For Peter Decherney's Internet Policy Course Spring 2008 The ability to forget is as significant as the ability to remember. Forgetting is not merely the absence or erasure of memory. Rather, both remembering and forgetting are intertwined actions. Yet, because of the very ease in which we forget and the difficulty we have to remember, forgetting has always taken a backseat in our struggle to retain our memories. Throughout time, we have created technologies to help us remember. Technologies as basic as books and paintings keep our sights and thoughts alive. Later, the invention of the phonograph allowed us to store sound. The printing press, film, and other transferring media (like the VHS tape) accelerated the distribution of our memories. Our quest to remember continues into the digital age. But digital technologies are fundamentally different than the technologies of the past. As such, we need to reconsider the model of digital memory in its relation to forgetting.

Annotation

Dodge & Kitchin explore pervasive computing in regards to surveillance and increasingly sousveillance (capturing data about yourself). They look at the development of life-logs, sociospatial archives that document every action, every event, every conversation, and every material expression of an individual's life and the potential social, political, and ethical implications of machines that never forget. They suggest that given the new possible paradigm, forgetting needs to be incorporated into new technologies. They look to Schacter's modes of forgetting as a basis for creating an ethics of forgetting. They go over the main types of forgetting in Schacter and call for implementing Schacter's models in technological design to create a humane but still useful system. They also champion the idea of incorporating forgetting into architecture (as a kernel) instead of legislating forgetting as a blanket.

Citation
Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. 2005. 'Outlines of a world coming into existence': pervasive computing and the ethics of forgetting. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34, no. 3:431 - 445.

 

 

Annotation (all facebook artilces have the same annotation) 

These three articles address the issue that one cannot be fully deleted from facebook. Instead your account is deactivated. The data persists on facebook's servers "in case you wish to reactivate your account". Users were concerned about persistence, i.e., forgetting, but of course, the articles and facebook frame the issue as a question of privacy. Facebook has since incorporated the ability to delete, but the option is still difficult to find and implement. Facebook has also integrated several other privacy features, but I would argue that the issue (again) is that of data persistence rather than data exposure.

Citation
Aspan, Maria. 2008. After Stumbling, Facebook Finds a Working Eraser. The New York Times, February 18 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/business/18facebook.html?sq=facebook%20profile%20delete&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print (Accessed March 1, 2008).

 

 

Annotation

Blanchette & Johnson broadly call for reframing data retention from an issue of privacy and surveillance to one of persistence and forgetfulness. First they provide background on the current state of privacy and suggest that our constant surveillance is leading to a panoptic society. They call for a reaffirmation of the social values of forgetting. They use examples from U.S. law to demonstrate how forgetfulness can and is already incorporated into policy for the betterment of society, but warn that these policies are already buckling and old limits are fading under the increasing capability of technology to remember.

Specifically they draw on three policies: credit reports, bankruptcy law, and juvenile crime records. Each have limits on the time in which data is held. Such forgetting allows individuals a fresh start. They note that social forgetting/forgiving is not enough to affect policy change. In the case of bankruptcy law, the creditors and government benefit in the process (the law captures all debts in a central repository allowing for collective action and fair distribution; government needs to look responsive to helping individuals get back into economic business).

Citation
Blanchette, Jean-François, and Deborah G. Johnson. 2002. Data Retention and the Panoptic Society: The Social Benefits of Forgetfulness. Information Society 18, no. 1:33-45.

 

Problems with the computer model of memory: Our understanding of the human mind has always been informed by technology. Because the dominant perspective of the human mind has been that of an information-processing device (much like that of a computer), the duality of memory (remembering and forgetting) have been seen as a passive model rather than remembering and forgetting being actions. This perspective reifies human memory, turning it into a thing rather than an active process. While the cognitive sciences frame memory with words like “erasure” and “retrieval”, we’ve known for decades that human memory is not like computer memory. Rather than reproduction, remembering is constructive and reconstructive; it is not exact, nor is it important that it is. (Barlett) Cultural historical psychologists (Soviet Vygotsky) view remembering in the context of activity such that if a memory is used in an activity different than its original context, the memory will be reinterpreted with respect to the new activity and there is no guarantee that the memory is relevant anymore in the same manner that it was when it was stored. (not so useful for my purposes) In the computational framework, forgetting is seen as the simple erasure of memory, or the loss of the link to the memory location. Forgetting is seen as an example of the fragility of the mind whereas computer memory with its indefinite and persistent storage is much better. Thus, forgetting is seen as a negative bug, but Bannon hopes to show how it is a positive feature.

