Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
Enlarge (Princeton University Press)

Mayer-Schonberger wants us to remember to forget.

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
(Princeton University Press)

Mayer-Schonberger wants us to remember to forget.

Would we all be better off if this blog post, this website and countless other digital ways of capturing our lives had expiration dates?

If we valued forgetting as much as remembering?

Maybe. At least that's what Viktor Mayer-Schonberger believes.

Mayer-Schonberger, director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, is the author of the new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.

He writes that:

Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making. It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events. Through perfect memory, we may lose a fundamental human capacity — to live and act firmly in the present.

I came upon Mayer-Schonberger's thinking in Wired magazine. His premise intrigued me because I've always wanted to know what the world looked like thousands of years ago, what great historical figures sounded like — and what life was like for my grandparents and other ancestors I never knew. Here was someone making the case that there might be a downside to my thinking.

We spoke by telephone — Mayer-Schonberger was in Seattle. He was sympathetic to my thinking, but argued that it's not good if "whatever we do, whatever images are taken of us, will be around for decades to come" — and available to use against us.

Part of our conversation follows below. As ironic as this is, in the interest of full disclosure I'll point out that this is a "digital" version of our discussion and it has been edited. I didn't change any of my questions or Mayer-Schonberger's answers that you'll hear, but I did leave much of the interview on the proverbial editing room floor. The first voice you'll hear is the professor's:

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What do you think? Add your thoughts in the comments thread.

And for a view from the other side of the issue, check Wired's story on Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell's new book Total Recall. The magazine says that:

Since 2001, Bell has been compulsively scanning, capturing, and logging each and every bit of personal data he generates in his daily life.