The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age

Interrogating the Right to be Forgotten

A. Ghezzi, Â. Pereira, Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic, A. Ghezzi, Â. Pereira, Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137428448
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428455
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Storiografia

This edited volume documents the current reflections on the 'Right to be Forgotten' and the interplay between the value of memory and citizen rights about memory. It provides a comprehensive analysis of problems associated with persistence of memory, the definition of identities (legal and social) and the issues arising for data management.

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The Ethics of Forgetting and Remembering in the Digital World through the Eye of the Media

Ângela Guimarães Pereira^a, Lucia Vesnić-Alujević^a and Alessia Ghezzi^a1

Le souvenir opère sur fond d’oubli.

Augé, M. (1998)

Memory is a ‘dualistic entity’, composed of remembering and forgetting, and it is one of the constitutional elements of one’s identity and one’s self (see for instance, James, 1890/1950; Conway, 2005). As much as remembering, forgetting is constitutive in the formation of new identities (Connerton, 2009). A seminal text in the field of memory studies is that of Yates (1966): memory practices are presented as art, and, in Yates’ work, the practical, religious and ethical importance of memory is thoroughly studied. Ricoeur (1999; 2004) offers a deeper study of the importance of forgetting and its socio-political impacts, starting from the history of memories. In his work on ‘forgiveness’, Ricoeur gives forgetting a prominent role in human memory: ‘Could forgetting then no longer be in every respect an enemy of memory, and could memory have to negotiate with forgetting, groping to find the right measure in its balance with forgetting?’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 413). Much of the debate on cultural and collective memory has been shaped by the view, commonly held if not universal, that remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is a failure² (Ricoeur, 1999; Connerton, 2009). The idea that forgetting is vital for effective function is, for example, in sharp contrast to the mental reflex of certain computer scientists who maintain that forgetting is a ‘bad thing’ (O’Hara et al., 2006: 356): it is often perceived to be the result of human fragility or a technical problem. As Connerton (2009) notes, the high value ascribed to memory over the years is notable: ‘the threat of forgetting begets memorials and the construction of memorials begets forgetting’ (Connerton, 2009: 29); ‘memorials’, as such, recognise on one hand that the collective representations hold knowledge about the matter in general for the relevant actors; and on the other hand, that knowledge had been progressively lost (Connerton, 2009: 47). Therefore, forgetting is inextricably linked to our human and social condition, ‘built into the capitalist process of production itself, incorporated in the bodily experience of its life-paces’ (Connerton, 2009: 125). Through the hybrid on-line/off-line momentum we live nowadays, and its progressive pervasiveness and ubiquitous connectivity, we build many immaterial memorials more easily that are replicable and widely distributed, but, perhaps paradoxically, more volatile and vulnerable, as far as memory practices are concerned.

We can say that until the hype of connectivity and sharing, which Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have stimulated, our memory was in some way materialised, expressed and contained by the boundaries of our bodies and objects, and therefore somehow manageable. The issue of forgetfulness (expressed as the erasure of data) appears now to be an emergent urgent issue, especially because by design many of the technologies from which we are requiring forgetfulness were not designed to be forgetful.

In fact, our memory is no longer solely installed in our bodies, in physical objects, diaries and logs, or in our remembrance, or in the song-lines of the Aboriginal Australians³. Current ‘digital memory’ technologies extend our memories in the form of bytes stored in our personal devices’ chips or in the Cloud. Our memory is a hybrid, itself resulting from the variety of material and immaterial containers in which we choose voluntarily or involuntarily to ‘store’ experience and knowledge in a broad sense.

Digital memory: a ‘right to be forgotten’?

One of the questions of this book is: Why do we need a ‘right to be forgotten’ (RtbF) in a world that seems to celebrate memory and condemn forgetfulness?

The importance of ‘oblivion’, or forgetting, has been looked at from different perspectives including the ontological, epistemological, and pragmatic. Here, we would like to discuss its importance vis-à-vis the ongoing connectivity momentum.

Fifteen years ago, J.D. Lasica (1998) noted that the consequences of the Internet’s enormous memory were not being given proper attention: ‘Everything you’ve ever posted online could come back to haunt you someday’. Accordingly, any traces left online would also remain even if we try to ‘move away’: like a shadow, our online life follows us wherever we go. Thanks to its ‘eternity effect’ (Walz, 1997), ‘the Internet preserves bad memories, past errors, writings, photos or videos which we would like to deny later’ (De Terwagne, Chapter 5). In the meantime a growing body of literature about the governance of personal digital memory has emerged, focusing on practical and legal debates. As referred to in the introduction to this book, our inspiration comes from the ongoing discussions in Europe about the ‘right to be forgotten’ online following the announcement of Commissioner V. Reding⁴ in 2012 about regulating data erasure and rectification online. This proposal has set the stage for a great deal of debate regarding substantial and policy-making perspectives across the media, legal, and technical spheres not only in Europe but worldwide.

While forgetting is a normal function for humans, it contrasts with what is expected from computers: when our data are lost, this is considered a failure (O’Hara et al., 2006); yet, the demands for the infallibility of the ‘total memory’ of the Internet contrast with the limits of human memory (Székely, 2012). Blanchette and Johnson (2002: 33) underlined the importance of oblivion in developing new technologies and in managing personal or sensitive data, since ‘the control over personal information is not only affected through selective access, but also through selective retention of such information’. The retention of data, such as from bankruptcy, juvenile criminal records, and credit history, could mean that individuals have no right to oblivion⁵ (institutional forgetfulness) and social forgetfulness. Indeed, the authors point out that new technologies affect social forgetfulness:⁶ ‘while critics of the panoptic society have justly remarked on the ubiquitousness of data-collection practices, we underline how such practices invisibly extend the persistence of social memory and diminish social forgetfulness’ (Blanchette and Johnson, 2002: 39).

