New York Times Brilliant Article on the Web, Technology & Forgetting

Today's New York time's has a wonderful article about how the web enables us to never forget, and why that could be such a bad thing.  The article (link) shows the impact of the never-forgetting-web on people, privacy, and their relationships and jobs.

It also talks about how we might work around it - technological and legal solutions that would help us to forget or, over time, bury negative information about each other.  What I liked most, however, was the discussion of what happens if we can't forget.

If we cannot forget, we must learn to forgive.  We all make mistakes, and many of them are pretty bad ones.  That does not mean that we are bad people, it means that good people do bad things from time to time.   I don't think there any people who don't do bad things.  If you subjected someone to enough scrutiny, I am sure you can find reasons to criticize or embarrass.

And if we can eventually see all the bad things that everyone does, and we cannot find a way to forget them, then we must find a way to forgive each other.  And maybe that wouldn't be the worst possible outcome.

Lots of Data.  From the Flickr collection of See Ming Lee (CC)