Book Review on Delete_The virtue of forgetting in digital age
Review on the book “DELETE: The virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”
In this book the author is discussing on the issue of we forgetting to forget in this digital age. Things like we post in networking sites in internet and the things we search in search engine getting stored for ages makes things complicated. The author has coated a few incidents like a teacher-in-training, Ms. Stacy Snyder not getting her certificate because of posting a inappropriate picture in face book, and a Canadian psychotherapist, Andrew Feldmar not allowed to cross US border by 2006 because of writing about his experiences with LSD in the 1960s at 2001 in an article, for supporting his cause. By these he is arguing that “Time is a great healer” may not be valued any more.
Forgetting is human, yes, our system is built to forget easily and to remember we need to go a notch up. In this digital era forgetting is made difficult with every bit of the information stored or typed in internet is saved forever. As discussed in the book, flipping through your thousands of photographs taken and deleting few of those is really pain staking instead you can store everything without much effort. These have in a way erased one of the most fundamental behavioural mechanisms of humankind. Author have also suggests a few solutions to the problem of digital unforgetting like scheme of data “Expiration Dates.” and strict privacy laws. He prefers a legal and technical approach in part because getting people to constrain what they desire to share is difficult.
The thought of someone else knowing what we are searching in internet and what we post in social networking sites getting stored forever is bit concerning, yes a bit. The issue is bit blown out of proposition here. Apart from someone intentionally hacking into our account of networking site and posting which we don’t want to and a friend accidentally or even intentionally posts a photograph which we may not please us, there is nothing much to worry. A little self-censorship may do the trick for us. Even in the examples given, the complete picture is not there, like what happened after the Ms. Stacy Snyder sued the board. In my opinion with an eye for the information we share in the internet this issue can be handled well. We had a discussion over this book and the issue it addresses, the outcome was interesting. One thing I want to share here is that when we login to a google account whatever it may be a email account or even a social network, and we search anything in the internet gets saved against out account. It is true, only if we open a google account and search. How many have a google account, even those have google account how many times we open our account and search simultaneously. Another interesting thing which came out of the discussion we had in the class was the voting. 18 voted in favour of the author that there is an issue and 12 voted against it. Other fact is majority of the 12 voted against were from technical background who know a bit about internet and stuffs. There is an issue of information getting stored forever but it is not as serious as mentioned by the author.
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