Forgetting, in general, has been seen by many as strength, as a positive filter in order to live better (Nietzche, 1997)⁷. But in our hybrid world, it is further seen as an emancipatory process, offering the possibility of avoiding malicious effects arising from the absence of this function (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). It is not a bug, but a feature that avoids stultification in thinking, where one is afraid to act due to the weight of the past (Bannon, 2006). It is also a way of avoiding an information overload that poses challenges to retrieving and selectively deleting data (O’Hara et al., 2006). Bannon (2006) goes further and contends that computers should be designed to forget. In fact, many authors suggest that forgetting should be an integral-by-design function of the process of designing and implementing digital systems that record and keep personal data (O’ Hara et al., 2006: 361; Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). For example, Dodge and Kitchin (2005: 15) suggest that digital memory could mirror some of the characteristics of forgetting in human memory by ‘ensuring a sufficient degree of imperfection, loss and error’ (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005: 15; Schater, 2001) in order to overcome exploitation and pernicious data usage that could even incur an abuse of civil liberties. Bowden (2012) argued that we need ‘forgetfulness’ by design and that ‘contrary to representations from transnational Internet corporations, it is now entirely possible to design systems to forget (or minimise) data in predictable and manageable ways, under the control of the data subject – but we may need more technically proficient regulators to prevail over tenacious lobbying protecting billion-dollar markets’. We argue that ‘forgetfulness’, as other design matters should be settable preferences by users whilst the maximum protection for users data should be set by default.

By the late 1990s, the Internet had transformed from ‘a medium or an information retrieval tool’ to ‘a powerful archiving technology’ (Lasica, 1998). In the near future, when millions of devices will be connected through what is called the Internet of Things (see Vermesean et al., 2011) or Internet of Everything, the amounts of data generated and exchanged about a person will be enormous, further diminishing the agency of individuals to autonomously control their data destinies. In such a scenario, we concur that the practical implementation of ‘forgetting’ can be thorny from a practical and technological point of view, unless the technology is designed to implement this function. The semiotics of memory online is rich for remembering functionality: history, bookmarks, cache, save, save as, burn, and so on. The fact is that the technologies that we want to demand be forgetful were by design built not to forget, responding indeed to political and business demands different from what is asked by the proposed regulation on a ‘right to be forgotten and erasure’. Our digital memory is not only what we decide to post (our ‘digital footprint’), or what others decide to post about us⁸. Often what is at stake is what that information does to us and also what it does to others (Ettighoffer, 2008): ‘the transparency of the information on someone’s errors of trajectory, condemnations and lifestyles could affect and disturb the life of other related people. Unfortunate or dishonest links become very easy on the Net. They can be used by whoever wants to put his/her fellow man in trouble’.

This is not only about technology being dysfunctional. In his book, Delete, Mayer-Schönberger (2009) says we must hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which our digital memories are governed on the web: ‘the truth is we are causing the demise of forgetting, and it is up to us to reverse that change’ (2009: 14). Responsible usage concerns all, and to a greater extent the young ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001), who should become more knowledgeable about the dangers of making their lives available through the Internet with often consequent self-inflicted pains. We would argue that we have not made space yet for a wider societal debate on what the social norms, etiquette and values should be subjacent to our presence in the virtual world, and especially at the intersection of both the online and offline. Therefore, the ways in which we choose to publish about others and ourselves often ignore what we would reasonably adopt as social norms in the offline world; for many reasons, for example, indiscretion and effrontery are made easy online (see, for example, Bertolloti and Magnani, 2013).

We would argue that because forgetting is recognised as an essential function for memory governance, technologies denying part of our memory function raise an ethical issue. ‘Digital memory’ technologies, in particular those that collect, store and transform our memory in the form of digital data by consented or unconsented processes, extend, reframe, normalise and transform what should constitute the memory of individuals and of individuals and their networks. But, how is the online media approaching these discourses? What issues emerged following the announcement of provisions for a right to be forgotten in Europe? In the next section, we look at online media following the announcement of the RtbF proposal in order to explore what major implicit or explicit ethical issues arose in the media discourses. This helps us to map ethical issues of concern for users and to grasp the meanings and expectations of a right to be forgotten online.

The Right to be Forgotten in the online media

Our starting point was the online media news, chronicles and commentary about the European proposal for the ‘right to be forgotten’. In many pieces, we saw that many have called for more clarity on how a digital RtbF might be implemented (for example Warman, 2012a; Warman, 2012c), while others saw the EU as ‘asking Google to censor the web’ (Warman, 2012b). Concerns were also expressed over proposals seen as leading to limits on freedom of expression on the Internet. ‘It’s hard to imagine that the Internet that results will be as free and open as it is now’ (Rosen, 2012a). Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsellor, commented in a blog post that the ‘right to be forgotten and the right to demand deletion of information reflect a current trend, namely, that data protection and personal rights are increasingly being used as justification for online censorship’ (in Von Hülsen and Schult, 2012). Thomas Boué, director of the Software Alliance, accuses the Commission’s proposal of erring ‘too far in the direction of imposing prescrip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Interrogating the Right to be Forgotten
• 1  The Ethics of Forgetting and Remembering in the Digital World through the Eye of the Media
• 2  The Right to be Forgotten and the New Archival Paradigm
• 3  The Right to be Forgotten in Post-Scarcity Culture
• 4  Oblivion: The Right to be Different...from Oneself: Reproposing the Right to be Forgotten
• 5  The Right to be Forgotten and Informational Autonomy in the Digital Environment
• 6  Identity Construction and the Right to be Forgotten: the Case of Gender Identity
• 7  The Importance of Being an Ego-Writer
• Index