Jeffrey Rosen, in a lengthy article for the Sunday New York Times Magazine, discusses the permanance of the personal in the digital era --- how everything created is preserved, cached, then searched and used.
There is good and not-so-good in all of this. It does permit the end of forgetting, in that it's possible to find what you thought you lost, with a little digging. But it also means that what you capture is a an eternal record --- and not always a positive one, in which "ill-advised photos and chatter come back to haunt people months and years after the fact."
Employers routinely scour the Internet to learn more about their current and prospective hires. Relationships and business arrangements are often subjected to digital scrutiny before and during. And your identity, once framed by your local situation and acquaintances, now has more difficulty in redefinition due to the digital record of activity.
For journalists, this digital footprint is a goldmine. Newsrooms routinely look at Facebook and MySpace pages, Tweets and blogs to gather information about people, places and things. Few barriers exist technically or legally, for the time being.
Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, portrays the merging of the public and private self and concludes that this phase may evolve into one of greater digital forgiveness --- just not now.
There is good and not-so-good in all of this. It does permit the end of forgetting, in that it's possible to find what you thought you lost, with a little digging. But it also means that what you capture is a an eternal record --- and not always a positive one, in which "ill-advised photos and chatter come back to haunt people months and years after the fact."
Employers routinely scour the Internet to learn more about their current and prospective hires. Relationships and business arrangements are often subjected to digital scrutiny before and during. And your identity, once framed by your local situation and acquaintances, now has more difficulty in redefinition due to the digital record of activity.
For journalists, this digital footprint is a goldmine. Newsrooms routinely look at Facebook and MySpace pages, Tweets and blogs to gather information about people, places and things. Few barriers exist technically or legally, for the time being.
Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, portrays the merging of the public and private self and concludes that this phase may evolve into one of greater digital forgiveness --- just not now.
