2018 | Buch

Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age

verfasst von: Prof. Dr. Florent Thouvenin, Prof. Dr. Peter Hettich, Prof. Dr. Herbert Burkert, Prof. Dr. Urs Gasser

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Law, Governance and Technology Series

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

This book examines the fundamental question of how legislators and other rule-makers should handle remembering and forgetting information (especially personally identifiable information) in the digital age. It encompasses such topics as privacy, data protection, individual and collective memory, and the right to be forgotten when considering data storage, processing and deletion. The authors argue in support of maintaining the new digital default, that (personally identifiable) information should be remembered rather than forgotten.

The book offers guidelines for legislators as well as private and public organizations on how to make decisions on remembering and forgetting personally identifiable information in the digital age. It draws on three main perspectives: law, based on a comprehensive analysis of Swiss law that serves as an example; technology, specifically search engines, internet archives, social media and the mobile internet; and an interdisciplinary perspective with contributions from various disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics, amongst others.. Thanks to this multifaceted approach, readers will benefit from a holistic view of the informational phenomenon of “remembering and forgetting”.

This book will appeal to lawyers, philosophers, sociologists, historians, economists, anthropologists, and psychologists among many others. Such wide appeal is due to its rich and interdisciplinary approach to the challenges for individuals and society at large with regard to remembering and forgetting in the digital age.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Part I Introduction

Abstract

In today’s networked information society, more and more information is being produced and consumed in digital form. Much of this information is readily available, able to be called up at any moment on devices we carry in our pockets, and perhaps more so in future, wear on our wrists or on the bridges of our noses— perhaps 1 day even embedded in our bodies. The storage of such digital information has become easier and cheaper, transitioning from large reels of magnetic tape that were relegated to isolated large-scale computing centers, to memory sticks or SIM cards and now even the nebulous “cloud”, seemingly accessible at all times and from virtually any location. Yet, despite the fact that a blog entry from 7 years ago can generally still be viewed today without many of the issues or risks of loss that plague paper documents, digital information within constantly operating networks is deceptively vulnerable; continuous curation is required to preserve its on-going availability. These aspects of the networked, digital data ecosphere which we currently inhabit have produced a shift in the previously prevailing balance between remembering and forgetting.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

Part II Normative Concepts of Information Management

Abstract

The digital revolution is transforming society, the economy and government in many ways and profoundly alters the way in which we handle data and information. Nowadays, information is collected, stored and processed faster than ever before through the use of electronic tools. The storage capacity for digital information is continually increasing, whereas the costs for storage media are simultaneously shrinking. The following chapter examines how the legal system attempts to regulate information management in the face of the exponentially growing amount of digital data and seeks to illuminate the assumptions that underlie such regulatory efforts. In this way, we reveal the interplay between law and “remembering and forgetting” and the extent to which the law in one national jurisdiction regulates these processes.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

Technological Developments

Frontmatter

1 Introduction

Abstract

In the following chapter, we examine a number of technological developments which are of particular significance for the shifts in the relation between remembering and forgetting that have occurred. We begin with the technology that first gave rise to a court decision at EU level that affirmed the existence of a “right to be forgotten” within EU data protection law: search engines. As the Internet began to move beyond a platform that was primarily of interest only to academics and US military personnel, search engines quickly came to fill a critical role in providing meaningful access to the universe of content within the World Wide Web. To this day, they serve as important tools to help users find goods, services, and information on the Internet and as virtually essential resources to ensure that newly emerging content receives attention and that websites, individuals, companies, and brands establish a foothold on the Internet. Thus, the prominence of information highlighted by search engines is directly related to whether and how long that information is “remembered” by digital society.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

2 Search Engines

Abstract

Search engines provide us with the specific piece of information we are looking for on the Internet, be it any type of trivia, the weather forecast, the population of Guinea-Bissau or the verification of someone’s background.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

3 Remembering and Forgetting in Social Media

Abstract

Social media is a recent development in our society that now influences our lives on a daily basis. However, when it comes to defining the term “social media”, there is no official, universally applicable definition. Some authors employ a broad definition incorporating a social media platform, which allows users to upload and share content as well as to comment on these. Murthy, for example, states that “[s]ocial media has been broadly defined to refer to ‘the many relatively inexpensive and widely accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on a common effort, or build relationships’”. Others do not make any reference to a proper definition, but rather simply cite a number of examples, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and different kinds of blogs, in order to illustrate what social media essentially is. To some extent, rating platforms are also included in this field.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

