saving is not "forgetting to forget"- holy fuck this guy was at Harvard!

Dear The World:

It was with interest that I listened to your report on Viktor Meyer Shöenberger’s Book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting etc.”, for I too think that there is a cultural problem brewing due to the ease and low cost of saving information digitally.  I do however completely disagree with his premise that equates this act of “automatic digital saving” with “remembering”.  In fact, I think it results in quite the opposite.  By virtue of the ease of saving information digitally, we basically put information into what amounts to one big electronic drawer where we proceed to immediately forget it.  

Shöenberger’s equating of “saving” with “remembering” is fallacious; they are not the same thing.  Saving everything electronically is a crutch that precisely allows us to stop actively remembering things; it makes us lazy and forgetful.  Ask any teacher what has happened to their students’ ability to remember things with the advent of easy digital storage. I am a teacher, and sometimes I think my students have Alzheimer’s. Way I see it, “digital saving” can more easily be equated with “forgetting” than with “remembering”.

The story from the book that your reporter related about the woman that did not get a job because of a picture of her with a drink on Facebook has nothing to do with the act of “remembering”.  In fact, in a moment of charity, I would call it an act of “forgetting”: she forgot to remove the picture from her page when she applied for the job.  In my more uncharitable moments, I call her original posting of the picture an act of “stupidity”;  but that is a whole different category of activity that has also been made easier with the advent of easy digital access.

Sincerely,

Katya Cohen