I recently came across a short book that I thought readers of the list might find of interest: "Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age," by Vikto Mayer-Schonberger (Princeton University Press: 2009).  The author is a former professor at Harvard's JFK School of Government and currently works as Director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Centre at the National University of Singapore's School of Public Policy.

I found it interesting on a number of levels.  To begin with I would note that it never mentions records management, records retention, document retention, retention schedules and the like.  A part of this may be because the author is not looking at this at an organizational perspective. Rather his analysis is focused at the individual level and then expands to consider impacts on society at large.  The author observes that much of our remembering (courtesy of Google and others) is largely decontextualized and that human memory is weakest along the temporal plane.  By that he means if you are trying to remember a past event which of the following pieces of information will be the least helpful in recall: (a) place, (b) person, (c) time.  He quotes research to demonstrate that time is the least helpful

At first glance the book appears to be a discourse on privacy.  He provides a couple examples of some rather innocuous postings that caused their authors considerable difficult.  However, the author is equally concerned about a parallel issue -- what are the implications of living in a world where others are continually collecting data about all of our daily activities.  He speaks of the unequal relationship between the surveyor and the surveilled and how this in the long run may undermine individuals and society as a whole to change their minds.  The author worries that information overload may interfere with our ability to make decisions.

The author advocates a revival of digital forgetting with the statement "I am not advocating an ignorant future, but one that acknowledges that with the passage of time humans change, our ideas evolve, and our views adjust.

He examines several technical solutions in which digital forgetting might be introduced -- from abstinence to a redefinition of property rights; but in the end he suggests that creators of information be able to set expiration dates on the information that is created based on their input (this would include sales information that an online retailer collects about a buyer -- so that the buyer could indicate how long such information would be retained.

As I said in the beginning -- I thought that this is a pretty interesting work on something that records managers deal with frequently.

David B. Gaynon
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Huntington Beach CA, USA



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