It's becoming more expensive for people to forget than to remember, suggests Viktor Mayer-Schonberger in his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, as reviewed by Adam Keiper in the Wall Street Journal (10/23/09). This is actually something of a contrarian perspective because some historians are concerned that the digital era is making it harder to keep permanent records: "Archivists and librarians have looked for strategies to preserve digital public records, with mixed success," and some fear a "digital dark age" ahead.

But Viktor is looking at the issue differently. It used to be that "lastingly recording knowledge and experience required the painstaking labor of educated specialists, from ancient scribes to medieval monks ... In the digital era, by contrast, the cost of saving information has fallen so far that the state of affairs has flipped." As Viktor observes: "Remembering has become the norm, and forgetting the exception." In fact, he says that "the economics of storage has made forgetting brutally expensive."

He continues: "With the help of digital tools, we -- individually and as a society -- have begun to unlearn forgetting." His concern is that, because of this, we might become inhibited in a way that imposes on our sense of freedom. He frets, for example, that our children might not speak their minds online for "fear their blunt words might hurt their future careers." He also worries that we might not call out corporations for greed if we think our words might one day be used against us. His solution involves data "expiration dates," on the assumption that "getting people to constrain what they desire to share is difficult."