Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age
Matthew Longshore Smith · Identity in the Information Society · 2010
Much ink has been spilt theorising and documenting the transformation of our societies from an industrial age towards an information age (Webster 2002), network society (Castells 2001), or knowledge society (Mansell and Wehn 1998).Central to these visions is the importance and relatively free flow of massive amounts of information based upon new information and communication technologies.Indeed, a large part of the world is experiencing an information explosion with significant institutional and social implications (Kallinikos 2006).This surfeit of information is generally viewed as a net social positive.Opening access to a wide range of data is viewed as an essential input for social gains across different social domains such as education, health, and even governance, especially in developing countries (Benkler 2006; Smith and Elder forthcoming).If information is power, the open access to it can be a democratizing force.Read-write web (web 2.0) technologies have taken openness to a new level, lowering transaction costs for collaborative production of information and other goods in novel ways (Benkler 2002;Lessig 2006;Shirky 2008).Of course the story is more complex than this as any social transformation brings threats as well as benefits: issues of information privacy, surveillance societies, intellectual property rights, inter alia, all need to be taken seriously as potentially negative social consequences.Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, an engaging, and wellresearched book by Mayer-Schönberger, wades into this debate, painting a potentially dystopian future where an individual's digital past may constrain their present.Delete ponders how individuals and societies will be altered as we move toward a world where all of our digital transactions leave permanent digital traces.While Delete focuses on the potentially negative social consequences, it is by no means a pessimistic account; rather Mayer-Schönberger constructively engages with the existing gamut of proposed fixes and offers his own admittedly partial and