MoodyTunes

I’ve been thinking about this blog and Facebook a lot recently because a) I probably spend too much time on Internet-related matters, and b) the more I teach, the more I worry that crafty students will dig up something incriminating. I don’t think there’s much scary stuff to work with — all I do is sit around and read books and write things and dink around online. And ever since I stepped into a classroom my Facebook profile has been reasonably locked-down. Still, there are plenty of horror stories.

There’s an interesting and relevant article in the New York Times today called The Web Means the End of Forgetting. It’s about the idea that we’re not allowed to forget and/or learn from mistakes or other past experiences because everything we post online (or that others post about us) is saved indefinitely and can be recalled with the click of a button.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

(Stacy Snyder was denied a teaching degree because of a MySpace photo.)

Those last lines sound dramatic. “A great many people,” or a few notable screw-ups? For every Stacy Snyder held up as an example in the near-continuous stream of articles about cyber-fears, there are probably millions of people who’ve done just fine keeping their “worst things” off the streets. Or they’ve at least kept those things within the realm of standard gossip circles like people did in the good ol’ days. Plus, odds are quite high that the people included in that “everyone” probably don’t care quite as much about you or me as we’d like to think.

But I get the idea — it’s difficult to undo mistakes if you’re putting an unfiltered or lazily filtered textual/photographic narration of your life events into multiple online content distribution systems. Everything goes out to a bunch of people, and it’s hard to reel it all back in.

This is a long way of saying that I’ll be scaling back a bit on posts here once mid-August rolls around. But after all this, it’s not out of cyberdrama fears…it’s more about time management. I have some classes to teach, writing to write, and sleeping to sleep. I’ll save the cyberdrama for when I’m trying to sell something — then I’ll stage an appropriately inappropriate incident, start a Twitter account, and go to town destroying and then redeeming my online identity.