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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 237 pp. $24.95.
There is a famous Indian parable of a group of blind men who are trying to describe an elephant. Each of the men is feeling a different part of the elephant, and based on what they feel, each gives a description of the animal, saying, variously, "The elephant is leathery and floppy," "The elephant is smooth and hard and curved," "The elephant is firm and low to the ground solid and has the diameter of a small tree," etc. Each accurately describes the portion of the elephant he is examining but fails to get a sense of the animal as a whole. This story comes to mind in considering Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schönberger's concern is with a new problem posed by our use of electronic communication systems, and the fact that our communications are now typically stored, easily shared, and once shared, difficult to erase. Tracings of moments in our lives that represent who we were at one time and no longer are, or that reveal actions from an otherwise isolated context, now often have a permanent existence in the electronic environment that can compromise our ability to control our own lives. The interest in controlling what is remembered about us, as he presents it, akin to our interest in personal privacy (indeed, Mayer-Schönberger often writes about privacy in the book as though it is conceptually indistinct from the idea of deleting what we no longer want around). He touches on questions of power, in a limited way, in the sense that he is worried about the ability of the state or an employer or another group in power to adversely affect our lives based on personal information over which we have very limited control. An audience that has presumably been participating in Internet discussions or communities during the past decade should find this concern easy to understand.
Mayer-Schönberger's argument for deleting information is narrow in scope. The book begins with an account of the history of...