I am a true believer in the secrecy of memories; I am a strong supporter for the expiration date of digital memories

It used to be that memories only existed in the minds and hearts of those who dared to remember. Memories were kept private, within the person, within the family and with time, they eventually faded away by newer memories.

If I wanted to remember something, I would write it down, or take a picture of it, a true paper and ink picture and not a digital file. But with new technologies, many things have changed including memories. Viktor Mayer argued in his book that “because of the digital technology, society's ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory” and just like anything, perfect memory has its pros and cons (Mayer 4).

Mayer mentioned that some individuals and organizations make better uses for this “perfect memory”, he mentions that medical offices, the law enforcement and even if some of us could disagree, financial institutions make use and benefit of the ability of keeping archives for non-expiring, undefined periods of time (Mayer 10-11). But you don’t necessarily have to be in an important job in order to benefit from this perfect memory.

• As a student, I enjoy the benefit of keeping my school files longer than I can hang on to whatever is it that I learned.
• As a family member, I enjoy the benefits of hanging on to pictures and videos or family time that happened some time ago.
• As an adult, I guess I enjoy laughing at the silly things I see myself doing in baby pictures, remembering (or believing to remember) memories of the things I did when I was not old enough to remember.

 But the cons of this perfect memory are that we are living in a panopticon under constant surveillance by technologies that will record of every move, every second (Mayer 11). This means, that both, good things and bad things about us are recorded and at times, made public, for not only this generation, but also future generations to come.

In his book, Meyer introduced the idea of an expiration date for digital information. The way this would work could be by requesting and requiring an expiration date before anything is saved, submitted or posted. After the expiration date, the files would forever be deleted (Meyer 171-181).

Now from my perspective, his whole idea of expiration dates seems feasible: a date would be required, the cleaning would take place on a certain schedule,a utility program that can help us manage the expiration dates of our files, but, of course, it could confirm (if desired) before the files are deleted (Meyer 171-181). The only complain I have about it, is that I would also like the option of a 00/00/00 expiration date, meaning that I would like personal pictures and videos of my family to forever be kept on my computer unless I get in a fight with my sister and as a way to deal with my anger and frustration, I decide to delete the file. Well, now that I think about it, I guess that maybe having the option of retrieving deleted files, could also be a good idea.  

As with everybody, there have been times when I have wished that some information about me could be deleted or expired. The most recent example that I can remember happened some months ago when my husband logged in into my MySpace account and read previous picture comments of old friends from high school. The comments were not obscene or anything, but my husband did not like the fact that some of my friends were commenting on my physical appearance.

Reference:

Viktor, Mayer-Schonberger. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton University Press, 2009. Print.