What is the importance forgetting has played throughout human history? What will be the effects on society, relationships and humanity now that so many aspects of our lives are digitally preserved?
Viktor Mayer- Schönberger author of “Delete: The Virtue Of Forgetting In the Digital Age,” and guest on this edition of Radio Curious has some insight into these questions. He argues that the capacity for eternal memory can have unanticipated and often unwanted consequences. The potentially humiliating content on Facebook forever enshrined in cyberspace and Google’s search memory of the content and time of all our on-line searches may in the future reveal portions of our past we have entirely forgotten and would everyone else did too.
In these two conversations with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, we explore some of the ways in which our personal information, data, conversations and experiences are forgotten by us as individuals. We also consider the future potential effects on society of digitally preserved information, as well as the consequences of remembering what is sometimes better forgotten.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is director of ‘The information and Innovation Policy Research Centre’ at the National University of Singapore and author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”. He spoke with us by phone from his home in Singapore on January 4th 2010. We began by asking what effect the imbalance of remembering and forgetting in the digital age has on our lives
The search engine mentioned which allows a search history to be deleted is www.ask.com. The website which allows you to share information and attach and set expiration date after which the information will be deleted is and no available is www.drop.io
The book Viktor Mayer-Schönberger recommends is “Collected Fictions” by Jorge Luis Borges. The film he recommends is “The Lives Of Others,” directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
