DELETE The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
By Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
Princeton University Press, 237 pages, $27.50
TOTAL RECALL How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
By Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Dutton, 288 pages, $33.50
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From our earliest writing and painting to modern photography and sound recording, human beings have long relied on technology to help us remember, notwithstanding some effort and expense. With breathtaking speed, however, the digital revolution now enables us to store, retrieve and transmit unimaginably vast stores of information, and with very little trouble or cost. Both Delete and Total Recall address the new e-memory's surprisingly under-remarked consequences for the individual and society, but as their titles suggest, these informative, well-written books offer very different perspectives.
In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, a public policy scholar at the National University of Singapore, argues that e-memory is jeopardizing the quality of our lives by making it easier to remember than to forget. The technology's most obvious drawback is the increasing likelihood that your personal information could be co-opted and used against you by various Big Brothers, to say nothing of outright criminals. To illustrate, Mayer-Schonberger tells the stories of two apparently upright persons who naively posted what turned out to be compromising information online and suffered very serious unforeseen consequences.
After a university official found a goofy party photo of her on MySpace, 25-year-old Stacy Synder was denied the teaching certificate that she had diligently pursued for years. When a border guard did an electronic search that turned up an academic article that mentioned a decades-past drug experience, Andrew Feldmar, a Canadian therapist of nearly 70, was barred from future entry to the United States.
Such stories are certain to become commonplace, considering the extremes of self-disclosure that are now part of the youth culture. In a wired global village that's "unforgiving because unforgetting," Mayer-Schonberger writes, not even moving to the other side of the world can restore the "clean slate" of yore.
According to Sir Francis Bacon's maxim that "Knowledge is power," Google already rules the post-industrial world. To be sure, this particular Big Brother has used its e-muscle to accomplish some very good things, starting with the democratization of vast treasuries of information once reserved for professional elites.
On the other hand, as Mayer-Schonberger says, "Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves," including that search on a mental illness, say, or those purchases of books that might raise official eyebrows. Google's founding motto may be "Don't be evil," but only Pollyanna would trust that this commercial enterprise will always put users' privacy before its own profits without some form of legal constraint.
Delete offers many scary examples of how the control of personal information stored in e-memory can fall into the wrong hands. At first glance, the efficiency derived from digitizing our health records to make them accessible to all of our care providers would seem to make that step a no-brainer. Yet Mayer-Schonberger points out that when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, they used the government's benignly intended population registry to identify and persecute Dutch Jews. Similarly, e-data from agencies that monitor pollution are a boon to environmentalists, but also to terrorists looking for targets.
Perhaps Delete's most chilling image is Mayer-Schonberger's comparison of life without the right to e-privacy to the Panopticon. In this ghastly prison, designed by 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, inmates are invisibly monitored. Because they never know whether they're being observed or not, they soon behave as if they were constantly watched.
In addition to the obvious threats that e-memory poses regarding control of personal information, Mayer-Schonberger worries about a subtler problem: the undermining of forgetting. Notwithstanding the huge baby boom's hyper-concern with aging in general and memory decline in particular, in most cases forgetting isn't a disorder but a natural, highly adaptive behaviour.
