Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Citation

Stevenson, K. (2010), "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age", Records Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2010.28120aae.001

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Article Type: Professional resources From: Records Management Journal, Volume 20, Issue 1

Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerPrinceton University PressPrinceton, NJ2009237 pp.ISBN: 978-0-691-13861-9

Keywords: Records management, Data handling, Retention

Humans have always had an innate condition of forgetting, argues Viktor Mayer-Schönberger – that is, until now. With the advance of technology, humans are now able to use technological means to ensure nothing about themselves or their lives is forgotten. From photos on Facebook ruining a teacher’s career to the story of Gordon Bell, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger aims to demonstrate how remembering has become the norm, and forgetting is now the exception.

The experience of Gordon Bell would send a shiver down any Records Manager’s spine. Bell records everything about his life, from his medical records to an image of every person he meets, every e-mail and even every webpage his visits. Bell has been doing this for almost a decade, and it is all stored on his computer. The purpose of this is for research called MyLifeBits and its aim is to prove that a machine can act as a “perfect memory”. Mayer-Schönberger is concerned at the advent of this “perfect memory” because he is worried about the actual impact that supplanting forgetting with remembering has on human beings, and on society as a whole. This ability to record all information is also a concern for the Records Manager, and this is why Mayer-Schönberger’s book is of relevance to the profession, although we are not the original intended audience.

Mayer-Schönberger’s book is about the role of forgetting and remembering in our society. In an attempt to demonstrate his concern that remembering everything through technology is not good for society, he first recounts the human history of remembering and forgetting. Chapter two contains a brief but very interesting description of how humans have attempted to remember information, from first using just their internal memory to the external and collective memory where information has been gradually recorded as language has evolved, and methods of recording have also. Chapter three contains the example of Gordon Bell, and lays out the argument for how and why the human ability of forgetting has been lost. This is where the book really moves into the profession of Records Management, albeit unintentionally.

The author argues that the ability to no longer forget is down to the shift from the analogue to the digital age. As well as digitalisation, other reasons for the ease of remembering are cheaper storage, easier retrieval and the global reach (access) of electronic information. These are all terms and ideas that a Records Manager would recognise and agree with. Chapter four then moves on to argue why remembering can be beneficial (citing CCTV and medical records as saving lives) but that it can also have its problems such as exposing society to harmful consequences (citing data breaches or ID theft). Taking this further, Mayer-Schönberger focuses on two main problems of remembering: “Power” and “Time”. Knowledge is “Power”, it creates a divide between those who hold the information and those who access it. Meanwhile “Time” is an issue, according to the author, because by remembering (with insufficient understanding of the context that the information was created in) we are stuck in a permanent past, and an ignorant present. Concerns of accessibility and the lack of contextual information (metadata) are issues Records Managers are all too aware of.

In Chapter five, Mayer-Schönberger suggests six responses aimed at preventing or mitigating the challenges of power and time posed by digital memory:

1. 1.

   digital abstinence;

2. 2.

   information privacy rights;

3. 3.

   digital privacy rights infrastructure;

4. 4.

   cognitive adjustment;

5. 5.

   information ecology; and

6. 6.

   perfect contextualisation.

The latter would have a resonance with Records Managers, as what he is suggesting here is that the digital memory should have more information about itself – something Records Management professionals might call metadata (although he does not use this term himself).

Chapter six contains the main epiphany from the author. He argues that in order to reintroduce forgetting we should give information expiration dates. He argues that users should add “meta-information” detailing how long a piece of information should be kept. Information professionals will react in two ways to this idea: either in a state of relief that their message of the benefits of retention schedules is finally getting across, or annoyance that a non-records management professional has put forward, as novel, an idea that already exists and has been in use.

Whichever the reaction of the Records Manager, one cannot deny that Mayer-Schönberger’s book is of interest for the profession: packed full of anecdotal evidence, the Records Manager would find this a useful book to use when attempting to explain to their organisation why it is not necessary to keep everything. For the non-records management professional, (perhaps at whom this book is more aimed at) it is a thought provoking work with ideas that would undoubtedly impact on how society creates and uses information. And for the Records Manager, this can only be a positive outcome.

Katharine StevensonNorthumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK