Interested in this? Read more on the half-life of digital identity
The End of Forgetting: Growing up with Social Media — Kate Eichhorn
Save for a few mortifying journals and photographs kept safely in trunks, many of us can gladly leave our adolescent selves behind. What happens when you can’t? When that self is meticulously documented, not only on your own social media but on everyone else’s too?
Eichhorn considers what this relentless memory means for a new generation of people trying to grow out of past identities.
When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future — Abby Smith Rumsey
A historian and archivist, Smith Rumsey explores the history of human memory — our efforts, over thousands of years, to keep what needs to be kept — right up to the paradox of our present.
We are holding on to more than ever before, but more precariously than ever; stored in bits and bytes that might soon be unreadable. What historical record will be left for future generations, and how will they access it?
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in a Digital Age — Viktor MayerSchönberger
Probably the canonical digital forgetting text, internet law scholar Mayer-Schönberger looks at the perils of digital memory in both our personal and public lives.
What do we lose when remembering, rather than forgetting, becomes the default? He proposes expiration dates on digital information to shift the balance back to forgetting (provided it doesn’t get digitally archived before it expires, that is).
Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten — Meg Leta Jones
Investigating the ruling on the right to be forgotten, Leta Jones delves into the debates about censorship, privacy and identity that arise when we grapple with the threat of digital memory.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — Jon Ronson
A classic on the new forms of mortification in the digital age. Ronson profiles some of the earliest mass shaming causalities, including Justine Sacco (#HasJustineLandedYet) and Lindsay Stone. He works out that Google made about half a million dollars off Sacco’s shaming. Stone enlists the (incredibly expensive) services of an online reputational management firm to try to change her search results. If you want to see how well that worked, just Google her.