Have we forgotten how to forget? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger worries about this. In September, the associate professor of public policy at Singapore University, who is affiliated with Harvard, published a fascinating book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. In it, he argues that technology has inverted our millennia-old relationship with memory.
For most of history, almost everything people did was forgotten because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But this had a benefit: “social forgetting” allowed us to move on from embarrassing moments. Digital tools have eliminated this: Google caches copies of blog posts; networking sites thrive by archiving our daily dish. Society defaults to a relentless Proustian remembrance of all things past.
We live with a fear that what we do online may return to haunt us. “We’ve become so cautious in what we say or do,” says Mayer- Schönberger. As society suffers when people stop taking risks, Mayer-Schönberger argues that we need to stop creating tools that automatically remember everything. Instead,we need to design them to forget.
And software developers are doing just that. A good example is drop.io. It’s a “private sharing” service where users upload files and receive a URL to give to who they like. Photographers, for instance, can use it to notify clients of photos they want kept secret. But drop.io is unique in that you assign expiration dates to what you upload. It could be in a few hours, a month, or “after five people have seen it”. If no date is set, the default is a year. When it expires, the file is gone. Of the millions of files uploaded in the past 18 months, two-thirds no longer exist. As CEO Sam Lessin says, drop.io files are “like wormholes that pop in and out of existence for a specific purpose”.
Another good example of intentional forgetting is the Guest Pass feature on Flickr. Like drop.io, it lets you share specified photo streams by creating dedicated URLs you can email to those you want to see them. According to senior engineer Kellan Elliott- McCrea, about 11 percent of Flickr members use Guest Pass, mostly for snapshots of kids, homes, weddings and parties, the kind of stuff you want to show off, while being able to make it go poof. There are no guarantees - someone could take a file they’ve been granted temporary access to and repost it for all to see, forever. But users tend to respect the system that’s engineered for forgetting.
Mayer-Schönberger thinks that all social software should be designed this way as we’d be more inclined to ask if something ought to live forever. Data storage is so cheap that if we’re not prompted to delete, we won’t. There is another benefit: we just might pay closer attention - in real time - to our experiences. If you decide that a sunset or a conversation should live on only in your mind instead of on your hard drive, then you will probably savour it all the more. Just ask Marcel Proust.
very filled with dreams
okay seriously about that broadsheet article though
this one, written by kate harding who is no lie one of my very favoritest internet people! i think i cried when i found her site! but ouch, this paragraph:If I can see that the adult is trying to get the outburst in hand, and the kid is simply having none of it, I chide myself for my own knee-jerk uncharitable thoughts and try to focus instead on how frustrated that parent must be, what a crappy position she finds herself in. I believe this is The Decent Thing to Do. But at the same time, there really are parents out there who do nothing, or almost nothing, when their kids start making life miserable for everyone else on a plane or in a restaurant or in a store — and I reserve the right to smugly judge them, dammit.
i just… don’t think anyone should reserve the right to be smug, ever. can i say that? can i say that i think smugness is inherently assholish? smugness involves a closing off of your mind to alternate possibilities. also, i just don’t see the point of it. it’s self-serving at the expense of others and even if it IS justified, just… why expend mental energy on that, instead of something more positive? like you could smugly judge your fellow airplane passengers, i guess, or you could wonder about how many of them are going and how many are returning (does anyone else like to do this on airplanes?) and whether any of them are getting married, or if any of them are leaving home planning to begin a new life and if they’re sad about this or happy or a bit of both. airplanes are so great for speculating about people because you know, if nothing else, they are traveling a great distance, for usually no small cost, so they’ve got to have some kind of reason.
and you may say, “well isabel, i am not interested, personally, in making up backstories to people i don’t know” to which i say, “well great, bring a book then.” but see, when you are smugly judging the Bad Parents who Should Be Minding Their Kids, Dammit, you are already doing that! it’s like david foster wallace speech i’m completely obsessed with and reread like once a month and link all the time because it should be required reading for life, when he says, “it’s really easy to view people in terms of how irritating they are to you right now, but for all you know they are super wonderful people who have committed minor acts of heroism, and maybe it’s not the most likely thing but it sure is possible and it is to your own benefit to try and entertain that possibility when you can.”
