Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Review of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I like the idea of this book, but I didn’t like reading it. His argument is that by keeping everything that we’ve done online that we risk two things: first, that adolescent foibles and drunken late nights will be held against us potentially forever, and second that to forget makes us in some way more human and we have to retain that. To be honest I skimmed almost everything regarding the second argument and so may be stating it poorly.
While it is in fact the case that it’s easier to find out people’s shady secrets when you can find them online, I don’t think this has changed society in any fundamental way. All human cultures have some sort of taboos that if people break they try to keep it quiet. Modern American culture doesn’t have the same sort of shame culture that Ancient Rome, Victorian England, etc. had anyway. I am sure I am wrong, but most cases of blackmail are for criminal offenses, not drinking pictures or sexual escapades. Now that DADA has been lifted this will probably take care of a lot of one of the remaining huge incentives to keep sexuality quiet–not that this doesn’t exist in a hundred other little ways in other arenas. Either way, there are things that people want to keep secret for sure, but a lot of other things that just aren’t a big deal for other people to know.
But I digress. It is well known by now that before job hunting you better clean up your digital image. I don’t see that as a problem. You can easily live a private life about which your employers know nothing, digitally or physically. The major issues arise when it comes to the intersection of personal and professional–what if you use your social media accounts for work purposes, for instance? Standards for institutional social media are changing, partly due to these sorts of conflicts. Some organizations push for more open communication, some shut it down completely.
He proposes some solutions to these problems such as digital abstinence and expiration dates for information. They are already technically possible, but I didn’t buy his argument that it was necessary to even worry about the problem. There have been a number of books on this topic lately, and this is just not the best treatment of it.
View all my reviews
Midsummer catching up
At that point in the summer where it seems that it was just Memorial Day and now it’s the Fourth of July. What has happened?
In my case, mostly a lot of reading. I am working my way through all the books I learned about while at MIT 7, i.e. a lot of books sold at the MIT Press bookstore, and some other books people talked about at the conference. But on the other hand, I’ve also been making many visits to the new book shelf at my local public library and reading some fun books. I used to track what I was reading on my blog, now I mostly write it out on Goodreads. Here are some recent reads.
Margaret’s bookshelf: read
The last few days I’ve been messing around with Google+ as a form of “professional development.” I doubt it will be a Facebook killer, to me it seems like it will be a nice supplement to Twitter. But that’s possibly because the only people I am following so far I also follow on Twitter.
I also bought some barefoot shoes. I doubt I will take up running, but I do think this will make hikes and packing sneakers for air travel more appealing. Reading about barefoot did make me wonder if it would be possible for me to become more athletic. There’s always been a lot of “no I can’t” or “that’s not for me”, but over the last year I’ve discovered that many of my assumptions about my capabilities and proclivities were wrong. Or, perhaps, to look at it another way, I started using my brain to think about things differently, which shaped my neural pathways into feeling more comfortable with something. Obviously there is both good and bad with this.
Will return to regularly scheduled content later.
Some Web 2.0 love
In case you didn’t see it in the comments on yesterday’s post, Andromeda Yelton made an interactive version of my library Madlib . I am guessing she found out about it from Twitter, via social networks created by a combo of web 2.0 and humanity 1.0.
Speaking of that, this week will, hopefully, be the week that I get some stuff figured out about the Chicago Underground Library website, including some actual social network/media strategies, how to stop getting inexplicable error messages, and how to not say naughty things in French. Nell and I are presenting our latest iteration at Code4Lib 2011 next month, but there are way too many loose ends that I (and probably no one else) sees for comfort. Not to mention that the eagle eyed library coders will spot some, ahem, kludges.
In one final, and unrelated note, I had exactly one social media new year’s resolution which I have broken about a million times in the last two weeks. But I have done so well at my professional development and personal fitness resolutions that I won’t worry about poor self-control in a relatively harmless realm. After all, we humans have finite willpower. Thanks, science!