Home » Opinion » Book review
Information overload in age when nothing can be deleted
October 30, 2010, Saturday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IN this age of easy information, forgetting is a lost art.
Once a piece of information is etched into a hard disk, it stays there and may be recalled at a click of the mouse.
According to "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, digitalization, cheap storage, easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software conspire to override our natural capacity to forget.
This development has disturbing implications.
When the past is forever present, the Internet never lets us forget and imposes on us things that had best be forgotten.
The author mentions an aspiring 25-year-old single mother who was judged as unfit for teaching because a photo she shared on her MySpace web page shows her drinking from a cup.
The page has been catalogued by search engines and archived by web crawlers.
In this instance, a more or less harmless scrap of information has been successfully used against the unsuspecting provider of the information.
Some Chinese still feel vaguely threatened by our dang'an (personal record), a secret file kept by our danwei (employer).
It accompanies us throughout life, though we are left in the dark as to its contents.
If you have transgressed and been duly disciplined or punished, sometimes the wudian (stain) would be entered in your dang'an. It would stay there, ready to destroy possibilities when, for instance, you are being considered for a promotion.
In the politically extremist era, many a career and prospect had been ruined by a casual note: "This person is not fit to be entrusted with important assignments."
But the specter of dang'an pales beside the perfect memory of a computer.
With dang'an, I do not think a stupid adolescent mistake would eclipse my adult career, for human discretion is still exercised in building a personal file.
In addition, access to the file is restricted to a few people and, what with physical limitations and decay of paper, these files would probably die a natural death after, say, 100 years.
Not so in the cyberspace.
One of my colleagues said recently that with a kind of software, he easily restored all the files he once believed had been permanently deleted on his laptop, from the day the computer was bought.
When we Google, every key word we enter betrays something about us.
According to the author, in the spring of 2007, Google conceded that until then it had stored every single search query ever entered by a user, and the search result subsequently clicked.
These queries reconstruct part of our past, and the author conclude that "Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves."
Our physical movements is being closely watched too.
Whether we are walking on the street, strolling in public areas, commuting on a bus or metro, numerous video cameras record with great precision our movements and surroundings.
The book reveals that soon new face-recognition technology will be able to identify individuals in real time as they are captured by cameras.
Some phones sporting GPS features already allow the users to be constantly tracked.
And police have been tracking down suspects by monitoring mobile phone signals for sometime.
By constantly confronting people with past indiscretions or transgressions, some people are denied chances to reform.
At the beginning of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" (1850), "a rag of scarlet cloth" in the shape of the letter "A" on the breast of Hester Prynne represents the act of adultery that she has committed.
Hester's charitable deeds and quiet humility have earned her respect from the community, and by and by the "A" is said to be standing for "Angel."
Could she hope of this elevation in the digital age? The future will ever be unforgiving because it cannot forget.
Ironically, the digital world has been deceptively known to be a free, democratic realm, where netizens can express their sentiments to their heart's content unencumbered by identity, little aware of the electronic footprint left on the net.
Until one day when the footprint is used against them.
Mayer-Schoenberger believes there are graver consequences.
Citing the growing use of surveillance technology, some warn of a digital version of Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon," a prison in which guards could watch prisoners without prisoners knowing this.
Lost in the data of our past, we risk losing our power to generalize and abstract.
We would lose the power to live and act firmly in the present.
As a solution, the author suggests an expiration date for all information, and believes steps need to be taken to help us forget better.
Once a piece of information is etched into a hard disk, it stays there and may be recalled at a click of the mouse.
According to "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, digitalization, cheap storage, easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software conspire to override our natural capacity to forget.
This development has disturbing implications.
When the past is forever present, the Internet never lets us forget and imposes on us things that had best be forgotten.
The author mentions an aspiring 25-year-old single mother who was judged as unfit for teaching because a photo she shared on her MySpace web page shows her drinking from a cup.
The page has been catalogued by search engines and archived by web crawlers.
In this instance, a more or less harmless scrap of information has been successfully used against the unsuspecting provider of the information.
Some Chinese still feel vaguely threatened by our dang'an (personal record), a secret file kept by our danwei (employer).
It accompanies us throughout life, though we are left in the dark as to its contents.
If you have transgressed and been duly disciplined or punished, sometimes the wudian (stain) would be entered in your dang'an. It would stay there, ready to destroy possibilities when, for instance, you are being considered for a promotion.
In the politically extremist era, many a career and prospect had been ruined by a casual note: "This person is not fit to be entrusted with important assignments."
But the specter of dang'an pales beside the perfect memory of a computer.
With dang'an, I do not think a stupid adolescent mistake would eclipse my adult career, for human discretion is still exercised in building a personal file.
In addition, access to the file is restricted to a few people and, what with physical limitations and decay of paper, these files would probably die a natural death after, say, 100 years.
Not so in the cyberspace.
One of my colleagues said recently that with a kind of software, he easily restored all the files he once believed had been permanently deleted on his laptop, from the day the computer was bought.
When we Google, every key word we enter betrays something about us.
According to the author, in the spring of 2007, Google conceded that until then it had stored every single search query ever entered by a user, and the search result subsequently clicked.
These queries reconstruct part of our past, and the author conclude that "Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves."
Our physical movements is being closely watched too.
Whether we are walking on the street, strolling in public areas, commuting on a bus or metro, numerous video cameras record with great precision our movements and surroundings.
The book reveals that soon new face-recognition technology will be able to identify individuals in real time as they are captured by cameras.
Some phones sporting GPS features already allow the users to be constantly tracked.
And police have been tracking down suspects by monitoring mobile phone signals for sometime.
By constantly confronting people with past indiscretions or transgressions, some people are denied chances to reform.
At the beginning of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" (1850), "a rag of scarlet cloth" in the shape of the letter "A" on the breast of Hester Prynne represents the act of adultery that she has committed.
Hester's charitable deeds and quiet humility have earned her respect from the community, and by and by the "A" is said to be standing for "Angel."
Could she hope of this elevation in the digital age? The future will ever be unforgiving because it cannot forget.
Ironically, the digital world has been deceptively known to be a free, democratic realm, where netizens can express their sentiments to their heart's content unencumbered by identity, little aware of the electronic footprint left on the net.
Until one day when the footprint is used against them.
Mayer-Schoenberger believes there are graver consequences.
Citing the growing use of surveillance technology, some warn of a digital version of Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon," a prison in which guards could watch prisoners without prisoners knowing this.
Lost in the data of our past, we risk losing our power to generalize and abstract.
We would lose the power to live and act firmly in the present.
As a solution, the author suggests an expiration date for all information, and believes steps need to be taken to help us forget better.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
