About the Forget Web
This website is about an idea called the Forget Web. It is a manifesto of sorts, a call to action. If you agree with the assertions here, please show your support accordingly.
The Web
There is a famous quote from Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, that directly informs the mission of Wikipedia:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
"To organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
These are great ambitions. After all, knowledge is the most empowering asset, for the individual, her family, her community, her country and planet. Of course, the definition of what constitutes knowledge is key, but this essay need not get epistemological to make its point. Rather, let's insert some quotes from some great minds that validate the Wikipedia and Google missions from the perspective of the knowledge of history:
"History is a race between education and catastrophe."
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana, The Life of Reason.
The Forget Web
But now let's re-read those objectives expressed by Wikipedia and Google from the most personal point of view. Imagine you are the subject... in fact I've rewriten them accordingly:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of everything that's been publicly noted, said and recorded about you". We want "to organise all the public information we have about you and make it universally accessible and useful."
From my experience, these restatements, or more precisely the purposeful narrowing of the focus of the statements, spur two kinds of reaction, and we can discuss both in turn.
Response type 1: What's public is public, so what's the problem?
The best way I've found to counter this response is to compare the events in the lives of two eighteen year-olds, one who was eighteen in 1989 (that would be my era then, although the following examples are entirely fictitious, honest), and one who was eighteen in 2009. This usually converts those who first express response type 1 into type 2 responders!
Event 1 – Underestimating the intoxicating power of alcohol, committing an act involving partial nudity and then throwing up.
The record from 1989: A memory of youth occasionally recalled fondly with those mates you've kept in touch with over the years.
The record from 2009: Photos from three mobile phones uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and tagged. Video from iPhone uploaded to YouTube and tagged. Some subject to appropriate privacy settings, some not, which have then be crawled, archived and indexed by the world's search engines.
Event 2 – Underestimating the performance of dad's car, mounting the main roundabout in town and turning the car on its roof.
The record from 1989: Small piece in local newspaper with photo. No-one else involved and the named driver emerged unscathed. A copy kept in the newspaper's archives, and one used to wrap some china stored in the attic at number 34. Dad hesitates to lend you his car to this day.
The record from 2009: Small piece in local newspaper and on its website with photo. No-one else involved and the named driver emerged unscathed. Dad hesitates to lend you his car to this day. Website crawled, archived and indexed by the world's search engines.
Event 3 – Overestimating one's grasp of political theory and expounding the wonders of Marxism.
The record from 1989: Everybody you tried to convince forgets that you ever tried to convince them. You can't accurately recall the basis for your fascination yourself, and your diary lies unread in a bottom drawer.
The record from 2009: Your blog posts, comments, tweets, forum memberships and contributions archived, crawled and indexed by the world's search engines.
Event 4 – Overestimating one's need to adopt the latest trends and fashions.
The record from 1989: Photos reside in the cherished family photo album. Look at those bleached jeans, and remember that piercing!
The record from 2009: Photos and videos uploaded and tagged across the popular social networks and photo and video services. Look at the Coldplay military fashion and your "tramp stamp"! Content crawled, archived and indexed by the world's search engines.
Do any similar events come to mind personally for which the 1989 recall is preferable to the 2009?
Response type 2: What control do I have over this?!
None I'm afraid.
You're now 38 and in the job interview you've been working towards for years. You're now 38 and feel compelled to enter local politics. You're now 38 and you've been put forward for the parents' association at your kids' school. Let me just see what I can find out about you on this search engine... you know... "due diligence" and all that.
Akin to response type 2 is "What control does our society have over this?". Well, in the short-term, none. But longer-term, I hope society will bring pressure to bear to support initiatives such as the Forget Web, else we'll be living in a Society That Can't Forget, and I for one know that doesn't sound great even if I'm not appropriately academically qualified to argue why.
Forging the Forget Web
The protocols for the Forget Web should be defined by the World Wide Web Consortium or some similar body. The body will be adept at forming consensus based protocols for the Internet and the World Wide Web, and will appreciate the fine balance of advantages and disadvantages that often accompanies systemic innovation. Perhaps they will seek assistance from sociologists, historians, scientists, lawyers, artists and philosophers, particularly as there are some very fine lines to walk here.
For example, how do you distinguish between one's private and one's public lives? You could argue that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair should have the same rights as you and me over the kind of examples listed above, but should he be able to set the 'forget terms' of any content relating to his involvement with the 'dodgy dossier'? You could argue no.
The Forget Web recognises that there are different kinds of information and knowledge. Some needs to be enshrined, cosseted and made as widely available as possible to the greatest number of mankind for eternity. Some needs to fade from the digital archives as it used to benefit from fading memories. (Sure, that archive of decades old local newspapers may survive for a few centuries hence before sub-optimal storage conditions renders it an illegible mess, but it is predominantly inaccessible to all but the archivist and dedicated local historian; well until Google, Europeana, Gallica or some equivalent initiative digitizes it of course.)
Perhaps we don't have the technology or universal systems to achieve the Forget Web just yet. It will likely require a sort of 'delete-by-date', but who gets to set the date and who is liable for undertaking the disposal. Does disposal encompass complete destruction, or is the permanent and irreversible removal of personal identifiers sufficient? If the subject gets a say, how will we confirm their identity? Will such accurate personal identification, required to set the terms of disposal, serve simply to strengthen the Remember Web before the Forget Web kicks in?
Lastly, on the basis that identity will be core to the Forget Web, a quick word about that so we might arrive at a decentralised, open and free Web. When considering how you want to assert your personal identity online, please consider supporting open approaches such as OpenID that can be employed by multiple parties wishing to establish credibility in providing identity services in a competitive market (eg, high-street banks, governments, ISPs and utilities, non-profits). And do think about avoiding proprietary approaches from organisations for whom centralised, monopolistic domination of identity services would serve shareholder value most royally to the injury of an open and free Web. Such services may be attractive and convenient in the short-term, but the short-term is shortly history.
Support the Forget Web
If, like me, you believe the world should give the Forget Web some serious thought, please show your support accordingly. Here are some ways you can do just that. Please do at least one, else there will be no record of your support (irony intended).
- Leave a comment below
- Link here from your blog in a post about the topic yourself
- Contribute your personal expertise to the debate (eg, sociologist, historian, lawyer, scientist), particularly if you have what the most hardened response type 1 people may consider less trivial examples; macro societal effects for example
- Link here in your blogroll
- Link here from your email signature
- Use the support and 'delete me' badges to communicate your desire to have content you make public deleted by the host service some time in the future
- Reference the hashtag #forgetweb in your tweets and other social Web contributions.
And most importantly, start to take the time today to manage the digital debris your life is flinging off. Let your friends and family know what you consider acceptable and unacceptable before they upload something related to you, and ask them to take down immediately anything that you don't want in the public domain.
Whilst it's difficult to take future technologies into account if you don't spend your time future gazing, I'll give you one heads-up... identification of you in a photo or video in the future will not necessarily require it being tagged as such. Image-based search with face recognition is just around the corner.
There is another possibility. Social norms will change on the other end — people doing the searching will recognize that none of this is really “dirt” and that it’s just normal people doing normal things. Some people who deserved to get that job, but get rejected because there’s a picture from when they got drunk at a party last year somewhere on the internet will be briefly upset (before they realize this kind of attitude would have resulted in an unhappy job experience anyways). Ultimately though, once this kind of thing is ubiquitous, if you want to hire somebody or otherwise evaluate them for some reason, the degree of “dirt” will be what matters in “due diligence”, not the presence or absence. I don’t have a problem with that. In the meantime, perhaps what you propose is a good idea, but it’s nonetheless a losing battle so long as its profitable to do the opposite.
As I think I made clear on this page, I am no sociologist. So with that declaration reasserted, here’s my response to your comment Bob.
Social norms do of course change. Sometimes they change on a fashion whim, sometimes through technological innovation, sometimes because we think we’ve found a better way to go about things than our parents’ generation. Many different reasons.
To me, however, there is a difference between those things that are closely entwined with the way we live, and those things that brush up too harshly against what makes us human, or what makes our societies work more specifically.
No human has ever lived in a community or wider society that has put aside its ability to forget, or insisted that every single event, even of the most trivial nature, is recorded and made accessible to everyone with the absolute minimum of retrieval effort. I’m not sure we have the mechanisms to adjust to such a massive change. It makes our past adjustments to TV, nuclear power, nylon, inter-continental telephony, cars and microwave dinners appear a walk in the park. imho.
Sociologists… help me out here!
I have to say that broadly I agree with Bob. History shows that societies and individuals do adapt and remarkably quickly to new social norms thrown up by the march of ‘innovation’. 100 years ago the only kind of reference you could get for a job or accommodation would be from someone ‘of one of the professions’ – thus excluding the majority of people from progressing since they didn’t move in the right circles… people found a way around this by understanding the chain of influence. Today, we seem to have the opposite problem with too much information too readily available on everyone – and again we seem to be inventing a way around this through the online image manipulation technique often referred to as “social media”.
My experience personally and in speaking to friends, family & colleagues is that already the subtleties of negotiating & interpreting the information we locate on the internet are already well understood even by the most naive and recent users. For example my 78 year old father who has only been fraternising with computers for a couple of years triumphantly announced to me during a heated discussion about the relative benefits of using the Internet to locate historical facts about WW2 for my son’s school project, that little on Wikipedia could be relied upon to be factually correct. He had understood that ‘peer review’ meant relying on the right people with the right pre-existing knowledge bothering to go and change the information on a regular basis. He has a healthy dose of cynicism. As a nation of cynics I believe that if any country has the potential to appropriately filter or ‘wear a pair of internet glasses’ when consuming information about individuals which we locate in the way your’e talking about via the internet, it’s ours.
Thank you very much for your help, this site has been a great respite from the books,