4 Web Archives

Abstract

Everyday life is difficult to imagine without the World Wide Web: Politics, news, work, social interaction and many other aspects of society are happening or being reflected on the Internet. No other media guarantees a comparable dissemination of information that reaches people virtually anywhere in the world and in as little time as the Internet. While providing information is the initialization of knowledge transfer, preserving it must also be ensured in order to make use of that information into the future. Since most web content is exclusively available in electronic form, it is at risk of being lost forever. The lack of long-term availability of web content has been identified as one of the Internet’s most decisive weaknesses. To avoid a so called digital black hole there is a need to implement web archives. In 2003, the UNESCO recognized the danger of losing a part of the world’s cultural heritage and issued its Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage. This paper addresses the end of the information life-cycle and examines the need, benefit, methods, and possible developments of web archiving.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

5 Mobile Internet

Abstract

The digitization of all kinds of content and the emergence of the Internet Protocol as a universal standard for any telecommunication have changed the way we interact with each other. This fundamental change has progressed in a very short time. Digitization makes it possible to code data and information in a standardized way and to structure the data in small packages. The Internet Protocol makes it possible to transport these packages on nearly all communication infrastructures to any place on the globe, regardless of the platform from which they originate or to which they flow. Similar to today’s standardized shipping containers capable of transporting any manner of good by ships, railways, as well as trucks, the Internet Protocol frees content of dependency on any specific network or device. In principle, it is now irrelevant whether such a communications device is fixed or mobile. However, the convenience of accessing the Internet via mobile devices has led to a far stronger attachment to smartphones than to any other electronic device that has been introduced to date.

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Frontmatter

1 Remembering (to) Delete: Forgetting Beyond Informational Privacy

Abstract

Much has been penned over the last half decade or so on the pervasiveness and persistency of digital memory. With reportedly more than ten million photos uploaded to Facebook every single hour by one of its more than a billion users, large online platforms have become global repositories of digital memories. This has sparked an increasing number of cases, in which individuals have been harmed by digital memories. Whether it is old “mug shots” of prison inmates that are easily searchable online long after criminal records have been officially expunged, the off-the-cuff utterance about one’s job that travels back to one’s supervisor, or the stupid online comment that suddenly ends relationships, many thousands by now have been burned by digital memories about them. At times, even analog memories are digitized, visualized and popularized about one’s relatively minor transgressions decades ago, as a German minister of higher education discovered (before she had to resign).

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

2 Forgetting: In a Digital Glasshouse

Abstract

In the past, it was primarily famous people who found themselves in the so-called “glasshouse”. These individuals were exposed to the gaze of the public and had to accept that information about them would be exploited by the media or even in other ways. In the context of the digital world, the glasshouse has become bigger. Many more individuals are now on display in the glasshouse, and much more information about these individuals is readily accessible for a much larger “public”. This new situation raises a number of questions, not only with regard to greater transparency but also with respect to the sensible differentiation between important and unimportant information, and also, in particular, questions concerning the use and significance of forms of forgetting and concealing of stored material. In the following chapter I will explore the phenomenon of forgetting in the digital age from three different perspectives. Although each of the three perspectives is quite distinctive, they are all shaped by the digital environment.

Christine Abbt

3 On the Interplay Between Forgetting and Remembering

Abstract

When mentioned together, remembering and forgetting are usually regarded as opposites: we remember what we do not forget, and we forget what we do not remember. They are also commonly perceived in conjunction with time: we may or may not remember a past event and usually the probability to forget a fact increases with the amount of time passed since we last recalled it. However, it is less the amount of time that is significant here, but more the notion that with the amount of time passed, the forgotten item is displaced by other pieces of information whose number increases with time. In such cases, we forget in the sense that we purge information to accommodate new incoming data. Nonetheless, I will later discuss remembering and forgetting not in time-related cases but rather in terms of informational resolution. In this sense, a picture with high pixel density is a higher resolution image (remembering), while a low pixel density image is one of lower resolution (forgetting). It is important to note here that whatever the case, even the smoothest higher resolution image can be put together by means of a sufficiently high yet finite number of simply specified pixels. In other words, we can forget a high amount of information without affecting the quality of what our eyes perceive.

Nikos Askitas

4 On the Economics of Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age

Abstract

The digital revolution—the emergence of the Internet and new information and communication technologies—has generated much debate on regulating “remembering and forgetting”, i.e. the active management of information, and more specifically, regulation on the storage and deletion of information. This chapter provides some basic thoughts on and evaluations of the characteristics and properties of information, the role of government and potential interventions from an economics perspective.

