Delete

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“The human brain contains roughly 100 terabytes of information, not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it it’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality, there’s no way to translate the data. But the information being held in our heads IS available in other databases. People leave more than foot prints as they travel through life; medical scans, DNA profiles, psych evaluations, school records, emails, recording, video, audio, CAT scans, genetic type & synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music list, movie tickets, tv shows…. even prescriptions for birth control.”
— Zoe Graystone (or rather her avatar), Caprica tv series (s01e01)

Lately there has been quite a bit of discussion on the impact of digital and network technologies on memory, and the relationship between remembering and forgetting. Most notably, Nicholas Carr tackled this subject in his essay ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ (see also previous post), in which he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing our thinking (an issue he expands on in his forthcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains). “For me, as for others”, he wrote, “the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. ‘The perfect recall of silicon memory,’ Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, ‘can be an enormous boon to thinking.’ But that boon comes at a price.”

This idea of “perfect remembering” has been explored in two recently published books. The first is Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything (New York: Dutton, 2009), in which Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain wat they consider to be the “benefits” of the increase in electronic memory. The second publication, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s DELETE: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) offers a somewhat more critical and nuanced analysis of the consequences of the so-called “e-memory revolution”. Although they have different approaches and conclusions, both books share a similar premise. Confronted with widespread digitization, cheap storage technology, improved retrieval techniques and the global reach of computer networks, Bell, Gemmell and Mayer-Schönberger sense the demise of forgetting, and a fundamental shift to the default of remembering, “because it no longer requires a conscientious act, a tiny bit of time, energy or money that we need to expend to commit information to digital memory”. Unlike Bell and Gemmell however, Mayer-Schönberger sees this shift as deeply problematic, as the individual and collective unlearning of “one of the most fundamental behavioral mechanisms of humankind”: forgetting. “Digital technology empowers us as never before”, The pitch of DELETE reads, “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”. With the help of digital technologies, we have begun to erase forgetting from our daily practices, and although this evolution offers innumerable benefits – increase of efficiency and accuracy – it also exposes us to potentially harmful consequences. Two terms characterize what is at stake here: power and time. Mayer-Schönberger describes how digital memory amplifies and deepens the already existing chasm between the “information rich” and the “information poor”, or the surveyed and the surveillant. The accessibility of digital remembering may lead to forms of self-censorship: in a talk with Thomas Friedman, Google CEO Eric Schmidt cautioned that this “living with a historical record” means that people will have to become “much more careful how they talk, how they interact, what they offer of themselves.” Ultimately, this climate of self-censorship through the perception of panoptic control can stifle societal debate.

Mayer-Schönberger also points out how digital remembering threatens our ability to decide rationally. He refers, of course, to Ireneo Funes, Borges’ dramatic character who looses his ability to forget and is therefore no longer able to generalize or abstract; his world is one of intolerably uncountable details of his past. What Borges hypothesized, we now know. Neurobiologists have recently published on the case of AJ, a Californian woman who has “nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic” memory of her personal history and countless public events – like a movie “that never stops”. This rare case of “hyperthymestic syndrome” is a chilling illustration of the importance of forgetting. AJ wrote: “I remember good, which is very comforting. But I also remember bad – and very bad choices. And I don’t really give myself a break. There are all these forks in the road, moments you have to make a choice, and then it’s ten years later, and I’m still beating myself up over them. I don’t forgive myself for a lot of things. Your memory is the way it is to protect you. I feel like it just hasn’t protected me. Most people have called what I have a gift, but I call it a burden. (…) Though people tend to think of forgetting as an affliction and are disturbed by the loss of so much memory as they age, I’ve come to understand that there is a real value to being able to forget a good deal about our lives.” The way we (re)construct our memory, argues Mayer-Schönberger, is not so much a deficiency as a benefit. Human storage and recall are really constructive processes which help us to “reason swiftly and economically, to abstract and generalize, and to act in time, rather than remain caught up in conflicting recollections”. However, now that our “biological memories” are gradually supplemented by stronger and stronger grades of “external memories” inscribed on various media—from writing, paintings, books, photography (in the 1850’s daguerreotypes were advertised as “durable mementos”), sound and image recording technology to information’s “superior” incarnation in the digital – the idea of perfect remembering (envisioned by people like H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush) is taking a hold on human existence, “leaving us helplessly oscillating between two equally troubling options: a permanent past and an ignorant present.”

Every communication with the world produces a piece of information, and insofar as such communication is using any digital device along the way, chances are it will be added to our “digital shadows”. Furthermore, now that the Internet has evolved from a tool to access to a tool to share information, we are loosing control over our personal information; after all, every query on Google, every visit on Amazon leaves a trail. The past is ever present, ready to be called up at the click of a mouse. The dangers of everlasting digital memory are already obvious: whether it’s outdated information taken out of context or compromising photos the Web won’t let us forget. How are we to react, Mayer-Schönberger asks. Information Privacy Rights – or rather the right to informational self-determination – may be useful, as can privacy DRM, but these strategies are not well suited to address this challenge. The idea of creating an information ecology, based on rules constraining what information can be collected, stored and thus remembered, by whom and for how long, not only has conceptual weaknesses but also political ones, especially in a time when transparency has become synonymous with effective government (considering that, after 9/11, norms were enforced that described information retention rather than deletion). Instead Mayer-Schönberger proposes a simple solution: expiration dates on information. This would allow individuals to decide how long they want information to be remembered – although societies would have the power to override such individual decisions if necessary (a challenge for memory institutions). These expiration dates (already implemented in services like Amazon) would not be about imposed forgetting, but rather about awareness, and about “asking humans to reflect – if only for a few moments – how long the information they want to store may remain valuable and useful.” But what about cognitive adjustment, rewiring our brains to the demands of digital remembering? Such adaptation, says Mayer-Schönberger, however enticing, would fail to address another fundamental downside of digital memory: that of incompleteness. Not everything we communicate is captured as bits and bytes (and even if it is, there are no guarantees that the data will stay accessible or readable, an issue Mayer-Schönberger forgets to mention) – and certainly not our own thinking.

Mayer-Schönberger has to acknowledge that digital memory will always be fundamentally incomplete. This is part of the reason why Jean-François Blanchette sees the Total Recall vision as problematic: “not only on account of the purported imperviousness of digital technologies to decay, but also in its implication of a direct correspondence between records and remembering. It relies on a number of hypotheses about digital media that prove difficult to maintain in any sustained encounter with the practical constraints of digital information capture, storage and curation. Like any other media, digital media brings to the table its own dialectics of objectivity and subjectivity, signal and noise, integrity and decay, authenticity and forgery, transparency and censorship, remembrance and repression”. If there is something unique about digital media, Blanchette writes, “it is to be found in the powerful association between computers and mathematics that endows digital information with a special cultural authority, that which has historically accrued to mathematics as pure symbolic expression of natural laws. Mayer-Schönberger is indeed right, we should fear faith in the perfection of the digital archive”. We might already be too late: a recent USC study of the Center for the Digital Future found that a majority believes that “most or all of the information produced by search engines is reliable and accurate.”

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger will be one of the speakers on the ‘Memories of the Future’ conference, taking place on June 25th in Gent (Belgium). More info soon!