As an only child, whose parents were also only children, I value memories as something rare and fragile. Sometimes a doctor asks me something about my childhood medical history and I simply don’t know – and there’s no one alive who is likely to remember the answer to the question. So I’m inclined to value memory.
But after reading Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, I’m now seriously inclined to also value the reverse. There are, from my youth, as is I think the case with most people, plenty of incidents that can still produce an inward cringe when I’m remind of them – and no doubt there were many more similar events over which my brain has drawn a merciful veil.
But I didn’t grow up in the internet age – I was well into my 20s before I had my first website (and I was a fairly early adopter of the web), into my late 30s before I had my first blog. Enough sense, hopefully, to avoid putting anything up that will cause rampant future embarrassment. (Although come to think of it I wonder what I might have posted on some early, internet archived email lists around about the early 90s…)
Mayer-Schonberger begins Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age with the story of a 25-year-old American, Stacey Snyder, who was denied a licence to be a teacher after an official found a photo of her on Facebook taken at a party and captioned “drunken pirate”. It is a type of newspaper story now so common as to be almost cliché – the unwise email sent around the world, the Facebook “my job is boring “ status that gets someone fired.
But in considering the value of forgetting in the internet age, Delete goes much further, into much darker, murkier territory. I was astonished to read that (without telling their customers) the American post office when it receives a “change of address” mail redirect, passes this information on to third parties, mostly mail order companies, so they can also redirect their mail. Mayer-Schonberger continues: “More troubling perhaps is the practice of two thirds of all health insurance companies in the United States to screen health insurance applicants by digitally assessing their prescription histories. Most applicants and even many insurance brokers are unaware of such invasive practices made possible by digital accessibility.”
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