The dangers of remembering too much

[SteveRiley]

Got an email the other day from a colleague of years ago. He was wondering why he couldn't find my post-Microsoft blog anymore. This is what I wrote -- a kind of consciousness-streaming of stuff that's been on my mind for a while now and this was the first opportunity I had to put it in actual words. Thought I'd share it with you fine folk here.

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I got a bit bored with the blog so I deleted it and also my Twitter account. I've been playing my French horn a lot lately and I didn't have much time to post stuff. I'm also starting to worry about long-term Internet presence. Time softens human memories, and I tend to think this is a good thing. Historians help us remember important events and provide the necessary (and often difficult to locate) context. But the Internet is changing all that. Not only can I find a reasonably complete record of everything that happened to a person, but I can also find what other people think of that person, and things that are falsely attributed to that person. People change, often for the better, and it's good that our brains allow the impact of stuff in the past to fade. I worry that this important social development attribute is disappearing, and is largely a cause of the toxic cultural and political divide we face in this country today. I hope I don't sound like a Luddite, because that's not my intention. But the Internet is forcing a significant social experiment on all of us, and I'm not convinced the outcome will be compatible with the social structures humans have constructed.

[dibl]

Re: The dangers of remembering too much

Yep, I worry about that too. Seriously, I have told my kids and grandkids to be very, very careful about spouting their opinions on facebook or other social sites. Until the past 15 years or so, it has always been true that a person could work his way and relocate his way out of a troubled youthful situation, and be assessed only for his adult conduct in his current community. This is no longer true for the younger generations -- I fear their youthful indiscretions will follow them indefinitely, wherever they go and however they improve themselves. I am enthusiastic about most technological innovations, but this is a truly unfortunate side-effect.

[SteveRiley]

Re: The dangers of remembering too much

facebook

Speaking of Zuckerburg's "innocuous" creation...

• Facebook's new "Read" app isn't a button, but an automatic activity logger
• Facebook is scaring me, so always remember to log out
• Oh, but wait... Logging out of Facebook isn't enough
• Facebook fixes the issue, but still tracks browsers for dodgy "security" purposes

If you're suffering from link overload (really, who isn't?), the last two are the most important.

[de_koraco]

Re: The dangers of remembering too much

heh, the internet is like the gossip girl/guy we all know.

[otisklt]

Re: The dangers of remembering too much

... the Internet is forcing a significant social experiment on all of us, and I'm not convinced the outcome will be compatible with the social structures humans have constructed.

This is no longer true for the younger generations -- I fear their youthful indiscretions will follow them indefinitely, wherever they go and however they improve themselves. I am enthusiastic about most technological innovations, but this is a truly unfortunate side-effect.

On the other side of the coin, won't there be a point where these 'indiscresions' will no longer matter due to the sheer volume?

If not, there will either have to be a flush of some type or an adaptation because there will just be too many people that have screwed themselves already and its only going to get worse as the tracking continues to get refined and the workforce continues to get even more picky.