One of the great virtues of technological progress is that it enables people to reinvent themselves. An ex-convict can use a pc and a stack of used cd’s to mashup a hit rap song. A cobol programmer can re-train himself to develop lucrative mobile apps for the iPhone. A Greek immigrant can run for political office in California and later become a founder and prominent blogger of a top tier web site for political commentary.
However, as with any revolution, there is a flip side. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine offers a nice spread entitled, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” which discusses the undesirable consequences of the pervasiveness of information enabled by technology.
The article cites the case of Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” Upon discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.
Indeed, the internet and social media have ushered in an age in which everything we do can be captured and added to our permanent and publicly-accessible record.
If every act forms the basis of a reputation score that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the future, what impact will this have on our adventurism, on our inclination for risk-taking ?
“It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.”
Such solutions could include services like ReputationDefender, which monitors one’s online reputation and contacts Web sites individually requesting they remove any offending material. Or perhaps the notion espoused by Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, of what he calls “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over.
If you have a vision or are already building a company that helps restore the dying art of forgetting on the internet, I’m interested in speaking with you.