Mark Schelker

5 A Political Economic Analysis of Transparency in a Digital World

Abstract

In 2013, the Swiss free newspaper “20 Minuten” launched a series of articles, starting with the headline “These are the 20 most honest members of parliament”. On the newspaper’s online platform, readers could also have a look at “the most dishonest members of the National Council” and even browse through a list of all members of parliament (MPs) ranked according to the extent to which they kept their campaign promises. The ranking was possible due to the availability of two online information platforms. The first one, “Smartvote”, is an online voting advice application where candidates for parliamentary elections answer a set of policy questions, and voters can answer the same set of questions to evaluate which candidates best match their preferences. The second information platform is accessible via the website of the Swiss national parliament and offers access to all votes in the National Council (the upper house), including the individual voting behavior of all MPs. The combination of these two information tools allowed the newspaper to compare the MPs’ stated opinions before the elections (i.e. their pre-election promises) with their actual votes on similar policy issues after the elections.

Christine Benesch

6 Digitalization and Social Identity Formation

Abstract

Contemporary debates on digitalization and digital communication highlight the fusion of online communication and “offline” interaction into one life world coined “onlife” by Floridi (2015, p. 94). Not too long ago, the “virtual” world represented a place where one could experimentally construct alternative and “free” forms of selfpresentation and identity apart from the so-called everyday life in the “real” world of bodies, buildings and “real” social relations. Both the phrases “world wide web” and “Web 2.0” originally signified a free space to which the rules of the “iron cage” (Max Weber) of power politics, capitalist economy, law and science did not seem to apply.

Matthias Klemm

7 The Digital Age and the Social Imaginary

Abstract

Benedict Anderson (1991) first coined the term “imagined communities” in 1983 when the first edition of the publication by the same name came out, and was an instant success with cultural anthropologists. Shortly after the publication of the book and before it caught on with a wider scholarly public, he mused about how anthropologists were more interested in his work than colleagues in his own field, political science. Anderson touched on a couple of key ideas that dramatically impacted how anthropologists thought about culture and society. One was that community and identity are products of the collective imagination. And as such they are always tied up in a process of remembering and forgetting. And secondly, that media is always central to how that social imagination is articulated and disseminated. But even more importantly, media shapes the process of remembering and forgetting that goes into the collective imagination.

Melinda Sebastian, Wesley Shumar

8 The Role of Temporal Construal in Online Privacy Behaviors

Abstract

In today’s digital world, corporations and governments can afford to store ever increasing amounts of data about the identities and behaviors of digital actors. By extracting patterns and interpolating future intentions and risks, data owners create an informational asymmetry. When I search for a traditional Lasagna recipe, the search engine is already combining this query with thousands of other queries to project the risk of me getting certain diseases associated with eating fattening foods. Thanks to the search engine, I get to cook a tasty lasagna, but my identity is directly or indirectly, and mostly without my awareness, revealed to marketers, health insurance providers, employers, researchers, and whoever else may profit from my Lasagna bits and bites (cf. Pettypiece and Robertson 2014).

Johannes Ullrich

9 Remembering Prevails Over Forgetting: Archiving of Personal Data in the Analog and in the Digital Age

Abstract

What’s the relationship between remembering and forgetting, when archiving personal data? Which personal data should and can be remembered and which should be forgotten? And: What are the answers to these questions in the analog and in the digital age? What impact does digitization have on remembering and forgetting?

Christoph Graf

10 Longevity: Remembering and Forgetting Personal Memories

Abstract

What goals will humanity pursue with technology? One possible answer is longevity. Imagine the average human life span increasing by a few decades. What if this happened in one go for all of humanity? What if it happened for a privileged few only? How would the advent of longevity impact societal values? To grasp the implications of such a substantial event on remembering and forgetting, I outline a “scenery” of future values in front of which related legislation may occur.

Domenico Salvati

Part V Design Guide

Abstract

This Design Guide summarizes the multidisciplinary insights gained in the course of the project turning them into a set of suggestions, a guidance for design for the handling of information with a special emphasis on the role of memory in the age of digital technologies. The guide starts by stating its addressees (Sect. 1), aims and scope (Sect. 2), and develops an operational framework (Sect. 5) based on the main observations from our research (Sect. 3) and their consequences (Sect. 4).

Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert, Urs Gasser

Titel: Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age
verfasst von: Prof. Dr. Florent Thouvenin
Prof. Dr. Peter Hettich
Prof. Dr. Herbert Burkert
Prof. Dr. Urs Gasser
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-90230-2
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90229-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90230-2