ENGL004 University of California Importance of Social Forgetting Essay English 4 Essay # 2 Prompt 1000-word minimum 125 points Please write an essay in

ENGL004 University of California Importance of Social Forgetting Essay English 4

Essay # 2 Prompt

1000-word minimum

125 points

Please write an essay in response to the questions below. Remember to answer the first question fully.Then present a thesis that directly answers the second question. Then use three detailed examples to support your thesis.

According to Jeffrey Rosen in “The Importance of ‘Societal Forgetting,’” what is the value of societal forgetting? Do you believe that employers, universities, and other institutions should consider the past behavior of job applicants as revealed by social media or online searches when making hiring decisions? Support your opinion using three specific, well-developed examples from your own personal experience, observation, or reading (not including Rosen’s essay). Part 2 Writing Assignme
ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing
tential level, our
that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and
discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.
The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost exis-
ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered
pasts.
In a recent book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the cyberscholar
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of
“societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society
accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from
past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are
observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s
sans are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which
everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impos-
sible, in practice, to escape them.’ He concludes that “without some form of forgetting,
forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.” 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.
It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to
think about privacy in actual villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian
Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people oral or
written, true or false, friendly or mean-was considered a terrible sin because small com-
munities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to
ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the
Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global
village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmud’s definition
of gossip. Although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records
for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people
may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes: “If a man was a repentant
sinner,” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.”
have an obligation
not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they
Works Cited
Krebs, Brian. “Security Fix.” The Washington Post. 3 Dec. 2008. http://voices washingtonpost.
com/securityfix/2008/12/court rules_against_teacher_in.html.
Levy, Andrew. “Teenage Office Worker Sacked.” Dailymail.com, 6 Oct. 2017. http://
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1155971/Teenage-office-worker-sacked-moaning-
Facebook-totally-boring-job.html.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age: New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2009. Print.
2
Part 2 Writing Assignments
THE IMPORTANCE OF “SOCIETAL FORGETTING”
JEFFREY ROSEN
Jeffrey Rosen is an American academic, writer, and speaker. He earned a BA
from Harvard University and a JD degree from Yale. Rosen is a professor in the
George Washington University School of Law, and a widely published writer.
The following is from an essay he published in 2010.
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley
High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, posted a photo on her MySpace page wa
showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the
caption “Drunken Pirate.” After 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 underage students. As a result
, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation
the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had
violated her First Amendment right to free speech by penalizing her for her perfectly
legal after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected her claim, say-
ing that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of
public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech (Krebs).
When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy
Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a chal-
lenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe:
how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and for
gers nothing—where every online phato, status update, Twitter post, and blog entry
by and about us can be stored forever. With websites like LOL Facebook Moments
which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users,
advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years
after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: There was the 16-year old British gid
who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored
(Levy); there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the
United States but was turned away at the border
and barred permanently from vindo
ing the country-after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had
written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with
According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and humall
about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants including
resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research
search engines, social networking sites, photo and video-sharing sites, personal websites
and blogs, Twitter, and online gaming sites, Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report
ill
LSD (O’Brien)
by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribe
From The New York Times, July 21, 2010. Copyright © 2010 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Und
tion, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
Part 2 Writing Assignme
ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing
tential level, our
that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and
discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.
The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost exis-
ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered
pasts.
In a recent book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the cyberscholar
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of
“societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society
accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from
past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are
observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s
sans are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which
everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impos-
sible, in practice, to escape them.’ He concludes that “without some form of forgetting,
forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.” 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.
It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to
think about privacy in actual villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian
Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people oral or
written, true or false, friendly or mean-was considered a terrible sin because small com-
munities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to
ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the
Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global
village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmud’s definition
of gossip. Although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records
for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people
may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes: “If a man was a repentant
sinner,” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.”
have an obligation
not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they
Works Cited
Krebs, Brian. “Security Fix.” The Washington Post. 3 Dec. 2008. http://voices washingtonpost.
com/securityfix/2008/12/court rules_against_teacher_in.html.
Levy, Andrew. “Teenage Office Worker Sacked.” Dailymail.com, 6 Oct. 2017. http://
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1155971/Teenage-office-worker-sacked-moaning-
Facebook-totally-boring-job.html.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age: New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2009. Print.
Part 2 Writing Assignments
2
lished the case of AJ, a 41-year-old woman in California, who does not have the bio-
logical gift of forgetting.[4] Since she was 11, she remembers practically every day-not
in the sense of a day that passed, but in astonishing, agonizing detail. She remembers
what exactly she had for breakfast three decades ago; she recalls who called her and
when, and what happened in each episode of the television shows she watched-in the
1980s. She does not have to think hard. Remembering is easy for her-her memory is
“uncontrollable, and automatic” like a movie “that never stops.” [5] Instead of bestowing
A? with a superb facility, her memory repeatedly restricts her ability to decide and to
move on. It seems that those that have the capacity to store and recall unusual amounts
of what they experience, feel, and think would like to be able to turn off their capacity
o remember—at least temporarily. They feel shackled by their constantly present past
,
o much so that it constrains their daily lives and limits their decision-making ability as
well as their capacity to forge close ties with those who remember less. The effect may be
even stronger when caused by more comprehensive and easily accessible external digital
memory, Too perfect a recall, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-
making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past
behind, and much like Borges’s Funes, incapable of abstract thoughts. It is the surpris-
ing curse of remembering.
Forgetting is not just an individual behavior. We also forget as a society. Often,
such societal forgetting gives individuals who have failed a second chance. We let people
try out new relationships if their previous ones did not make them happy. In business,
bankruptcies are forgotten as years pass. In some instances, even criminals have their
convictions expunged from their record after sufficient time has passed. Through these
and
many similar mechanisms of societal forgetting, of erasing external memories, our
society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn
from past experiences and adjust our behavior.
Despite the central importance of forgetting for humans, the monumental shift we
are experiencing in the digital age—from a default of forgetting to one of remembering-
this phenomenon has, so far, received limited attention. Back in 1998, J.D. Lasica wrote
a remarkable piece in the online magazine Salon, titled “The Net Never Forgets,” and
concluded that “our pasts are becoming etched like a tattoo into our digital skins. [6]
More recently, Liam Bannon, as well as Jean-Francois Blanchette and Deborah John-
forgetting to remembering is monumental, and if left unaddressed, it may cause grave
to uncover the dark side of the demise of forgetting.[7] The shift from
consequences for us individually and for society as a whole. Such a future, however, is
mer inevitable. It is not technology that forces us to remember. Technology facilitates
the demise of forgetting-but only if we humans so want. The truth is, we are causing
the demise of forgetting, and it is up to us to reverse that change.
ber, we are able to compare, to learn, and to experience time as change. Equally impor-
As humans, we do not travel ignorantly through time. With our capacity to remem-
to live in the present. For millennia, the relationship between remembering and forger-
ting remained clear. Remembering
to unburden ourselves from the shackles of our past, and
son, have begun
5
1
s
3
ant is our
//
ed
ability
to forget,
was hard and costly, and humans had to choose
Part 2 Writing Assignments
FAILING TO FORGET
requests
VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is a German-born scholar and writer. He earned two
LLM degrees, one from the University of Salzburg and a second from Harvard
