Want to know something about someone? Just Google their name and their history is at your fingertips. Online databases and social networking allow you to learn their political and religious affiliations, the private events of their lives, their financial status, their comings and goings- their good behavior and their bad.
“The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” the cover story of the New York Times Magazine‘s July 25 issue by Jeffrey Rosen should be required reading for anyone documenting their personal minutiae on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter.Rosen paints an alarming picture of what happens when there is no mechanism for forgetting and warns us about technology’s pitfalls with dramatic stories about how social networking has destroyed lives and livelihoods.
What happens when we cannot reinvent ourselves and transform because our personal history is permanently documented in the clouds of technology for every potential employer, associate or criminal to find? Rosen introduces us to emerging technologies addressing these problems with software that will erase certain data by a specific time date and defend our reputations by monitoring and warning us about what may become detrimental.
Read it as a warning. Read it as your salvation. Read it to understand the meaning of both memory and its absence.