Benefits of forgetting

From Internet to iPod, technology is supporting rapid advances in memory. The giant magnetism (2007 Nobel Prize in physics) will lead to storage drives that exceed the terabyte threshold. Human energy is then not used to remember, but to forget. Now, society needs new ways to forget, people can forget and need to try to keep forgetting for themselves.

Stuart Parkin, a working physicist at IBM, is working on improving the random access set, called "Magnetic Random Access Memory" (MRAM), which allows storing data in exponential functions on those Smallest unit of hard drive. This technology will be commercialized in the next few years, which is the most recent contribution towards eternal retention & human memory assistance.

While digital storage capacity has reached the limitless limit, some thinkers are concerned about the unintended consequences of memory retention technology. Certainly the Google giant is storing information of millions of users, in dozens of secret centers around the world, including commemorative photos and archives for posterity millions of websites that no longer exist. anymore, enough for anyone to stop worrying. The form of memory is immutable and can be accessed from anywhere. As the momentum progresses, scholars are questioning - perhaps this is the first question that appears in human history - we need to look for ways to forget.

" We have a system to neglect everything easily and must consume energy to remember, " said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Management. " Now we turn to a system that remembers everything and is forced to consume energy to forget. It is a grim transformation ."

Jorge Luis Borges perfectly visualized the risks of memory in the famous story " Funes, the memories ", about a man capable of storing unlimited memories and was paralyzed because that. Perhaps not only Borges refers to this, but can imagine the ability to accumulate and store memories of digital forms - this is having a strong influence on each person's life. Individuals, such as transient unintentional actions, may be stored in computer records. " Any work done online online exists the ability to be stored forever, " said Coye Cheshire, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of Berkeley - California. " Remove anything you want, like asking Google to remove an inconvenient photo, but it is still recorded, stored somewhere ."

It is possible to clearly calculate personal expenses, but it is difficult to calculate the huge losses for the whole society."What many people forget - there is no word game here - that is forgetting the existence of computer hard drives ," Mayer-Schönberger said. " Based on experience and sociology, we are not difficult to exploit the ability to forget or put things in a temporary context, because forgetting is a biological trait of people ."

In a recent article called " Useful Gaps: The Art of Forgetting in the Computer Age ," Mayer-Schonberger predicts the price that mankind must pay for the prospect of an era of no forgotten . One thing is for sure, all online comments & online transactions are being stored somewhere, never forgotten, they can fill public opinion or civic behavior in impossible ways. know. It is a contradiction, because evaluating private information - from a personal email account as a sensitive data is extremely difficult with a remote host.

According to this article, Mayer-Schönberger also offers a controversial argument that we can - and should rehabilitate our own ability to forget. He supports data ecology based on combining laws and software to provide a definite expiration date for storing sensitive data on computers. Tracing systems, online vendors, mobile carriers, surveillance camcorder services - all must be placed under a common obligation to be sure to clear all data after a certain period of time. .

Of course, such rules exist a gap: If the data can be copied, they will exist forever. Mayer-Schönberger said: "My solution is not based on perfect technology ." " What I want people to be interested in is the life time of information that surrounds us, which is the awareness of the importance of alertness for people through the forgotten information ."

Mayer-Schönberger was not the first scholar to address forgetting. A decade ago, two sociologists Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi suggested a society that forgot about the power and way of making nuclear weapons. Technical information for creating them is not subtracted, meaning that insights (existing in human form in words, equations, charts) can lead to more destruction & death, sometimes they will destroy man and mankind.

There are ways to forget, however, that belongs to a moral theme. We can forget about the power of nuclear weapons but we can forget both the practices of medicine and other technologies. The first thing is to have a balanced agreement between the " should forget " and the " must remember " things, Cheshire said.

The forgotten system can be a frightening combination of hot wishes with authoritarian purges of culture. But Mayer-Schönberger offers a very special, almost unimaginable proposition: reducing popularity and increasing privacy on the Web.Ecological data - Internet users are allowed to waive their terms of use with each click or search action - every action within the web world must be private, not recorded, and anything else .

" Internet users are using a platform-based service that requires a lot of user data collection and storage ," said Dan Visel, a member of the Future of the Book Institute (New York). This summer, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com were under pressure from users, demanding to make plans to remove IP addresses and cookies after a certain amount of time. Further, they require to be provided with an eraser, ensuring that every user click is not recorded. That contrasts with the fact that these companies often store data for 13 months to 2 years or scan the computer era.

Dr. Danah Boyd at the Berkman Center for Internet & Social Research under Harvard Law School says the solution must not resist the viability of memories but adapt to this. " Interfering with the Internet structure will lead to a confrontation ." Boyd said: " People, especially young people, are coming to the end of the mechanism of abolishing any interference from the government or the main part of technology ."

Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of information technology and public policy at Heinz School of Carnegie Mellon University, notes the accumulation of digital memories. The problem overcomes re-remembering itself. " Digital information and storage costs are decreasing, thanks to data mining technologies that reduce the cost of information classification. But the big question is whether these two costs are reduced. proportional to each other? ", Acquisti said. " If the information is not categorized, this is still in existence, the basic is protection against information overload ."

" And we are returning to a path of forgetting, that's how our father did ," Alessandro Acquisti.

Nam Thanh Hoang (By Jessica - Boston Globe)