Law School, and he earned an MA in Economics from the London School of
Economics
. He was a faculty member for ten years at Harvard Kennedy School
and today is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Inter-
net Institute at the University of Oxford. He has written and published exten-
sively, including the collaboratively written book Big Data: A Revolution That
Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (2009), and Delete: The
Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2012), from which the following read-
ing selection has been excerpted.
For us humans, forgetting has always been the norm and remembering the exception.
Because of digital technology and global networks, however, this balance has shifted
Today, with the help of widespread technology, forgetting has become the exception, and
remembering the default. On an average day, Facebook receives ten million web
from users around the world every second.[1] As professors John Palfry and Urs Gasser
have cloquently detailed, disclosing one’s information—whether these are Facebook
entries, personal diaries and commentaries (often in the form of blogs); photos, friend-
ships, and relationships (like “links” or “Friends”); content preferences and identification
(including online photos or “tags”); one’s geographic location (through “geo-tagging or
sites like Dopplr); or just short text updates (“twitters”)—has become deeply embedded
into youth culture around the world. [2] Should everyone who self-discloses information
lose control over that information forever and have no say about whether and when the
Internet forgets this information? Do we want a future that is forever unforgiving because
it is unforgetting. The demise of forgetting has consequences much wider and more mode
bling than a frontal onslaught on how humans have constructed and maintained their
reputation over time. If all our past activities, transgressions or not, are always present
how can we disentangle ourselves from them in our thinking and decision-making: Mel
perfect remembering make us as unforgiving to ourselves as to others!
Largeting plays a central role in human decision-making. It lets us act in the
cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events. Through perfect memory, we may be
fundamental human capacity-to live and act firmly in the present. Jorge Luis Borges
short story “Funes the Memorius” lays out the argument. Due to a riding accident
a young man, Funes, has lost his ability to forget. Through ferocious reading, hehe
amassed a huge memory of classic works in literature but fails to see
Once we have perfect memory, Borges suggests, we are no longer able to
abstract, and so remain lost in the details of our past.[3]
Republished with permission of Princeton University Press, from Delete: The Värtter of Fages
Age by Viktor Mayer Schönberger. Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press, pontes con
through Copyright Clearance Center Inc.
beyond the weak
generalizeze
Part 2 Writing Assignments
2
lished the case of AJ, a 41-year-old woman in California, who does not have the bio-
logical gift of forgetting.[4] Since she was 11, she remembers practically every day-not
in the sense of a day that passed, but in astonishing, agonizing detail. She remembers
what exactly she had for breakfast three decades ago; she recalls who called her and
when, and what happened in each episode of the television shows she watched-in the
1980s. She does not have to think hard. Remembering is easy for her-her memory is
“uncontrollable, and automatic” like a movie “that never stops.” [5] Instead of bestowing
A? with a superb facility, her memory repeatedly restricts her ability to decide and to
move on. It seems that those that have the capacity to store and recall unusual amounts
of what they experience, feel, and think would like to be able to turn off their capacity
o remember—at least temporarily. They feel shackled by their constantly present past
,
o much so that it constrains their daily lives and limits their decision-making ability as
well as their capacity to forge close ties with those who remember less. The effect may be
even stronger when caused by more comprehensive and easily accessible external digital
memory, Too perfect a recall, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-
making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past
behind, and much like Borges’s Funes, incapable of abstract thoughts. It is the surpris-
ing curse of remembering.
Forgetting is not just an individual behavior. We also forget as a society. Often,
such societal forgetting gives individuals who have failed a second chance. We let people
try out new relationships if their previous ones did not make them happy. In business,
bankruptcies are forgotten as years pass. In some instances, even criminals have their
convictions expunged from their record after sufficient time has passed. Through these
and
many similar mechanisms of societal forgetting, of erasing external memories, our
society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn
from past experiences and adjust our behavior.
Despite the central importance of forgetting for humans, the monumental shift we
are experiencing in the digital age—from a default of forgetting to one of remembering-
this phenomenon has, so far, received limited attention. Back in 1998, J.D. Lasica wrote
a remarkable piece in the online magazine Salon, titled “The Net Never Forgets,” and
concluded that “our pasts are becoming etched like a tattoo into our digital skins. [6]
More recently, Liam Bannon, as well as Jean-Francois Blanchette and Deborah John-
forgetting to remembering is monumental, and if left unaddressed, it may cause grave
to uncover the dark side of the demise of forgetting.[7] The shift from
consequences for us individually and for society as a whole. Such a future, however, is
mer inevitable. It is not technology that forces us to remember. Technology facilitates
the demise of forgetting-but only if we humans so want. The truth is, we are causing
the demise of forgetting, and it is up to us to reverse that change.
ber, we are able to compare, to learn, and to experience time as change. Equally impor-
As humans, we do not tra…
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