look, i’m not going to say there are no bad parents. THERE ARE. one of mine is. i am just going to say that you absolutely cannot fucking tell from observing a parent with their children for very long whether or not they are good parents. FOR EXAMPLE: my brother and i were really shockingly well-behaved kids, by and large. if you were to see us hanging out in public with my father, you might have assumed that he was a very good father because, look how well-behaved his kids are! you would NOT have seen, in watching me and my brother entertain ourselves peacefully in our father’s company, the fact that my father is an actual sociopath incapable of loving anyone, including his children, who did a number of things to make our lives hugely stressful while we were growing up!
on the contrary, if you had seen us with our mother in the grocery store - because my mother was the actual parent in this relationship, which meant she had to take us to the grocery store sometimes, unlike my father who never needed to because we only saw him on weekends - you may have caught us in one of our whinier moods. you may have seen us fighting at each other, tattling on each other, yelling about how we wanted to go home. and you may have thought to yourself, “shit, that woman really needs to get her children under control for my personal benefit.” you would NOT have seen the fact that she was still several years from finding a treatment that would consistently alleviate the pain of her fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. you would NOT have seen that she was freaking out about how she was going to feed us on a grad student’s wages because my father wasn’t paying child support. you would NOT have seen the fact that we were ordinarily very well-behaved but the past few months had frayed all three of our nerves.
so this is why you should never judge - smugly or otherwise - parents based on a single glimpse of them in public. because you don’t fucking know what they’re dealing with, what they’re normally like, what it was that may have been that last straw today. you don’t know if the kids are quiet because they know if they misbehave they’ll get beaten till they bleed later [this is not me, for the record, this is a hypothetical but probably very real situation]. you don’t know - and Kate addresses this in her piece and then just… ignores it, which is weird - whether the kid does in fact have special needs, whether they are autistic and can’t deal with crowds but can deal less with being separated from their parents because their parents don’t have the money for a steady caretaking assistant. you just don’t know.
so shut the fuck up and read your book. it’s better for your soul than judgment.
“I loved you Kate, I really did. You helped me greatly with size/fat acceptance, and it’s made me happier not to have to battle constantly with my weight but to love me as who I am. I like to think that some fatphobic thin people read your articles too, and go away, and learn. I link to your articles in quite a few of my posts. Now’s your chance. Are you going to go away and learn?”
this was a great post
yeah it was. made me rethink some of my own kneejerk defensiveness when it comes to feminists who may or may not hate babies. ouch, it stings when someone you think is awesome fucks up!
i had one nitpick with the post, which i addressed in the comments over there and don’t feel like rehashing in full (short version: she says, basically, teachers and childminders don’t care if that one moment of controlling a child damages the child’s self esteem, or teaches them that adults hate children and privilege hates oppression, etc. which i will be honest with you, i do not look at the ranks of teachers and childminders through rose colored glasses, this is true a lot of the time and it is embedded into the way most people think you should do education; but SOME of us care, is all). but really, it’s all great and you should read it and probably none of you are educational reform geeks like i am and won’t be bothered by that one tiny thing in a giant post of awesome like i was.
this is really lovely :)(via downblue)
mister sandman, bring me a dream
duuuuu, look at that little pout!Julie, by me.
srsly you should all be following fuckyeahbabies, it brings me such joy.
YES!
James Franco is set to make a a guest appearance as himself on NBC’s critically-acclaimed show 30 Rock.
The 31-year-old actor will be involved in a faux romance with Jenna (Jane Krakowski.
Creator/producer/star Tina Fey told EW, ”[Jenna gets] into a high-profile relationship with a movie star that is arranged by their agents.”
Source: JustJared
L
someone once told me the grass is much greener on the other side
worb:
as told by ginger = sooo much love.and i paid it a visit
well it’s possible i missed it
it seemed different yet exactly the same yeah yeah yeah yeah
till further notice TILL FURTHER NOTICE
i’m in between I’M IN BETWEEN
from where i’m standing FROM WHERE I’M STANDING
my grass is green
someone once told me the grass is much greener
on the other side
