rest is of little interest to anyone. The site keeps me busy and if it helps others to stay abreast of daily events then my time is well spent.
nomdeblog Says:
“The follies of youth, digitalized, become permanently inescapable.”
Thank goodness my youth was pre-digital. Yet the follies continue LOL
Posted on December 20th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Mac Says:
An interesting concept and timely. How delighted would be those folks whose emails follies and slipshod unscientific procedures are now exposed if their records had a diary date and had disappeared rather than being retained to stain them?
Posted on December 20th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Lindsay Says:
Google? Glad to see their ethics are again allowing auto-suggestions for Climategate (10.7M today, 22.5 last week) – Bing’s is at 51.5M today, and climbing.
But it really doesn’t matter. The Great Firewall of Canada is in place and legally enforced on all ISPs – and it goes right down to a specific photograph. Secret negotiations by our Civil Servants are ongoing!
Nah! I don’t need a tin-foil hat – I actually wish I did …
* The Firewall’s infrastructure has been “tested” for the last 2 years and is now enforced by a law to “protect the children”. Expansion is just a matter of adding some wording to be “in-step” with our other freedom-loving friends (USA, EU, Australia, etc.)
* One treaty from the “Secret Negotiations” was leaked a couple of days ago to wikileaks.org (a site soon to ‘disappear” from your Internet access?).
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4627/125/
I know you’re going to say “But I don’t pirate”. So? Remember the National Film Board, the archive of Canada’s history? You can’t get much from them today – for copyright reasons. When copyrights were extended to Life+50 years the NFB couldn’t get the funding, or even find the legal copyright holders to get an extension. So? Our history “disappeared” by legal enforcement and never happened! Just a few words altered in an existing Act, for modernisation.
Hey! You can always get the un-filtered news through a Russian proxy server. Oh wait, they’ll be blocked by the firewall. We’re mushroomed!
Posted on December 21st, 2009 at 1:30 am
Lindsay Says:
Is your faith copyrighted? Is the [religious book of your choice] copyrighted? Is the Pope copyrighted? Ha! You Pagan! That Intellectual Property claim would be really, really …. Oh? Oh-oh. My bad. I’m going to hell. Is it too late for my salvation and just pay the fee?
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/holy_see_declares_unique_copyright_on_papal_figure
Don’t – I know the definition and that we’re all Pagans.
Um… Microsoft is being sued over trademark infringement for using the word Bing [tm] by “Bing Information Design” [tm] – So I guess I shouldn’t have also used the word … Ah! My brain hurts. Let’s all switch to Russian.
Posted on December 21st, 2009 at 2:24 am