Forgettability certainly isn't something we have in day to day interactions with those around us, our friends, coworkers, nor our neighbors. We tend to pay dearly in our local social circles for the sort of behavior that we tempt ourselves with online. People just stop spending time with us when we can't get along. You have skin in the game.
If there's something different about the internet, it's that it compels so many of us to say regretful things that we want to delete.
> It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like
I'm having the opposite realization lately. This tech trope of permanence isn't actually happening.
For instance, I used to be able to search some of my unique internet/gaming aliases 15 years ago and get thousands of results as I was a big forum poster back then and those hits showed up. Now I get three hits across the whole internet. Things die and nobody saves it. Why would they?
Then you look at Archive.org, the main presence I can think of that's aiming for long term records, and they have breadth, like website homepages going back weekly for a decade, but they rarely have evidence of that controversial deleted tweet from a week ago. Quickly, all people have are screenshots and then it fizzles out.
Finally, to my eyes, the only issue with permanence of things we've said in the past, if it exists, isn't with the permanence itself but because modern culture gives very few of us a way back from something unsavory (by someone's standard) that we once uttered.
Forgettability certainly isn't something we have in day to day interactions with those around us, our friends, coworkers, nor our neighbors. We tend to pay dearly in our local social circles for the sort of behavior that we tempt ourselves with online. People just stop spending time with us when we can't get along. You have skin in the game.
If there's something different about the internet, it's that it compels so many of us to say regretful things that we want to delete.
> It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like
I'm having the opposite realization lately. This tech trope of permanence isn't actually happening.
For instance, I used to be able to search some of my unique internet/gaming aliases 15 years ago and get thousands of results as I was a big forum poster back then and those hits showed up. Now I get three hits across the whole internet. Things die and nobody saves it. Why would they?
Then you look at Archive.org, the main presence I can think of that's aiming for long term records, and they have breadth, like website homepages going back weekly for a decade, but they rarely have evidence of that controversial deleted tweet from a week ago. Quickly, all people have are screenshots and then it fizzles out.
Finally, to my eyes, the only issue with permanence of things we've said in the past, if it exists, isn't with the permanence itself but because modern culture gives very few of us a way back from something unsavory (by someone's standard) that we once uttered.