What if everything you say, do, write about, read, email, took pictures of, and are interested in was stored forever, accessible for an infinite time into the future, eventually to be re-discovered and re-read by someone, somewhere, sometime?
Sounds rather Big Brotherish, doesn’t it?
And yet, this is exactly what is happening in today’s world, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard University. An Associate Professor of Public Policy, he believes that with the massive databases sported by websites such as Google, Facebook, and MySpace, as well as the other corporate databases, file servers, and scads of personal storage space, we face a future where a person’s entire life history — at least, that recorded by computers — will forever be a part of the searchable and readable past. With devices such as cellphones, PDAs, and other “life” devices being constantly used by people to keep track of each other and schedules, more and more of our daily happenings are crossing, if not being stored upon, a network of some type.
In my old-fashioned filing cabinet in my closet at home, I keep a lot of different folders. Most of them are terribly boring — tax paperwork, bank statements, medical receipts — but a few contain some more personal information. One is all the letters I’ve gotten from all girlfriends in my past, no matter how serious or trivial.
Boy, are some of them terrible.
There was a great portion of my life where I hadn’t figured out the opposite sex to any great degree and oftentimes made some horrible stumbling blocks in my communication with them — much of which is reflected in those letters. The immaturity, the naivaté — it’s all there in paper and ink if you really want to read it. I try not to on a regular basis, as it makes me cringe most times.
However, having this sort of information about myself accessible to myself is also very educational and revealing. It gives me past history of myself, how far I have (or haven’t) come, what things I have gone through, the mistakes I have made. There is nothing more humbling than reading through a stack of letters from your early college years to realize just how incredibly stupid you really were.
If, however, those sorts of things were to be released to the general public — well, I’m not so sure. There’s a great deal of things that I said back when I was a Bible thumper that would make me absolutely shrink today. I did and said things with the opposite sex that should never see the light of day, and I’m sure there’s some old programming code and documents that should never grace the desk of my employer or they’ll wonder why they ever trusted a system to a guy who couldn’t get, “Hello, world!” to display on a screen.
99.998% of what we do and say is steeped inside of the context surrounding it — the place, the people, the history, the mood, even things as benign as the weather, how I felt that day, if I slept in, if I got laid; these factors make huge differences in the interpretation of the event. Yet, if only portions of these things are stored within the computer databases of the world the context is forever lost to the void of Time, never to be reconnected.
An example: Say, perhaps, that you and a friend in high school had developed a long-running joke about being homosexual lovers, complete with the various innuendos and remarks that accompany something like this. (I know what you’re thinking — high schoolers would never do such a thing! I’m shocked I even thought of it, really.) You chat and giggle about it between classes with your friends and even act it out occasionally, much to the immature humor of your cronies. Now, say that you also used your cellphone, IM program, Facebook, and MySpace to construct this alternative persona of you — just for the fun of it.
14 years later you are grown up — a responsible adult eager to enter the meeting room for your interview as the CTO of a rather large corporation. You walk in, sit down, and the interview committee starts asking you questions. At some point in the conversation, the head manager tosses a packet of paper down in front of your eyes containing printouts from that particular homosexual acting experience back in high school and asks, “Would you care to explain this?” The context being lost from the original event (we were kids, goofing off, it was nothing…), you are suddenly in a pretty hot seat.
I’ll admit, this might be a bit of a stretch, but it wouldn’t be the first time that an employer has explored the Internet to see what sort of dirt could be picked up on someone else and then dooced them for it. The fact is, many websites store vast amounts of information about their users long after they have performed it. Most have a privacy policy about these sorts of things, but what happens if it is released, either accidentally or purposely?
Should computers be like people where they essentially forget a lot of things you did when you were younger, especially the extremely dumb things of youth? Well, we should define “remembering”, perhaps, because while your buddy George might ‘remember’ about the homosexual thing, he may not recall the finer details. Whereas, a computer will have every detail down to the last comma and period in its databanks, without memory degradation, for as long as someone sees fit to keep it.
Computers also have the inability to recognize the progress of maturity in a human and the ability to switch viewpoints (even drastically) based on one’s aging and experiences. Things we said and believed when we were young aren’t applicable here, but nobody teases me about believing in the Easter bunny when I was 3. Likewise, with the fading of memory, nobody would fault you for being “stupid in high school”, yet if they can pull up word-for-word something you did back then with your friends, you suddenly have a very vivid “memory” made real and relivable in a bad way.
In some ways, I’m glad things are being recorded about me in the computers of the world. Maybe at some point in the future, when I am dead and gone, they will be a bit of a lasting legacy to my existence. Someone may notice decades from now that a guy named Nathan once lived in Iowa, was a computer programmer, and did certain things. It is in some ways a bit of an immorality program for the wired of the world.
What do you all think? Should computers be retaining information this detailed and this long, or should there be limitations? Are people allowed to be stupid when younger and wiser when older, or do younger people need to start watching their backs more often, given how much more of an impact their words and actions now have on the world?