Citation full pdf at ebsco megafile
Bannon, Liam J. 2006. Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: the duality of memory and implications for ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 2, no. 1:3-15.

 

Perhaps we can think of ephemeral technologies, or perhaps more correctly, technologies that support ephemeral events, in distinction to the persistent technologies that are usually envisaged. The ideas presented are very simple and playful, a starter-pack to begin to explore an alternative design space incorporating aspects of forgetting.

One radical idea elaborates a notion of a ‘digital shelter' where various forms of electronic signals are blocked within certain spaces or places, thus allowing people the freedom to chose to be electronically ‘on' or ‘off' (Sepulveda-Sandoval 2001). We could imagine the development of personal ‘sweeper' technologies that would inform us if particular spaces were being bugged, and activities recorded. Similarly, we could imagine the design of electronic ‘jamming' technologies that would hinder the pickup of meaningful signals from particular sites, akin to the current military jamming technologies. We could imagine various kinds of electronic tagging systems for messages or material that could time-stamp material and contain something like a ‘sell-by' date, where the information would self-destruct after the elapsed time, or where the distribution of your original message could be tracked, although the latter idea raises further privacy issues. My point here is not to provide simple technological fixes to what are ultimately societal practices. Rather, the aim is to highlight different design options. We need to explore augmentation means for all human activities, both remembering and forgetting.

Citation full pdf at ebsco megafile
Bannon, Liam J. 2006. Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: the duality of memory and implications for ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 2, no. 1:3-15.

 

 

An exploration of forgetting: Bannon showcases several examples which demonstrate that while we don't consciously think about forgetting, not being able to forget severely impacts our ability to move easily through every day life because of the sensory overload. The discussion of collective memory (that is, what a society chooses to remember and pass on to the next generation) has been through the lens of cultural identity and national solidarity (see the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs). The question is: can there be collective forgetting? Bannon posits that collective forgetting occurs when a group, passively or deliberatively, chooses to not carry the past into the future. (wouldn't this rather be the case that the group chooses not to carry forward the present into the future?) Historical conflicts often use forgetting to further a particular perspective or heal wounds. Collective forgetting is both a blessing (allows society to move forward) and a curse (society doomed to repeat history). Justice system employs deliberate forgetting to allow individuals a fresh start. Politically, collective forgetting is amnesty. (discussion of amnesty, blanchette, south Africa)

He continues differentiating individual vs. collective remembering and forgetting, similarities and difference between humans and computers, remembering and forgetting in the age of ubiquitous computing and finally forgetting in design.

 

 

Annotation (all 3 articles have the same annotation)

These three articles address the issue that one cannot be fully deleted from facebook. Instead your account is deactivated. The data persists on facebook's servers "in case you wish to reactivate your account". Users were concerned about persistence, i.e., forgetting, but of course, the articles and facebook frame the issue as a question of privacy. Facebook has since incorporated the ability to delete, but the option is still difficult to find and implement. Facebook has also integrated several other privacy features, but I would argue that the issue (again) is that of data persistence rather than data exposure.

Citation
Aspan, Maria. 2008. How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free. The New York Times, February 11 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/technology/11facebook.html?_r=1&sq=facebook%20profile%20delete&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=3&pagewanted=print (Accessed March 1, 2008).

 

 

cf:
SenseCam:
http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/projects/sensecam/?0sr=a

Articles about the MyLifeBits Project and Gordon Bell:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3084
http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/bio.htm
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;363346268;pp;1

Annotation

Gordon Bell has a distinguished career in the IT industry.  He's also decided to catalogue his life.  This brings up interesting questions as to why keep all this stuff?  Is there some purpose to being able to forget some or most of it?

