A review for Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

The book illustrates the relationship between remembering and forgetting.  Before the information era, forgetting is default and remembering is the exception. But as the development of information technology, things are changed. Right now, remembering turns to default and forgetting is changed to be an exception.  The author advocates that the things that bring side effect to people should be allowed to be deleted.  People have been losing opportunities because of some of their past scandals which are published on the Internet.

First, I want to applaud that the author proposes a counter-intuitive viewpoint.  But to the things that bring side effects to people, we have to analyse it a bit deeply.  For the things that bring disaster to a society or even to the world, we have to keep it forever to remind our descendants that which things they can do and which things they cannot do, and we should backup more copies to prevent someone destroying it intentionally. But for some problems that cause people feel uncomfortable in the coming years of social activities, for example, the picture, that the author mentions, showing a lady disguise herself to be a drunken pirate, should be allowed to be removed from the Internet.

The technology, that can store information in cheap storage device, does bring many conveniences to people, we can’t deny the fact.  But things, which programmers need to do, are that we need to develop some software that allowed some information to be deleted. For which things are allowed to permanently removed, I recommend that it can be organised to a public organisation to censor them.

 

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