Wednesday, 6 July 2011

Why we must remember to delete …

– and forget – in the digital age

Human knowledge is based on memory. But does the digital age force us to remember too much? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that we must delete and let go.

My personal favourite from the Guardian’s article?
    Yet through millennia, forgetting has remained just a bit easier and cheaper than remembering.
    No longer. Because of the digital revolution, he argues, it is easier to keep everything – the drunken email you sent your boss, the photo you put on Facebook in which you're doing something non-CV-enhancing to an inflatable cow – rather than go through the palaver of deciding what to consign to oblivion.
An inflatable cow? And what would someone be doing to it? The mind simply boggles!

The article can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-delete-forget-digital-age.

Mayer-Schönberger’s book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, is published in paperback on 25 July by Princeton University Press, £12.50.

Checking back I find that there are reviews of this book in 2009. The article is clearly dated 30 June 2011 – but the link to the Guardian Bookshop is to a publication date of 2009.

I’m confused!

No longer. I went back and read the whole of the article – a new edition is to be published. Surprising that Amazon does not have it catalogued.

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