Bell is refining his technique to store everything about himself on one terrabyte of data.  He wants to get it all on his Dell laptop.  He started out motivated by Bill Gates' book and decided to scan all the paper he owned.  Co-conspirator Jim Gray helped him set-up a database for searching and archival purposes, but when Jim went sailing and never came back, Bell's quest became personal.  Now he captures all web sites he goes to, he wears a sensecam to capture photos whenever light or heat changes (or in timed intervals).  He works for Microsoft's research arm and can leverage Microsoft's power to create technology that allows data to be easily retrievable and identifable.  He doesn't see it as lifelogging because he doesn't want the information public.  One article likens it to "immortality" but rather, it's more like a huge digital scrapbook or time capsule.  His laptop is so valuable to him now as a repository of memories, that he doesn't carry it around with him anymore.

Through the lens of forgetting, one should ask if keeping all this data is useful.  The technology is more for identifying and retrieving information more than collecting the information.  Collection is still a time-consuming and cumbersome process.  On top of that, for the information to be retrievable, he has to annotate all of his data.  How much of the data will anyone actually access in the future?  What are the benefits of the system.  Who benefits from the data?  He says he doesn't have a problem with persistence -- all of the data should exist in perpitude, but is this a realistic recollection of him as a person?

Citation
Lightfoot, Geofrey, Steven D. Brown, and David Middleton. 2001. Performing the Past in Electronic Archives: Interdependencies in the Discursive and Non-discursive Ordering of Institutional Rememberings. Culture & Psychology 7, no. 2:123.

Annotation (all three facebook annotations are the same)

These three articles address the issue that one cannot be fully deleted from facebook. Instead your account is deactivated. The data persists on facebook's servers "in case you wish to reactivate your account". Users were concerned about persistence, i.e., forgetting, but of course, the articles and facebook frame the issue as a question of privacy. Facebook has since incorporated the ability to delete, but the option is still difficult to find and implement. Facebook has also integrated several other privacy features, but I would argue that the issue (again) is that of data persistence rather than data exposure.

Citation
Aspan, Maria. 2008. Quitting Facebook Gets Easier. The New York Times, February 13 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/technology/13face.html?sq=facebook%20profile%20delete&st=nyt&scp=2&pagewanted=print (Accessed March 1, 2008).

 

Annotation

Forgetting is easier to do than remembering. Empirically cultures have tried to preserve memory through devices like books, film, record, etc. However, conservation has always been expensive, thus strict limits are applied as to what to keep. New digital memory is relatively inexpensive and it allows us to store everything, regardless of significance. Also, digital data is easily reproduced and accessed bringing up issues of privacy. Because of this, Mayer-Schonberger sees a shift from discarding to preserving. Is this a good thing? No.

Three conventional responses:

• Comprehensive privacy litigation is difficult because lobby groups exert a lot of power but represent only a few, while the masses who would benefit are diffuse and disorganized;
  
• constitutional reinterpretation while potentially valid under the First, Fourth, and implicit "privacy" amendments (first, third, fourth, fifth, ninth, and fourteenth) is difficult to pass and would not regulate private parties only public government;
  
• Null response or inaction can be argued as the best approach if there is no demand for legal action, however, the null response argument is naive when considering political theory's acknowledgment of the difficulty the majority has in transforming its will into law.

Lawrence Lessig proposes a solution that is a combination of law and code, but Mayer-Schonberger finds solution too complex for this focused issue of data retention. Instead, Mayer-Schonberger proposes a simple solution of reinstating forgetting over time through

1. user-defined storage timelines,
   
2. decreasing cookie life,
   
3. requiring companies to delete/forget data, including cell phone software, and
   
4. limiting sensor data.

Mayer-Schonberger briefly covers the strengths and weaknesses of his plan and summarizes article in the conclusion.

Source citation
Mayer-Schoenberger, Viktor. "Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing." Working Paper RWP07-022, Cambridge, Mass.: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2007 Apr.