DELETE
The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
By Victor Mayer-Schönberger, Princeton University Press, 237pp.

FUTURE FILES
A History of the Next 50 Years
By Richard Watson, Scribe Publications, 302pp
Reviewed: 21 November 2009

I’d venture that most readers of Panorama, like me, have more interest in better remembering than in better forgetting. But Victor Mayer-Schönberger, an ex-Harvard Public Policy academic now based in Singapore, is concerned that our world of digital information storage and retrieval is at serious risk of remembering too much for our own good.

In “Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”, his view is that both mental and social health depend on a reliable process of forgetting. Decisions we make should not be over-influenced by past events whose context is no less relevant. What’s more, if we are aware that our words and actions will be relentlessly recalled, we inhibit our natural responses to the present. My mind drifted to the deadly robot-speech of too many contemporary politicians and the “gotcha” games of political interviewers.

To argue for more forgetting is counter-intuitive to those who value information, history and transparency, but the writer pursues it systematically and thoroughly. Humans learned useful ways to externalise, preserve and communicate memory with pictures, then oral language, then writing. This generation has moved orders of magnitude into the out-sourcing of memory through information technologies of formidable capability.

It is now cheaper to store digitised information for ever rather than spend the time to selectively delete documents, images and communications whose ephemeral purpose has long been met. These casually preserved ephemera may then be recalled, in some unforseen context, by the amazing sorting and retrieval capabilities of modern search engines and data processing systems.

So is it fair that a person’s job prospects or personal relations can be blighted by the retrieval of some injudicious photograph or email sent across the Internet decades earlier, in a context that has long changed? A printed photo, diary entry or hasty letter would most likely to have been lost or buried over the intervening time. This book asserts that we all should have the right to re-make ourselves over time and shed the past.

There is important truth in that, but the other side of the coin is the question of individual accountability for past actions, on which social systems of trust and justice depend. Every society continues to review the balance between privacy and transparency, between appropriate accountability and damaging or vengeful gossip.

Mayer-Schönberger says the problem is worst when commercial or government agencies have the power to correlate a wide range of diverse information sources to construct an profile of an individual that appears conclusive, but may be based on pieces of information that may be inaccurate, outdated, incomplete, and almost certainly out of original context.

His general privacy arguments are not new. Societies have always acted on imperfect or unreliable information to discipline, incriminate, or shame members into acceptable behaviour. Rules of evidence are imperfect in the most liberal of legal systems. But like other social trends, the erosion of personal information privacy is now wider, deeper, and faster than ever before. Unprecedented technical capabilities have multiplied the risk of specious correlations.

For the individual, the author suggests that perfectly-retrieved digital memories actually impede decision-making. We have evolved to make contemporary decisions based upon naturally imperfect memories that have been modified and qualified over time and in the light of subsequent experience. Sometimes, it’s actually harmful to remember accurately how we or others felt and acted at specific times in the past.

These are interesting observations and well supported with lively examples, but he has more difficulty offering convincing solutions. Various legal and technical methods are reviewed, by which individuals could determine for how long, and in what context, any information concerning themselves might be used.

His favoured solution is to time-stamp all digital information with an expiration date controlled by its “owner”. Good luck with that. We emerged from the swamp only by learning from the past and by sharing information about others’ experiences, usually in unforseen future contexts. It reminds me of the perils associated with the well-intentioned Moral Rights laws that purport to give people control over future references to their artistic productions, but in effect risk stifling creative cross-fertilization.

Legal rights regimes over personal information would be costly litigation minefields, accessible to only a privileged few. In my view, any conceivable technical solutions to control digital information could and would be circumvented, because anything that can be read, viewed or heard by a human can readily be re-digitised. The only practicable strategy is to avoid digitising any information over which you want to keep absolute control – he calls this “digital abstinence”.

In the frequently-Googled words of Scott McNealy, former president of Sun Microsystems, “Privacy is dead – get over it”.

Richard Watson’s “Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years” is promoted as a provocative book, and it certainly succeeded with this reviewer. Watson doesn’t claim the profession of Futurologist, but he makes his living offering predictions and forecasts about trends that should interest anyone intending to live more than a few years.

This is an updated version of a book published two years ago – things change quickly in the future. Futurology is a field for the brave who won’t mind being wrong when their words are digitally retrieved in a few years’ time.

Spanning society, technology, business, entertainment and business, Watson brandishes a fire-hose of snappy analyses and predictions, any of which could kick off a robust argument in a pub or over a dining table. This is an Australian work, but Watson ranges globally for his resources of quotes, facts and anecdotes.

Possible futures don’t have to be consistent, and predictions can contradict each other within a few pages. On page 33, nation-states are becoming irrelevant, while on page 37 nationalism is on the rise. But who’s to quibble?

Well, all of us, really. The value of this book is not any single prediction you could put your money on, but rather a persistent prodding to think and argue about possible projections from where we are today. And so, about possible consequences of how we act today.

As a contrarian, I found it frustrating to read this book of provocations with nobody to argue against. But I do commend it as a readable source of ideas and factoids for use by stirrers in the classroom, in the boardroom, or in the torpid zone of Public Service strategic planning.

Richard Thwaites has worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and former Department of Communications, IT and the Arts.